Episode 18 Gardeners' World

BIRDS TWEET

Hello, welcome to Gardeners' World.

Now, at this time of year, we all look for colour,

and we celebrate it, quite rightly.

But actually, one of my favourite places in the garden

on a hot summer's day are the grass borders.

They're both cool, and, yet, they catch the light,

and because they move very easily in the slightest breath of wind,

they make it shift and dance, too.

And it's a good place to be.

And I love the height that you get at this time of year,

and for the rest of the year here in the grass borders.

There's a little bit of colour coming through,

in the Kniphofias and the Heleniums,

pushing towards the edge so that when it arrives

on the shores of the Jewel Garden

it can then just flame away into full summer glory.

This week, we visit a Rothschild garden that maintains

the old tradition of self-sufficiency

in fruit and vegetables on a grand scale.

The standards of fruit and veg, and food are very high.

So everything is particularly delicious.

Formal bedding really is not one of the most fashionable forms

of garden design.

But Joe has been in search of those giving

a new twist to this very Victorian display.

Sometimes, you have to throw tradition out the window,

do your own thing.

And just enjoy it.

And, today, I shall be doing summer pruning of my fruit

as well as cutting the grass so that I can maximise

next year's wild flowers.

It's time to cut the long grass here on the cricket pitch.

And, for about six weeks to eight weeks,

the grass looks really pretty.

Different grasses, clovers, plantains.

And, equally importantly, it's fantastic for wildlife.

But to maintain it and to maintain wild flowers, if you want them

in them, you must cut the grass and remove it.

The best time to do that is midsummer.

The end of June to the end of July.

It's the rhythm of haymaking.

MOTOR SPLUTTERS INTO LIFE

Really long grass can be tough to cut,

and will defeat almost all ordinary lawnmowers.

You can hire heavy mowers, you can use a strimmer, a scythe,

shears, anything that you've got to hand that will take

the majority of the grass off.

That's the first pass.

What you have to do, and this really is essential, is rake it all up.

If you leave any grass on the ground,

it will decompose and feed nitrogen back into the soil,

which, in turn, will encourage the grass to grow more vigorously,

and that will outcompete any wild flowers,

which is not what we want.

Cut the grass again, ideally with a mower with a collector,

as close and as tight as you can to expose patches of bare soil.

Now, if I just scratch that...

..you can see...

..it looks terrible.

Which is exactly what I want.

The bare soil is ideal for seeds that will need to germinate.

And these are the seeds of a plant called Yellow Rattle.

It's a lovely little wild flower.

When the seeds dry, they rattle in their pods.

And it's partially parasitic on grass.

So, it feeds off grassroots and also inhibits grass growth.

Doesn't stop it but just weakens it.

And that's great because it means that wild flowers,

which are always less robust than grass, have a chance.

Most wild flower meadows fail because the grass gets too strong.

This helps level the playing field.

Now, it needs bare soil, hence I don't mind having

the bare patches on the grass,

and you need to sow them when they're fresh.

So, if you're going to do this,

buy the seed sometime in the next couple of months.

They will not germinate till next spring,

but they need to be on the ground.

Once you've got them, the seed will spread,

so don't worry if it's a bit thin.

So, when I sow them, I'm not going to try and do it evenly,

I'm just going to scatter a little bit of seed,

and I'll do this all over the area.

But, here, I can just scatter the seed like that,

and the important thing is that they have contact with the soil.

So, actually, step all over it.

Stamp them in.

And, hopefully, some will germinate, and they will spread,

and that will all contribute to this lovely,

interwoven tapestry of grass and wild flowers.

Now, some people don't grow any flowers at all.

I know people who regard anything other than veg

as not proper gardening.

Well, those of us who do grow some veg like to think we can

be fairly self-sufficient sometimes.

But we went to visit a garden that prides itself on being

completely self-sufficient all of the time.

And this is the creation

of the renowned garden designer, Mary Keen.

It's a private garden of Lord Rothschild and his family,

growing vegetables, fruit, cut flowers, and it's wonderful.

I first got involved about 25 years ago.

And it was all in quite a rundown state. I mean...

It was kind of semi-market garden, collapsy greenhouses.

It kind of felt...

hopeless.

And Paul, who grows the vegetables and has been here for 30 years,

remembers a huge...one huge plot.

Oh, it's changed an enormous amount.

We used to get the tractor and ploughing to do it.

Yeah, there's not much we don't grow.

Runner beans are coming in now. French beans.

We've got the winter leeks planted.

There's about four or five different savoys. Red cabbage.

Coleslaw cabbage. Summer cabbage.

Within the actual cabbage square, there's probably over 1,000 plants.

You couldn't wish for a better place to work, really.

I wouldn't have been here 36 years otherwise!

HE LAUGHS

We thought the thing here was to make it much more gardener-focused.

Sue Dickinson, the head gardener,

I met her working at the Old Rectory in Burghfield.

And I knew then she was an absolutely amazing,

world-class gardener.

And, so, I've just counted there are nine on that thing there.

Why don't I get nine pears on my tree?

Well, I think this year the weather conditions were

so good when the fruit was setting, but it's not necessarily

a good thing to have so many fruit in a bunch.

We should have probably come along and thinned them,

but, sometimes, life is too short.

We worked on the design together.

Lord Rothschild likes things quite over-scale,

so the paths are HUGE so that seven people can walk down them.

And it all seems quite grand, but it is a grand place,

and you have to go with that.

And, then, on the pruning, I know on the walls, the espaliers,

you prune them in the summer to let the sun get to the fruit,

but, here, where they're growing underneath, the sun can't reach.

Does that matter?

Mary, it's not like other tunnels,

in the fact that you designed it to have these gaps in-between.

-No, I like the gaps.

-So...

We designed it together, I seem to remember,

on a stepladder with a chair.

THEY LAUGH

So often in pear and apple tunnels, the trees meet.

And you said, "No, I'd like to see through."

Sue was incredibly quick to see what the point,

what the spirit of this place was.

I did suggest to her that it might be nice to grow the cut flowers

among the vegetables, like a French garden.

She was quite strict about that and said, "Certainly not."

This is in the tomato house,

this section is the experimental tomatoes.

Ones that we haven't grown before that we're trying to find

something with better flavour or texture.

This yellow one's very good. Yellow Perfection.

And then we've got this Italian, San Marzano, which is very good

for cooking, makes very good pasta sauce and passata.

We come into the large tomato house,

which is a variety called Ferline.

When they're potted up, at the end of May,

they have a layer of horse manure at the bottom,

then compost,

and then, once they've been growing about six weeks,

they're fed with high nitrogen feed, which we give them until they

reach the top of the cane, and then we change to a high potash feed.

I like the little ones best, I think, actually.

-They're the ones you can eat quickly.

-Yes!

The standards of fruit and veg and food are very high.

So everything is particularly delicious.

It's looking pretty good, Sue.

Well, it's such a treat for me,

working in a place which goes on getting better.

We are team of eight gardeners.

All the gardeners have their own greenhouses to look after.

Paul looks after the veg garden.

And everybody does a bit of digging?

Yeah, in the winter, everybody goes where the work is.

They don't buy any fruit, veg,

flowers for the house.

And that self-sufficiency, which all estates, I think,

before the First World War, has simply ceased to exist.

This is unique.

I enjoy the design projects where I do have

a continuing interest in a garden. But they have never,

ever lasted as long or turned out as well as this one.

I think anybody who grows any veg

at all is always going to feel some envy there.

A greenhouse just devoted to different types of tomato,

and 1,000 cabbages.

Wonderful. Now, here on the mound,

it's framed by espalier pears.

And these form the structure, a kind of living fence.

And now is absolutely the best time to summer prune any

trained fruit, and that's espaliers, cordons, fans,

any type of fruit that isn't growing naturally.

These espalier pears were moved last year.

They are semi-mature and they're growing quite slowly,

but it's important, at every stage, to keep that training going.

Now, espalier, to make clear,

is when you have a single stem coming up here,

and then side lateral growths growing like that,

and then, from that, the flowering spurs grow up,

which will give the fruit.

In terms of training, I could train this down like that,

and that will grow on and grow out and become an extension.

But you've got this kink in it,

and that wouldn't look good. However, I have a growth here.

I don't know if you can see, but we're growing well,

so that will need tying in.

So this, I will cut-off like that there,

and I'll cut this one off here.

And let's go to one where we've got more example of lots of

growth that can be cut-off.

You can see on this pear, we've got strong vertical growth

coming up from last year's prune.

And this is very vigorous.

It's ruining the shape, and also won't bear any fruit for

a few years, because there are no spurs.

And pears and apples and fruit on spurs,

we can encourage that by pruning. Like that.

And this one here, that can come off,

and I'm leaving just a stump.

Which can form as a spur.

And what this is doing, as much as tidying and shaping it,

is letting light and air in.

So the fruit that have formed get the maximum sunshine and good

ventilation so it can grow and ripen healthily.

It is really important to remember that basic rule of pruning:

if you prune in summer, you restrict growth.

If you prune hard in winter, you encourage growth.

Now, trained fruit in some form or other

has been in fashion really from medieval times,

and I think it will always remain fashionable to some extent.

You certainly can't say that about summer bedding.

The Victorians loved it,

but it has been truly out of fashion for the last generation or so.

And perhaps now is the time for a resurgence,

so Joe Swift has been

along to see what some contemporary bedding might look like.

If there's one group of plants that really pumps out the colour,

can energise you and certainly let's you know that summer is here,

even on a dull day like this, it is summer bedding.

They have such a traditional tag that, well,

reinventing them and incorporating them into modern gardens is tricky.

This site is a summer showcase,

and the first thing that really hits me is, what's being displayed

as summer bedding is a much broader range of plants than you

would expect.

Now, I'm all for reinventing the way we use plants, and green walls,

they are relatively new and there are lots of different systems now.

So you can buy modules like this.

They slot onto the wall,

they've got built-in irrigation systems, which is absolutely

crucial that these plants get watered regularly, or they will die.

And then you can just plant them up.

But these make it nice and simple, and they can be reused year-on-year.

I've seen perennials planted up, I've seen herbs planted up.

But bedding plants like this work just as well, too.

Now, this wall looks pretty impressive.

It's done on quite a large scale.

I think, at home, you'd probably do something a lot smaller.

For me, contemporary gardens are a little bit more simple,

so maybe just take the silver of the cineraria,

and the dark purpley black of the ipomoea,

and just use those two together.

And over there, well, we've got a wall of proper bedding colour.

But you can see, really, that this whole idea is what you want

to make it. You know, what plants you want to grow in your garden,

and treat it like a piece of artwork that changes every year.

Now, a well-known gardening presenter was, well,

less than flattering, shall we say, about begonias.

Yeah, sure, they come in such a range of colours and they

have that traditional tag, but I do think that some plants are

worth revisiting, because they have lots of new varieties.

You've got to really edit them down, look at these prices and what

qualities it can give you in your garden.

So, this one, Begonia gryphon, is all about the foliage.

So we've got these deeply cut leaves that are sort of mottled and

slightly variegated on the top, which gives a good texture.

Underneath, we've got a lovely mahogany, deep veining to them,

and a glossiness as well. The combination works really well.

It's a great foliage plant.

Now, this is a new one, Santa Barbara.

What I like about this is the proportion of foliage to flower,

and the scale of them both as well. Begonias tend to have really,

blousy flowers, but this is much more delicate, much more subtle.

This one, on the other hand, is a really dramatic plant.

It's a statement plant all by itself.

Dark foliage and those bright orange, fiery flowers

shoot you off to the tropics.

This is more traditional looking to me, visually,

but this is a new introduction.

And it's got scent, and it's got a very good scent, too.

It's like a sort of light, fragrant rose,

and altogether those blooms are really kicking it out,

so always revisit, because there are new introductions and some of them

are not what you expect from a begonia.

Now, when you go buying bedding plants,

it's easy to get carried away and just start filling up your

trolley and ending up with every colour under the sun.

But here they've got these displays that really help you focus on

colours and the moods that they create. So here, it's really simple.

Lots and lots of greens,

the odd bit of white and yellow is splashed in there as well.

And this is very relaxing.

I could live with this cool colour theme all summer long.

Here, we've got something really cheery.

We've got the yellow coreopsis

working nicely with the velvety petunia here.

There's the odd orange in there, just little shots of colour.

But it's still a restricted palette,

and those colours are working nicely together.

I've been having a good look around,

and what's interesting to me is that we've got the usual suspects,

things like marigolds, geraniums, snapdragons,

but there's also lots of other plants, too.

Things like lavenders, echinaceas, perennial salvias.

So, you know, bedding isn't just about annual plants,

it's pretty much anything that's going to create seasonal impact.

I want to get a little bit more creative in how I plant

and put a display together.

I think, in terms of reinventing our summer bedding,

maybe we need to catch up with an ever-increasing range of plants

and some new varieties.

Now, I had a sort of light bulb moment with this bedding,

and I've really enjoyed putting it together.

I started thinking, "How can I reinvent it?

"How can I do something different?"

Because, here, it's all planted in blocks,

and I know they're showcasing different plants

so you can see the difference between them,

but by doing this and sort of liberating the plants,

doing what I'd call a mini-prairie bedding scheme,

they feel free and they feel fresh.

So we've got things like these dull dahlias,

and they're going to get nice and tall and keep flowering

through the summer. Sweet Williams,

which I haven't used for years, and I have to say,

coming up here, I've sort of fallen in love with them again.

The argyranthemums, these lovely daisies,

and then the bright orange zinnias, too.

And, as the summer progresses, this is just going to explode,

it's going to get bigger and it's going to get wilder.

I have so enjoyed putting this together,

and I think that's the thing about bedding - sometimes you have

to throw tradition out the window, do your own thing and just enjoy it.

Although the idea of bedding displays did go out of fashion,

a lot of us use bedding without sort of even being aware

that that's what we're doing.

I use tender annuals, for example, like cosmos.

Like sunflowers, like leonotis, like zinnias, to spot in colour.

They only last for a few months,

and then they're put onto the compost heap.

So it's the same idea, but just mixed in with

a different style of planting.

Well, from lovely bedding plants

to really very, very unlovely box blight.

Now, this is a running saga.

It's been going on now for three years here at Longmeadow.

Last year, we had the RHS expert here to advise us on the next step.

And one of his points was to let air into any hedge.

So, we halved most of our box hedges, including this one,

so it was up here.

It looked terrible, but we've also fed all our boxes in the garden

once a week with liquid seaweed,

and it is responding well.

There is fresh regrowth from what looked like absolutely bare wood,

and, so far, most of that regrowth is not affected, but some of it is.

These smaller edges, which were also halved, have regrown,

but the box blight has come back

and come back very typically in these patches.

And I'm often asked how do you recognise box blight.

Blight manifests itself as patches

of brown, dead leaves, but it's very characteristically either like

a scorch mark up the side of a hedge

or an area in the middle of it.

However, since we had the advice from the RHS,

they are growing well and the big hedge is a particularly tough

variety called Handsworthiensis, which has got really thick leaves.

So, it's got quite good defence against blight.

But really, what we want to see is if the new growth gets blight

or it's just the old growth.

So, that's for a continuing future.

This is for your present.

So, brace yourself.

Here are some jobs for the weekend.

Courgettes are prone to powdery mildew if they get too dry.

So, give them a really good drink,

being sure to aim the water at the base of the plant,

not over the fruits or the leaves.

And then if you have any fruits that are big enough to pick,

do so, and keep picking them,

because a small courgette can

very quickly become a whopping great marrow.

I know I've said this before,

but it really is a good job to do

and that is deadheading.

Any of your flowers that you want to continue all summer long,

cut back as soon as they start to fade.

And don't just snip the flower head off,

but go right back to the next bud or leaf axil,

and this will provoke fresh new blooms very quickly.

As the flowers of Mediterranean herbs like thyme and marjoram

start to fade, trim some of the herbs back.

This will stop the plants getting too leggy,

as well as provoke new leaves that are fresh and good for cooking.

And by only doing some of the herbs at anyone go, you're not denying

yourself a constant supply of herbs for the kitchen.

Now, Mediterranean herbs love this hot weather, but they do have

a tendency to get rather woody,

so you get fewer leaves.

But, basil is not Mediterranean.

Basil comes from the Far East and it likes wet, warm weather.

So, I've got some growing in the cold frame here,

and what I do is just cut it off

about three-quarters of the way down,

and so you will get some regrowth, but it's an annual

and has no tolerance for cold whatsoever,

so it won't survive beyond about September.

But the difference between these plants and the sort that you

can buy where you get up to 20 little seedlings in a pot is huge.

I can get really good pickings

over and over again from these.

Right, the best way to store basil is as pesto.

It's a pity to waste herbs that are perfectly edible when you cut

them off, but it's quite hard to keep some of them.

A tip for keeping things like marjoram or thyme

is just take the leaves off and pop them in an ice cube

and freeze them, and then if you want to cook with them,

you just pop the ice cube into the soup or the stew or whatever it is

and that gives you the flavour.

But, with basil, you need pesto.

Everybody needs pesto and it's so easy to make.

What you need to do is strip the leaves and you can see these

are wilting already. You need to be quick.

We want nice, firm leaves that are uniform green.

You don't want them thick, you don't want them yellowing,

and, if possible, not too limp.

There are the leaves.

I'm going to add a little bit of salt - and this is sea salt -

and that acts as an abrasive.

This is the garlic harvested a few weeks ago.

Pop that in and just grind that a bit,

and then start adding the leaves.

If you're using a food processor,

which we'd normally do for a larger amount,

don't put it on continuous, put it on to pulse.

Just bomph, bomph, bomph - and all you want to do is just break it up.

If you do it too much, it turns into a kind of green slurry.

Right, we'll add the pine nuts.

Then, we'll add grated Parmesan, although pecorino's good, too,

so sometimes we use half and half.

So, add that in.

Now, at this point,

I want to start to add the oil.

I got 100ml of olive oil.

Dribble it in.

It's smelling fantastic, really good.

There you are.

That's good.

That is so rich and intense.

You can't buy that,

but you can grow it and it's dead easy to make.

And you can make this just as well with rocket.

You can do it with parsley.

You can use walnuts with parsley, instead of the pine nuts.

You can use goat's cheese, you can use cheddar.

As long as you've got a green herb or a strong taste,

with a nut and some cheese and some oil, it works.

I'm afraid that's it for this week.

Next week, we revert to our normal time, 8:30 on Friday nights.

So, I'll see you then. Bye-bye.

Come on, Nige. Come on.