Episode 27 Gardeners' World

'Gardeners' World has grown to a full hour,

'giving us even more time to celebrate the very best

'of British gardening.'

Hello, welcome to Gardeners' World.

Now, I reckon that the end of September is the end

of the gardening year,

and tomorrow is a New Year's Day for us gardeners, so let's celebrate.

Let's celebrate with some bright, brash, audacious colour.

And these dahlias are supplying that in spades.

So, the light may be waning,

but we are not going gentle into any kind of night.

And of course, in purely practical terms,

if you keep cutting the flowers of dahlias, in particular, but

anything at this time of year, you are promoting new flowers, new buds,

and as long as the weather doesn't get too cold,

these will go on flowering for weeks to come in our new gardening year.

On tonight's programme -

Frances Tophill goes out on a limb in Cornwall.

This is just a light bit of weeding for you, is it?

-Yes, extreme gardening.

-Yes!

Joe Swift is in Scotland, rediscovering the rockery.

Rockeries were popular with the Victorians and the Edwardians,

who wanted to grow and show off the exquisite little plants

that were being discovered

in the mountainous regions from all over the world.

And Flo Headlam transforms a derelict garden in Lewisham.

I need to get busy!

And we will also be catching up with Adam Frost's progress

in his garden in Lincolnshire,

I will be adding a few last splashes of colour into my Jewel Garden,

and planting up an alpine trough.

I have got some nepeta plants here that have done really well.

They are looking fine at the moment and not dominating,

because I cut them right to the ground in early August.

And when they are growing and they are full sort of performance

in June, they are right up here.

This is a variety called Six Hills Giant, and it is pretty big.

Now, it's lovely, and I don't want to get rid of it,

but I do want to divide it and move it around.

It is quite a good time to do it now,

because you can see how big it is.

If you leave things till either the winter or early spring,

before they start to grow,

you can't really get an idea of how much space it is going to occupy.

Move things now, and you can really see the effect they will have.

This here is one plant.

So if I dig that up, I can divide it.

Cats find nepeta irresistible, which is why it is known as catnip.

And apparently, it has a narcotic influence on them.

It is the chemical nepetalactone, and they absolutely adore it.

However, by the same token, apparently, rats and mice hate it,

and so do mosquitoes and midges, so if you rub yourself with nepeta,

you won't get stung by mosquitoes, but you will get rubbed by cats.

I am going to chop into that, rather than trying to lift the whole thing.

There we go.

Right, that, you see, I could transplant,

lock, stock and barrel, which I am going to do.

I will put that in one trug.

But if I take this one out, I can divide it...

..with my fingers, like that.

And now I have two plants.

Herbaceous plants grow outwards like a doughnut,

so the outer reaches of it, the newest bits,

are always more vigorous and healthier and stronger.

And what you should do always is discard the centre,

put that on the compost heap and replant the outer segments.

So, we will pop that back in the ground.

Inevitably, that looks a bit floppy now.

I could cut it back hard and it won't regrow before next year,

but that will be fine and it gives me more plants

to take to another part of the Cottage Garden,

where I think these are going to serve well.

I have a campanula in there, which is too big and not wide enough,

and this will just fill that gap more naturally.

Right. This is a campanula called Pritchard's Variety.

Fabulous, lovely blue flowers in July.

But it grows to about seven, eight feet tall.

And that is out of scale with the roses on either side of it,

and even the espaliers behind it.

Everything else in the garden is dwarfed by it.

So, it is a lovely plant, I don't want to lose it,

but it is in the wrong place.

I'm going to dig that out

and probably move it to the grass borders

and replace it with nepeta.

Here we go.

Moving plants at this time of year gets round the trauma

that they undergo when they are in full growth,

because there is very little growth at this time of year.

And the idea, in the long-term,

is that the roots grow between now and, say, mid-November,

get anchored in, get established and they can support the top growth,

which will really kick in from April, May onwards.

That will hardly know it's been moved

and I'm sure will fit into that space better,

and the campanula will be able to hold its own

when I plant it among the tallest of the grasses

in the grass borders.

Now, this kind of rearranging of plants, designing and moving,

is common to anybody who has a garden, whether it is a small

urban backyard or rolling country acres,

but occasionally you do come across gardens

that stand outside any kind of common experience.

And in the first of three films,

Frances Tophill visits a cliffside garden near Penzance in Cornwall.

Many of us gardeners often feel we have a battle on our hands,

whether it's damp, shady spots or slugs and snails, aphids,

but very few of us will ever have to use one of these - a winch -

or deal with something like this.

-You ready, Robert?

-Yes.

This is one of the steepest gardens I have ever seen.

Do you often use a winch?

We do, we pull most of our shrubs and trees out with a winch.

It takes the roots out. Generally, it is much easier than digging.

-I can see that.

-Especially on a slope like this.

This is a revelation to me!

It is an extreme way of doing it, but it is extremely effective too.

-Soil's off. Most of the roots are out.

-That is one way to do it.

I think we will leave it where it is

and go for a walk round the garden, have a bit of a relax.

Sounds good to me!

Basically, a cliff, really, you're gardening on!

We are on the cliff. It is three acres, but we only garden two.

-Is it difficult to garden?

-Yes!

It is, but because we have terraced it, we've made it easier.

-You can stand and rest on the paths.

-OK.

And then you go up into the beds to do whatever you need to do.

Aside from that, you must have other challenging conditions.

The soil is very poor and that suits the plants that we grow.

They like low nutrient conditions, so that is fine.

The sea is very close, so we get salt spray,

so that doesn't do things any good either.

-And wind? I imagine...

-The wind...

-Storms and gales.

-From the east and from the north.

-So, you have it all, really.

-We do.

But you still manage to grow some lovely species, which is nice.

This is a particularly favourite part of the garden.

The astromelia and crocosmia and the euphorbia, all flowering together.

Lovely and bright colours as well.

I can see there is erigeron everywhere,

is that a favourite plant?

-It is.

-It is everywhere.

-It goes so well with the granite.

-It is very...

-Beautiful, yeah.

Ooh! That way.

-Turn round and come down backwards.

-Yeah.

This is just a light bit of weeding for you?

Absolutely, just a light bit of weeding.

We don't do this very often,

but a couple of times a year when we have to take out the bramble,

and this makes all the difference, because you have your feet on

the ground, you are steady, safe, and you can weed easily.

-So you need a bit of a head for heights, then?

-You do.

-It is quite fun though.

-It is.

-Quite a novel way to do it.

-Absolutely, yes. Extreme gardening.

-Yes!

-These rocks are incredible.

-They are absolutely wonderful.

Quite fantastic. We had to uncover them, but once we did,

then we realised we needed a path through here.

I was going to say, the terrain,

working round it must be really hard.

-Do you actually garden here?

-Yes, we do, a little.

A lot of this is self-sown,

but we have this miniature gunnera, which is, well...

That is amazing. So small.

When you think of gunnera, it's a great enormous thing.

If it was here, it would take over everything.

So, is this the lowest part of the garden?

Yes, this is as far down as we garden.

It's shady, damp, perfect for tree ferns.

In fact, they do so well they spore everywhere and we get

thousands of baby tree ferns, which go off into the trade.

-Really?

-You probably, if you buy one it may have come from this garden.

-That is amazing.

-Yes.

Having walked down all of this way, how on earth do you get all this

stuff, gravel and everything, down this far, is it with a wheelbarrow?

No, we send it down pipes, and the pipes go about

a third of the way down, so to get down here, we probably have to

move the hopper three times, so it keeps us pretty fit.

I'm only halfway up the garden. The house is way up there.

And the bottom is somewhere far down there, and I just...

I can't imagine gardening this on a daily basis, the two of them

coming up and down these paths with compost and plants and tools.

It must be absolutely exhausting!

Well, thank you very much for showing me round,

it has been a very steep learning curve!

It's been a real pleasure to have you here, we have enjoyed it.

Thank you very much. But there is one thing I am worrying about.

I know now how to get everything down,

but how on earth do you get it all back up again?

I will give you this, and I will show you.

-There is a little trick we learned in Nepal...

-OK!

..which does make a big difference to carrying stuff up.

Now, that is you get a bag like this,

put it over your shoulder, on your forehead,

and then off you go.

Wow!

Robert and Carol certainly have their work cut out here,

but it's a fantastic garden,

and it certainly is on the edge, in every way.

But a garden doesn't have to be on a sheer rocky slope to capture

the spirit of the mountains and the plants that thrive there.

This summer, Joe Swift set out to uncover some of our most

outstanding rock gardens.

And in the first of a new series, he visits Branklyn in Perthshire.

We fell out of love with the rock garden around the mid 1970s,

along with shagpile carpets and avocado bathroom suites.

And the reason for that, I think,

was that we lost the original concept of what they are all about.

They became a fad, people had to have them, so they started

piling up soil in the corner of their garden, chucking a few

rocks on and creating something that resembled a giant currant bun!

Now, I want to show you over the next few weeks that

rock gardens don't have to be how we remember them.

This year, more than 80 huge pieces of rock were seen

at Chelsea Flower Show, and countless smaller ones too.

Now, many of them were in gold medal winning gardens,

such as Cleve West's Exmoor-inspired garden

and Andy Sturgeon's Best in Show.

Now, we don't all want dramatic slabs of granite,

but even on a smaller scale,

and with complementary planting alongside,

they can make a stunning garden feature.

Rockeries were popular with the Victorians and the Edwardians,

who wanted to grow and show off the exquisite little plants that were

being discovered in the mountainous regions from all over the world.

Now, the challenge for gardeners was to recreate the conditions

in Britain where these plants would thrive.

At their home in Scotland in the 1920s, Dorothy and John Renton

set out to build a series of rock gardens that would support

their growing collection of exotic plants

from the four corners of the globe.

'Branklyn has been nurtured by head gardener Steve McNamara

'for the past 20 years.'

So, Steve, how did the Rentons go about creating this rockery?

Well, they started off, when they first came here in the 1920s,

they got all the rocks from Kinnoull Hill, which is just behind us,

and brought them down by steam engine.

And then they had to manhandle everything in here to lay it out.

It's well-drained, it's loamy, you know, the type of soil is

really good here, so it made a great place for a rockery, actually.

We are a little bit late in the season for the alpines,

but there's still plenty going on here.

Still plenty of colour. Lovely little diorama here.

Yeah, we now grow the much shorter ones,

and it's more appropriate, really, for a rockery.

And we've got the likes of Bulbinella hookeri,

the Maori onion, it's called.

-I love that.

-It's happy and it's growing like mad, you know.

And what's this one here, the green carpet?

That is the vegetable sheep, Raoulia haastii.

You can see the way it grows over the rocks and everything,

it's a lovely thing, actually.

People are fascinated, because it is rock-hard if you touch it.

It's fantastic, it's like a miniature landscape all of its own.

So it's not just alpines, you've got plants from all over the world.

You're not snobby or a purist about it.

No, I mean, the Rentons just collected plants from all over,

because they were just interested in growing them and, you know,

you can grow what you like, as long as you've got the right conditions.

I see you've got lots of these planters sort of

knocking around the place, haven't you?

I really like these.

I have to say, these stone containers with the moss and lichen,

they look like they've been here for ever, but I guess they are

a great way of getting a mini rockery into a smaller garden.

Not everybody has got acres of the stuff.

No, that's right, so this is a bit more manageable.

So, you don't feed these plants a lot,

is it getting some minerals from the rock itself?

It's getting minerals from the rock.

If you think of a scree slope, you know, all the rocks there,

not much soil, but there's loads and loads of minerals, and that

is what we are giving it here, all this gravel is giving it minerals.

Again, you're trying to sort of emulate the slope of a mountainside.

And OK, it's a little vignette of it,

but it's still quite effective, you know?

Come along!

Well, of course, I'm old enough to remember when rock gardens

were very much the rage,

but it is funny how they went completely out of fashion.

But I'm glad they're coming back,

they're fabulous and they're interesting,

and we should relish them.

And you don't need to have a great big rock garden

to enjoy rock plants.

They look very, very good in stone troughs or pots.

Now, I've got a couple of troughs and I originally planted them up

in the Cottage Garden about three years ago.

Then last winter, when we had a really wet winter,

I couldn't work out why everything was dying.

Cut a long story short, we looked and lifted it and found that

the central plug had been blocked,

and basically the plants drowned.

They can take any amount of cold, they can take any amount

of sunshine, but they cannot take sitting in the wet.

So drainage is paramount, and if you give them that, they're fine.

So, a big drainage hole, I've made some extra ones, but as long

as that doesn't get blocked, that shouldn't be too bad, so I'm going

to cover that over and I'm going to put some grit in the bottom.

Because what I don't want is the roots to come down

and then sit in a puddle.

For the actual compost mix,

you cannot be too well-drained.

I've got our standard mix here,

which has peat-free compost mixed with our garden compost,

a bit of soil, a little bit of leaf mould and some grit.

And I'm going to add to that 50-50 pure grit.

We don't want that.

Now, the plants.

One of the many lovely things about alpine and rockery plants is

they tend to be quite cheap and you can buy all kinds of different ones

without breaking the bank.

A little saxifrage, like this one, Whitehill,

which has beautiful little white flowers on delicate long stems.

It's perfect, absolutely perfect.

Now, this is an Androsace.

Very happy in these conditions,

and you can see it's got these extraordinary sort of floral type

foliage, but in fact there are pink flowers that will come up through.

Now, an awful lot of alpine plants flower in spring,

but the Erodiums will start to flower in June

and go on right into autumn.

Very common sedums, but, you know,

there's nothing wrong with being common.

That can go over the edge.

So, we've got plenty of flowers.

More Erodiums.

Of course, it's always an arrangement with any container.

That's better. That's more like it.

And planting them, of course, is easy.

The fact they're sitting a bit proud also doesn't matter,

cos I'm going to top this up with grit.

OK, that's an initial planting

and I'm going to add to that with some bulbs.

There are a whole range of minuscule alpine bulbs that you can get,

and I've got two, but this is a tulip, Illiensis,

which has got little yellow flowers.

So, we can pop that in there.

And these will flower March, April-time,

Quite early as tulips go.

Now, I've got a daffodil here

and I don't want any sniggering at the back.

We're all grown up.

This is Narcissus assoanus.

See? Easy. And it's beautiful.

It's got little yellow flowers and it's a tiny little daffodil.

That can pop in there.

So, we've got spring flowers, summer flowers, even some autumn flowers.

And the final thing to do is I'm going to dress it with some grit.

That will again improve the drainage,

but also stop any splashing.

These are very delicate flowers, so if you do get heavy rain,

and you've got soil and compost in there, they get splashed.

Finally, just because they hate sitting in water doesn't mean to

say that they don't need water, so water them in really well.

WATER SPRINKLES

There we are. Music to my ears.

Really good drainage.

The fact the water is running through the bottom means that

they won't get waterlogged.

Now, this kind of gardening is very particular, very precise,

but sometimes you just have to roll up your sleeves and get stuck in.

And that's what Flo Headlam has been doing in Lewisham.

The RHS Greening Grey Britain campaign

has discovered that one in four gardens in the UK is paved over,

but it doesn't have to be this way.

Today I'm in south London to tackle a front garden

that's been unloved and forgotten for far too long.

I need to get busy.

The garden belongs to Nisha McGregor,

and I know she's desperate for some help.

So, how long have you lived here, Nisha?

I've been here for just over ten years now, I think.

-And tell me about the garden.

-The front garden.

-The front garden!

-Well, it's been a bit of a battle between me and the weeds.

-Yes.

So, that was my first thing.

I thought if I can get on top of the weeds, then I could maybe

inject some life into it, but it's been really difficult.

-And shade as well.

-Yes.

-Yeah.

Unfortunately the other side of the street gets all the sun.

I only get sun on my part of the garden

first thing in the morning and then it's gone.

So, it is a challenge, cos we're on a north-facing site.

However, I think my main thing is evergreens.

I'm passionate about evergreens, I'm a champion of evergreens,

so, I'm thinking evergreens

and I'm thinking some plants with coloured foliage...

-Oh, brilliant.

-..to bring a colour palette, you know?

-Oh, good.

Well, give me a few hours and come back.

I'll get to work. See you later.

Well, I'd better crack on.

I'm going to be busy, obviously, clearing all this stuff,

and then I can weave my magic.

I need to see what's underneath that membrane.

Well, this is what I thought I would find, perennial weeds,

and in this case bindweed,

so the most important thing is just to get rid of as much as you can.

I'm taking great care to dig out as many of these perennial weed roots

as I can, and the more I dig out, the less will come back.

Be thorough. It's worth it.

So, this little trick, I love.

I get a plank of wood, just the width of the bed,

and you use it as a leveller.

Right, I'm ready to put up my hedge now.

After planting the boundary line hedge, I'm going to put down

a brand-new weed suppressant membrane

and then position my star plants.

This one here is my favourite plant.

It's Pittosporum Tom Thumb.

And then this one is another Pittosporum,

and this one's Tandara Gold.

And what I love about it is it's got a fine, airy quality,

and it's got these beautiful mid-green and lime-green leaves.

I just think it's beautiful and elegant and quite simple.

Planting through a membrane, cut the membrane, obviously.

Some people do a circle. I do a cross.

So...

So, I open it up.

Oh, and another tip is, I dig a square hole for a round pot

so the plant has lots of room to spread its roots as it goes in.

I'm going to add some bone meal,

just a handful, sprinkled in like that,

because that will help with the root development and give

the plants the best start that they can have.

And then I'm going to place my plant.

Put all the soil back, make sure it's nice and compact,

nice and firm, so you don't want any air pockets around the plants,

as firm as you can go.

All that's left for me to do is just to tidy up the soil,

push the membrane back and that's one Tandara Gold planted.

I'm going to put all the soft plants,

all the ground cover plants in position now before I plant up.

All the plants I've chosen are good for shade.

I've got ferns, I've got Alchemilla mollis,

which has a beautiful lime green, sort of acid green flower.

That sits really nicely with the Heuchera and they have really tall

flower spikes as well, so gorgeous. And Liriope.

So, altogether, I think they work really well,

it's a really good combination.

They will brighten this spot and just add some really soft colour.

And I'm adding another burst of colour with this window box,

which I planted with pink cyclamen, heather and variegated ivy.

The finishing touch is to add some gravel just to make it

beautiful and presentable.

Well, that's it. The garden is complete.

I hope Nisha likes it.

-Come and have a look.

-Oooh!

-See what you think.

Oh, my God, that's lovely.

-I can't believe this is my garden.

-This is your garden now, yes.

Oh, my gosh. I'll definitely be spending more time out here.

I won't be scared to come out here because of the spiders

-hiding under the weeds.

-Put a chair here, you know.

-I know!

A bit of Prosecco out the front.

It's absolutely beautiful.

It's elegant, sophisticated, it's just like you said.

-Thank you so much.

-My pleasure, thank you.

-Thank you.

I think that's inspiring.

It does show you that whatever the conditions, wherever you are,

where there's a will,

there is a way.

I get a lot of questions and e-mails and letters from people about fruit.

This is a very typical e-mail

which I've had from Dick Keeling in London.

He's sent me a picture here which shows a new branch

covered with a kind of white woolly froth.

This is the protective layers around the woolly aphid.

The nymphs spin this material to stop birds eating them.

Like all aphids, they are sap-suckers,

so they'll suck the sap of the new shoots

where the bark is thin and they can get through.

That will slightly weaken the plant but hardly at all.

The important thing is it doesn't affect the flowering

or the subsequent fruiting.

My attitude to this is that your garden is full of myriad

small creatures, the vast majority of which do no harm.

You share your garden with them.

In practice, the woolly aphid parents are now flying away

and the nymphs may well overwinter in crevices in the bark.

You can clear away the wool with a brush or with water,

but best of all, you can not worry about it.

Now, still to come on the programme,

we rejoin Adam in his garden in Lincolnshire.

What I want to get done today lay some of the paths here.

Something I actually call picking paths.

And the garden designer Mark Lane

shows us around his own garden in Canterbury.

It's really about just having fun

and getting out there and having a go.

But first, earlier this summer I paid a long overdue return visit

to a garden that's tucked away in a leafy Dublin suburb.

This garden is the life's work of the celebrated gardener and

writer Helen Dillon and is famous among plant lovers the world over.

In the 25 years that it's been open to the public,

it has inspired thousands of visitors

with its variety of garden rows,

each filled with an array of beautiful and unusual plants,

all surrounding the centrepiece,

an elegant canal flanked by borders plangent with colour.

Helen, I came here 21 years ago and this was lawn.

That lawn was nurtured within an inch of its life.

There was great obsession with this lawn,

so I thought the best thing to do was we take away the lawn

and make something terribly plain that nobody can be worried about.

This slightly compensates for the confusion and all the stuff.

You call it conf... This "stuff", as you call it.

The most incredible intensity of floriferousness.

I find colour terribly exciting,

and that's not fashionable at the moment.

I do have people coming here and they got their eyes nearly shut

because of the whole strain of looking at all this colour

and they say, "I only want green and white."

"I only want green and white," and I think, "Well, too bad,"

or something ruder.

Yes, I suspect something ruder, and good for you.

Well, I like colour too

and I think that the excitement and energy of it...

It's the energy of them clashing with each other.

-You see that orange rose over there?

-Yes.

That's absolutely oomph, it's called Warm Welcome.

-Yeah.

-Have you met it before?

-No, but to be truthful...

-You can't stand it?

It's not I can't stand it THERE.

I tend to view orange roses with a great deal of suspicion.

-One does, but they illuminate the place.

-Yes.

-Were you always a really keen gardener?

-Really. Boringly keen.

I've been gardening all my life. I love gardening.

-Yeah.

-Can't live without it, actually.

And what is it that drives you?

It's the only thing that makes me feel calm, relatively calm.

It's a kind of playing, it's a kind of...

I would get lost in myself, it's the only thing I can lose myself in.

See, I like this idea of playing. I've always thought that...

gardening is grown-ups going outside to play.

That to me is exactly what it is,

exactly what it is and I can remember just how I felt

as I put in my first polyanthus and I thought, God, that's gorgeous,

-isn't that gorgeous? And it was only one plant, one polyanthus.

-Yes.

I get the same pleasure out of one polyanthus as all this,

it's the same thing, it's the same kick.

Where have you drawn your horticultural inspiration from?

God knows. I am not educated, my dear. I left school at 16.

That was it. And, er, so, I suppose I'm educating myself.

Nonstop reading,

particularly old gardening books, and I've been terribly lucky

in travelling in lots of places in the world to look at the plants.

But that's the lesson, isn't it? Trust yourself, trust your eyes.

Yeah, yeah, learn and particularly, go and look at what other people

-are growing, even if it's only just somebody in the next-door village.

-Yeah.

-And get an idea.

Longing for ideas, you can get very good ideas in very bad gardens.

There's something that I always feel is that wonderful plants

can make bad gardens and boring plants can make good gardens.

-That's an excellent point.

-Yeah.

This is a very sophisticated garden. You know, it's very...

it's quite frankly grand, and yet you're happy to have

dustbins and plastic pots and things on display. Why's that?

Well, I'm very keen on dustbins.

-Dustbins are excellent for growing, er, roses...

-Right.

-..because you've got a deep root run.

-Yeah.

They'll do for five years in a dustbin,

provided you feed them.

If all you've got room for is one bin,

you can do a cracking good job.

I'm doing a sort of mobile gardening thing, particularly with things like

lilies, which look wonderful for three weeks and there's no reason

for them to block up a good bit of the border for the other 49 weeks.

BIRDS TWEET

To me, the garden was always a stage,

it's a stage in which I am moving the players

and if I get bored of the player, the player

will just have to go and get on with it in the yard, quite frankly.

If it's a lovely player, it can come out to the front.

It has to be a stage.

But all this is about to change,

because after 44 years spent creating

and tending her masterpiece,

Helen has decided that she needs a new challenge.

So, you've made this intensely beautiful garden,

-and now you're going.

-I know, because it's the time.

I just want to go while I'm strong enough to go,

and I used to think that I could watch it quietly fall to bits.

I've now decided I can't do that, I'd rather leave it

in its full glory and play at something new. I'll be making

a new very small garden, but I'm going to be thinking about it

and enjoying it and changing it and just getting excited about it.

A lot of people would say that at a certain age

it's time to wind down and do less and not have... Less of a challenge,

so where's that come from?

That's the whole joy of the challenge, you silly boy. Really.

That is the fun, isn't it?

I'm with you, I'm with you on that.

But Helen is not leaving everything behind.

Some of her favourite plants will find a home in her new garden.

There's no point taking plants you can easily get,

but there's great point in taking a plant like this,

which is my favourite, er, slightly mauve melianthus.

It's distinctly mauve, isn't it? Gosh...

And it gets more distinct as summer continues.

Has that melianthus got a special name?

-It's called Purple Haze.

-OK, Purple Haze.

So, that's one. OK, another?

-Step this way.

-Right.

So, Monty, what do you think of this spiky-looking customer?

It's very singular, is what I think.

It's a Pseudopanax Crassifolius from New Zealand

and the interesting thing is

it's evolved in that extraordinary form

because it wanted to stop itself being eaten by a giant extinct bird.

The grazing moa used to eat it.

This plant, when it gets to about 15,

it completely changes how it looks

and it ends up looking like that there.

It is amazing, this, isn't it?

How evolution has enabled it to...disguise itself.

I will be taking this with me because I love it.

Although Helen has spent more than half her life creating this garden,

her eyes are fixed firmly on the future.

What intrigues me listening and actually looking at you with

a twinkle in your eye, you don't seem upset by it, by leaving.

Because I'm excited by going - the creation is the excitement,

because there's no room to create anything here.

I can't take that bed to bits,

I actually think that's the best I can make that bed.

-It's done.

-It's done, it's done,

and it's like painting a picture, I don't want to go on

doing the same picture, coming down every morning

give it another little spot there, another little,

little bit of pink possibly there. I want a new picture.

I loved seeing Helen's garden again, and one thing you can be sure,

that if she paints a new picture,

it may be a miniature compared to that,

but it will be, in its own way, another masterpiece.

Now, something that struck me very strongly about the way that

Helen uses colour in her borders

is she's constantly adding plants in,

either in pots, or on top of pots, and what I'm going to do

is something that goes against most of the advice that I'd give you.

Normally I'd say, look for small plants, particularly perennials,

don't buy plants in flower,

because they're spending energy that you want in your own garden,

but I've been and found plants

that are in full flower

and got all the tones and colours I want to add to the garden.

They are only going to stay in flower for a week or two at most,

but it'll give me a chance to experiment

with places to plant them to look best next year.

It's a kind of dress rehearsal. So, for example, I've got this helenium.

It's called Mardi Gras.

Lovely caramel, orange colours coming through

and it fits in with the David Howard Dahlias

and the cannas and the sunflowers,

but actually, if you analyse this section,

this corner of the bed in the Jewel Garden,

it's flat and green

and these iris sibirica are not contributing much,

but if I can get in there and add that in at that height,

one of the ways of doing it is to put a pot there, like that...

It lifts it and if it grows into that, that's a good height,

there's no point in propping up a plant that is never

going to reach that final height,

but if you can get a plant that's sort of half its size

and then lift it up,

that's a good indicator of where to plant it for next year,

or you can make a group out of it.

And I bought these in threes,

because I'm looking for a hit of colour.

And the point is, at this time of year,

these plants will be fine in the small pots

for the next two, three weeks,

and if I like it, I can plant them in that spot.

If, on reflection, I think it's not going to work, well,

I simply just pick them up and move them. How's that looking?

Yes, that's much better.

So I'll take that one out.

I've got a Crocosmia 'Harlequin',

which has got exactly the same colour range

as the Helenium Mardi Gras.

You can see, I love crocosmias, anyway.

And 'Lucifer', for example, is long over,

that's the crocosmia of bright, brilliant red,

but some of them are much more subtle, and flower later.

You see, I think that's great, so if I take another pot...

..and pop that in here, pop that down.

See, the colour is ideal, and the whole point about this is

this is a great time of year to be planning for next July,

August and September.

Go and buy plants, move them around, get height, get texture,

get colour, and you can see what they're going to look like,

you can plant it and know next year at this time they will come up

and they'll be in the right place, giving you the right colour,

and that is a real advantage.

Now, this is for fine-tuning, it's finessing an existing garden

to try and get it as good as it can be every single day of the year,

whereas for Adam, in his new garden in Lincolnshire,

he's still very much at the stage of creating from the ground up.

It's mid-August and I've just returned from the family holiday.

The feeling, though, when you get back home in your own garden

is just wonderful.

I think in the UK, if we've got the weather,

I don't think there's anywhere more beautiful in the world, and...

out early in the mornings, walking round

this space here that, I mean, I'm calling the meadow area,

round the back end of the woodland, is beautiful.

But I wanted to get into this area,

so all I did was took the lawnmower, cut these paths through.

It's already got structure in here, so these brilliant old shrubs,

I've got that scent from philadelphus, lilacs,

but then I've got the edibles, the sorbus, and even the hawthorn,

you know, they used to eat the leaf and the flower

and call it bread and cheese.

Bit bitter for me, but I love those little stories.

So, I've been out taking pictures in the lanes and I'm really going to

start to work out what are those plants we can use

to bring into this meadow that are edible?

I think what I'll do in the winter is literally lift the canopies

and then I can start to add these edible plants, all the way through.

At the moment,

I'm really chuffed to bits with the progress of my veg garden.

The base for the greenhouse is coming along

and the cooking area is done.

The two sets of weather still planters are in place

and all my raised beds are looking great.

Most of the hard-core base for the paths is down.

Now I just want to add a few really useful design details.

What I want to get done today is lay some little paths in here,

something that I actually call "picking paths".

Sometimes when you create a bigger bed,

you can't actually get in there, so I can't get into weed,

I can't get in to pick the goodies that are going to come off the bed

and what I don't want to be doing is trampling all over this bed,

taking the mud on my boots, across the gravel

and across the rest of the garden,

so the idea is the big, long paths that go in between

the gravel beds, they run straight through these beds.

I'm going to use a mix that's six parts ballast and one part cement

for the footings.

The bricks for the path are 60 millimetres deep.

And they sit on a ten mil bed, so I need to establish some pegs

that sit at 70 mil below the finish level of the path.

These pegs set my levels as I'm laying my concrete mix,

but they will stay in place once the footings set.

And all I'm doing is finding the top of those pegs.

You know then that it's not only going to give you something firm

to build off, but it's not going to go anywhere.

Just check that it's going to fit.

There you go, brick's going to be level across the top,

fingers go in, which means I can get a nice bed all the way through.

You're probably thinking,

actually, that's an awful lot of effort to go to

for a tiny little bit of pathing,

but actually, I don't want it to move. I can put the bricks

straight on top of the soil and the soil gets wet,

I pull some vegetables up

and everything's moving all over the place.

So, I think, do you know what?

If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing right.

The mortar needs at least 24 hours to set,

but I won't be sitting around waiting.

There's plenty of jobs to be cracking on with.

Today, my boys Jacob and his younger brother Oakley

need a hand with some new arrivals.

Right.

Here we go.

All right, mate. Look.

Little blue one.

HENS CLUCK

So, these two think they're going to be businessmen,

so they're going to set themselves up a little business.

As far as selling the eggs, they've already made their brand,

they've got their boxes,

he's going to make some little flyers, take them into school.

I think it's a great way for the youngsters

not only to understand where their food comes from, but that

responsibility of looking after something, which I think is great.

And obviously make their old man a millionaire.

Since I've returned from holiday,

I've put together a full planting plan

for the new foraging border in the front garden.

I'll give you some idea actually about how I approach...

planting design, really.

First of all, I actually choose more or less like a pallet,

so I look at the plants that I want to use,

make sure they all grow well in the space.

Sometimes when I'm designing I have a word floating around in my head -

this one, you know, is food, it's foraging, but exotic,

it creates a certain atmosphere for me.

The next thing I do is I start to put in my trees

and my large shrubs,

and you'll see that these are worked all the way through the space.

I'm going to need that height, need something to break the sky

and actually break one area to the next area.

The taxus domes I planted when we first moved in

have really bounced back

and they're providing the framework

for the rest of the structural planting.

So the next thing to go in will be my smaller shrubs,

and you'll see from the colours on my plan that I, I like to

actually repeat a certain shrub here and I'll repeat it

a little bit further up the border,

then the herbaceous plants go in,

and that's really my border put together.

And the last little bit that I love doing

is what I called "drift planting",

so you'll see these big old shades of planting,

-and it's more or less if I just go...

-MAKES WHOOSHING SOUND

..and they're self-seeded over.

They're the ones that give me that natural feel and that feeling

that this garden really wants to take on a sort of a...

a life of its own.

While Adam's garden is still very much work in progress,

the garden designer Mark Lane has created a space

that is both beautiful and works well for him.

And earlier this summer, he showed us around.

As a garden designer, but also as a gardener,

here in my own garden,

it's a perfect playground for me to experiment

with choice of materials,

as well as plants and different plant combinations.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't,

but it's really about just having fun

and getting out there and having a go.

I love this small border.

It's actually a range of pinks, it's my rose and peony border,

and here we have Rose "Princess Anne",

and it's still in full flower.

And right in front of me

is Hydrangea paniculata "Vanille Fraise",

and then behind,

the Japanese anemones.

Now, this front part of my garden

is probably about a third of an acre, so it's a large area,

and we don't have an endless pot of money.

So we've actually used gravel underfoot.

Now, gravel, some people think,

"Well, it's not a very good material to use,

"especially for people in wheelchairs."

But if you actually lay it right,

it can really work well.

If you tamp down a good Type 1 base,

and then tamp down granular, angular gravel on top of that,

and then dress it with a finished layer,

you get a very solid surface.

And then, as you come up,

we've used gravel boards as edgers.

I've used a fence capping on top.

Now, that does two things.

One, well, I think it looks great.

But it also hides a white LED strip light all the way around,

and that goes around the whole of this part of the garden.

So, at night-time, the whole borders just lift,

and they look like they're floating on top of the pale gravel.

And then, as we come from the gravel boards,

we have these lovely green low hedges.

Now, this is Ligustrum ovalifolium,

which is a large-leaf privet.

Some people might shy away from privet,

thinking it's a bit ugly compared to box.

But when I tell you that it comes in at about a third of the price,

and might need a bit more trimming than box,

it still creates a wonderful, dense hedge.

And if you're actually worried about the size of the leaf,

I mean, that's quite a large leaf,

you can go for the smaller leafed privet,

Ligustrum delavayanium, or the Delavay Privet.

And I've used that elsewhere on my lollipops,

and they work brilliantly,

and they look just like box.

Go for privet, it's a good choice.

I really love my blue-and-yellow border,

it is simplicity itself,

just two colours.

And here are some really great tips which I've learned.

Use big, bold drifts of colours, such as the yellow rudbeckia,

and then, as a contrast, dotted amongst them,

are these jewels of blue

from the aster and the agapanthus.

Now, agapanthus are great plants to keep inside their pots,

because it actually constricts them and makes them flower more.

And then the beauty of that is you can pick that pot up

and move it around your border to fill a space.

And then, behind me is the Achillea "Cloth Of Gold",

which, when you cut back at the end of May,

around the Chelsea chop time,

it allows the flowers to grow at different heights,

giving a much more natural feel to the plant itself,

and then gives a natural flow to the border.

This is our white garden, and it's actually quite a new garden,

it's only five months old, but it's already looking really full.

People always think, "Well, white, is that really just it?"

Well, when you actually look at plants, there are obviously

different shapes and different forms, so you have the daisy heads

of the cosmos, then you have these beautiful umbelifers,

which are quite flat on top,

but they are made of tiny little pinheads.

And when you put them together, they just work.

I absolutely love this part of the garden.

It's exuberant, it's colourful.

I'm surrounded by it,

from every single angle,

and it's plants, there's shrubs,

there are grasses, there's trees -

everything that forms a garden,

and I just think it's incredible.

It's like someone has lit a match inside of me,

and it's just growing,

I just love this whole feeling that

the plants are actually almost hugging me.

And, for me, that just gives me a great warmth inside.

You know, it doesn't matter how much you rationalise your planting

or intellectualise the design of your garden.

If it doesn't get you by the heart, it's not going to work.

Now, what next?

Oh, I know. Jobs!

If you've got a bare piece of ground on your allotment or veg patch,

it's too late to sow any seeds,

but it's a good idea to cover the ground

with a generous layer of compost.

You don't need to dig it in,

just leave it for the weather and the worms to incorporate,

and it will be ready for use as soon as the ground warms up next spring.

Now is a really good time to take salvia cuttings.

Look for a nice, strong shoot growing at 45 degrees

between the main stem and a leaf.

And as always, choose a shoot that does NOT have a flower bud.

Pot them up with really well-drained compost,

put them somewhere warm, water them well,

and they should root and be ready for planting out next spring.

It's Michaelmas, and harvest time.

And if you've put all the work and trouble into growing vegetables

across the spring and summer,

do be sure to harvest as many of them as you can.

I know that some people find chard a little bit intimidating.

I've got a very, very simple recipe that we've eaten here for years.

For this recipe, you just need the leaves.

Just warm up a couple of tablespoonfuls of olive oil,

and gently warm it, you don't want it fizzing.

And then a couple of cloves of garlic,

soften that in the oil.

Now, at this time of year, we've got lots of fresh chillies -

this is a jalapeno,

but chilli flakes will do just as well.

There we go, give that a gentle stir around.

You don't want either the chilli or the garlic to brown,

it's just softening.

Now, you've washed the chard.

Just drain it lightly,

and you want to keep some of the water,

and then break it up a bit,

pop that in.

Stir it around and leave to cook,

and the whole point about chard is it's like spinach.

You know how you have that thing with spinach,

you get a large pan and you cram it full of leaves,

and it reduces to that much.

Well, this will reduce to about that much!

A bit of salt.

And the juice of a lemon.

You can either serve this as a vegetable,

or, as I like to eat it best of all, is as bruschetta.

Just get some good bread -

I like sourdough bread - toast it,

and then serve this on the bread.

It makes a really good starter.

Let's let that cook a bit.

Mmm!

I love this vegetable,

and it's a great way to eat it.

And we've been growing chard and eating it like this and other ways

for the last 25 years, and I never get tired of it.

But however you cook your vegetables, enjoy it.

And I'll see you back here at Longmeadow next week.

Till then, bye-bye.