Episode 6 Gardeners' World

Hello, welcome to Gardeners' World.

The floor of the copse here is covered with these

little wood anemones.

And they open out in the sunshine

and they'll close up when it clouds over.

And their like blossom growing up from the ground.

They've got that same freshness, the whiteness touched with pink.

And there's also delicacy about them.

You know this is not going to last forever,

but while it does,

it's a kind of heaven.

This week we meet a grower from Cumbria with a grand passion for dahlias.

I set off with 12 - 12 different varieties.

Now we have over 350 different types.

Everybody says it is dahlia heaven.

And last April, James Alexander-Sinclair

went to Alnwick Garden in Northumberland

to witness its amazing display of cherry blossom.

Part of the whole idea of cherry blossom is as the wind comes

it just blows off drifts of petals, doesn't it?

Yes, we can advertise it as Snowdon Alnwick,

cos there'll be so much blossom,

this hill will just be completely white.

I've decided to make some cut flower borders.

You know how it is - you go out and you're picking flowers

and you want a lovely, big, generous bunch of flowers in the house.

But you've just got perfect blooms in the border,

and to take them would rob the border.

And that choice can be really difficult to make.

So if you have an area dedicated to cut flowers, it's a crop,

and they are grown solely to be picked for the house.

You can grow absolutely anything -

herbaceous plants, shrubs, annuals, tender plants,

whatever you like to pick and use to decorate the house.

I've prepared the ground.

This has grown vegetables for the last 20 years,

so the soil is terrific.

Lots of manure, really good drainage, it's sunny,

it's sheltered, and that's perfect conditions for cut flowers.

I've got some gladioli here, and this is a gladioli called Zorro.

And it's the most incredible dark red.

Perfect as a cut flower.

So what I'll do is put a board down, and then...

And this, by the way, is a tulip planter.

I came across it,

and it is an extraordinary thing.

But a spade will do just as well, it's a toy.

And I'm going to...

..open out a slit trench,

like that.

And I'm going to add a little bit of grit along there.

If your soil is very well drained, you don't need to do this.

I'm not going to plant them all right now.

A really good idea if you are planting gladioli at all

is to do them in succession,

otherwise you're going to get all the flowers at once

and they will all go at once.

But particularly for cut flowers,

you want a good supply for as long a season as possible.

So I'll put some in now, some in about three weeks' time,

and then some as late as late May.

Pop them in about four to six inches apart.

You want to give them a chance

to develop into really nice, strong plants. So not too close.

At least four inches deep in the ground.

That way you get a nice strong stem, anchored in well,

and what you need for cut flowers

are straight stems, if possible.

And planting deeper will give you a stronger, straighter stem.

So I'll just cover these back over like that.

Gladioli have never been fashionable.

Other than Dame Edna, who used to

use them almost like a weapon.

As a general rule, water them in well.

Actually, today, my soil is fairly moist.

It has been showering, and I want to continue,

so I will water the whole bed when I've finished.

When I was a child, my mother had a cut flower bed,

but she only grew two things in it, which were dahlias and gladioli.

And the colours seemed to me back then, and certainly in my memory,

very lurid, vivid pastels,

if that's not a contradiction in terms.

They were like, sort of, 1950s lipstick.

And it took me a while to realise that dahlias, for example,

come in a wide range of colours and can be dramatic and can be subtle.

I've grown a lot since, and grown to love them too.

But I don't grow nearly as many

and I probably don't love them half as much as Jack Gott does.

And we went to visit him and his dahlias in Cumbria.

I've been growing dahlias for, I would say,

between 44 and 46 years.

I set off with 12 - 12 different varieties.

And now we have over 350 different types.

I'm an electrician by trade.

Used to get together at brew times, and one of these lads said,

"I've got some dahlias if you want to give them a try."

That's just how it started.

I'm just passionate about them.

The difference of varieties, the forms -

there's everything from the dark leaf ones

to the tiny ones that only grow 12 inches tall

with a flower like a little daisy,

to the great big ones that are just full of petal.

I've lived in this street all my life.

I'm now 68 years old.

We have the largest collection of dark leaf dahlias in the UK.

And the Dutch people say we've got the largest collection in the world.

We've got Grenadier here, which is a bright red one.

We've got Fire Mountain.

These two are better than Bishop of Llandaff.

They are a lot brighter flower.

And with the dark foliage, it makes it stand out better still.

Black Jack is not named after me, as if you might think it is,

and you won't see a darker leaf or a darker flower

of that type of dahlia anywhere.

That tree dahlia is imperialis.

It's been in about four years.

I've never had it to flower yet, but it will one day, it will flower.

The roots are that big,

I would need a pick and shovel to get them out.

I think in time it will start moving that conifer behind us.

There is a lot of colour here, but when you go round the back

and see all the colour that there is round there, you'll be gobsmacked.

Well, for growing show poms,

to start with you need the right varieties.

All flowers and all buds have what they call a calyx

which wraps around the bud to start with.

So for a good pom to be shown properly,

you need to cut those calyxes off,

just take them off like that.

And that allows the pom petals to go right back,

right to the back of the stem, just like that.

For showing cactus dahlias or any dahlias you want to show

that have got a long stem,

you need to be taking these two shoots off,

like that.

And you take the next two off below, like so,

which will give you a cut flower stem of about 22 to 24 inches.

The floral art ladies like them for displays

cos it gives them a long stem and they can put

greenery in between and the flower on the top.

I'm raising new collarette type dahlias.

The collarette is with the other collar round the centre.

And what I'm doing is I'm letting the bees, like that one,

it's going from there and then it'll go to there,

go to this one, and send the pollen onto these.

And this is the mother plant, you can say,

which is the one that's going to carry the baby seed.

You can always tell if a flower is finished cos it's pointed.

And then for ten days, I squeeze the water out of them...

and that ripens the seed.

Then we cut them off.

Just put them in milk bottles as if it was a flower.

Leave it there until this has all gone brown.

Then we knock the seed out of the pod,

save it in an envelope,

and then on the 1st of April every year, we sow the seed.

Most of them will come single.

You may get five that have a good collar around them.

Which, this year, I would say I have five out of 100, which...

That is good going.

Letting the bees do it, it's fantastic,

they are doing the work for me.

Everybody says it is dahlia heaven.

I do think that people like Jack are the beating heart

of British gardeners,

with real passion and expertise for their subject.

It doesn't matter if it's dahlias or whatever it is.

Long may they thrive.

But you don't need real expertise just to grow dahlias at home.

You do for showing, but in the garden

you fundamentally make a hole in the ground, pop them in,

and nine times out of ten

they will grow and flower without any trouble at all.

What they don't like is the cold, so you need to protect them from frost.

They don't like it too wet over winter, so we bring them in.

But they are very easy to propagate,

and especially from cuttings at this time of year.

I've got here a plant of Grenadier.

And as Jack showed, this has dark foliage and lovely red flowers.

And I've chosen a plant with plenty of shoots,

and I've forced these shoots by putting them in the greenhouse,

giving them a little bit of heat and light early in March,

and that will bring them into growth.

And what I'm looking for are strong, upright shoots

to make cuttings from.

And I take a pot with a little bit of depth to it,

use a potting mix that has got plenty of drainage.

I've added lots of grit to that,

so that will make the cutting go better.

I need to put my glasses on so I can see properly.

I don't want weak growth.

That one there is absolutely ideal

whereas the little one next to it is a little bit small.

So I'm going to try and isolate that out.

And when you cut them off, do so at the base, right down at the tuber.

There we go.

And you can see, I've got a little bit of tuber there.

Now, we clean off the extra growth.

And you do need a sharp knife when you're taking cuttings.

And the reason why you remove the leaves from cuttings

is because they are transpiring all the time.

They are taking up moisture, but because there are no roots,

there's no moisture coming in.

So there's a deficit.

But if we just leave a little bit of leaf,

and put that in the corner of the pot,

because against the plastic side of the pot it dries out more slowly.

Now, this must go somewhere warm

and it must be kept moist.

So water it, and then if you've got a little sprayer,

spray it two or three times a day.

That stops it transpiring too fast

and gives the roots a chance to grow before the leaves die.

And with any cutting, it is a race to develop roots

before the top part dies.

And you'll know that it's got roots when you start to see new growth.

And that way, you generate, over the years,

lots and lots of new dahlias.

While I'm in here, I'm going to sow some peas

for my new vegetable garden

And I said that I wanted it to be full of interesting, unusual

and sometimes endangered varieties.

These are purple podded peas.

The actual peas themselves are green,

but the pods are purple so look really dramatic.

And this variety, which is hard to pronounce, Blauwschokker,

is tall, so it needs support,

so you've got these purple peas hanging down.

They taste good, you can eat them as a mangetout,

you can eat them just as green peas,

so great in the kitchen and looking dramatic and fabulous in the garden.

And if I sow them in these root trainers,

you get nice, straight roots.

You just put them together like that, and if I...

..put some compost in them...

And just one pea per trainer.

If you've got lots of seed, you could put two in for each one

and then remove the weakest.

I'm going to cover those over a little.

Right. I'm going to put these in here

simply to make them easier to carry about.

There we go.

The greenhouse is really busy now.

This is the propagating centre of the whole garden.

Seeds are sown, cuttings are made.

They work their way down, they then get pricked out and potted on.

And then after the last risk of frost,

they can be planted out into the garden.

But for the last four weeks and the next four weeks,

this is the engine room of the garden.

April is the month where the great white cherry blossoms.

But when it blossoms does vary according to the weather.

I'm keeping an eye on it.

Here are the buds, still, I would say, at least a week away,

even if we have really warm weather, it could be two weeks.

Last April, James Alexander-Sinclair went to Alnwick in Northumberland

where they have an extraordinary display of the great white cherry.

Cherry blossom is the national flower of Japan

and every spring, blossom fever grips the nation.

For hundreds of years people have observed

the ancient tradition of hanami, or flower viewing.

'All over the park are rings of singing and clapping

'and dancing and drinking people.

'Everyone's anxious to share their love of the fragile blossoms.

'The time when the love of nature,

'inborn, they say, in every Japanese,

'comes bursting out all over.'

Here in the UK, one place you're almost guaranteed to see blossom

at this time of year is Alnwick Garden in Northumberland.

Famous for its fountains, it now has another feature

growing in celebrity - its 350 Tai-haku cherry trees.

These trees were planted a mere seven years ago,

and already their branches are beginning to touch,

which creates this luxurious panoply of white flower.

Prunus Tai-haku has the largest flower of all ornamental cherries -

a single blossom can be over two inches wide.

Bright white with hardly a hint of pink in sight,

the name Tai-haku simply translates as big white flower.

Head gardener Trevor Jones knows all about these stunning trees.

In my mind's eye, I can just see, five years on from now,

we will see no sky.

That's right, it'll just be a complete cloud of white,

which will be fantastic.

And the beauty of it is that once it starts to fall,

then we can advertise it as Snowdon Alnwick,

because there will be so much blossom,

this hill will just be completely white.

Part of the whole sort of idea of cherry blossom is as the wind comes

it just blows off drifts of petals, doesn't it?

Yes, it's beautiful, it's just like confetti falling.

There's a rather lovely story behind this tree, isn't there?

It has got a very good story.

This tree is unique because, at one time,

this tree was lost in cultivation in Japan, believe it or not.

-It's native to Japan?

-It is, yes.

And thanks to a gentleman called Collingwood Ingram,

he had a fascination for cherries.

At 46, he was such an authority on Japanese cherries,

he was invited to come across to Japan

and address the Cherry Society.

And when he went across he spotted a picture, and in that picture

there was a beautiful white Japanese cherry tree.

It was then that he learned that this cherry

was no longer cultivated in Japan.

He actually recognised the cherry from a cherry that he knew of

in the United Kingdom.

So he was able to come back to the UK and propagate that cherry,

which was really run down, and sent it out to Japan.

It's a lovely story, isn't it?

The fact that there was this one Englishman with an eccentric name

who just reintroduces this whole species back into Japan.

Absolutely amazing, yeah.

And thanks to him, we now have these wonderful Prunus Tai-haku trees,

not just in this country but all over the world.

And they're quite easy, aren't they? Are they easy to grow?

They are very easy. In fact, we don't do an awful lot to them.

They enjoy a fairly dry soil.

They don't like their feet being wet.

You plant them with lots of compost?

Yes, a fair amount. Compost or leaf mould, just worked into the soil.

-Give them a good start.

-That's right.

And you leave them, really, to get on with it.

It's never a good idea to prune a cherry tree hard, anyway, is it?

It's not, really, because you open the plant up

to lots of infection, then you start to get canker developing.

So, no, I would tend not to prune, really.

So only in desperate circumstances do you take a saw to them.

Definitely.

So, if you had a small garden,

would this be the tree that you would plant in it?

No, this would get too big.

Really, these trees tend to be quite large trees with flat tops

that cast a lot of shade underneath,

and really it would dominate your garden.

-Bad for a small garden.

-Yes.

But not bad for a middle-sized garden?

Or, if you have a very large garden, then 350 will do.

TREVOR LAUGHS

in Japan, if you're willing to ride the blossom wave as it sweeps north,

you can follow flowers from January through to May.

But here in the UK we're only treated to this delicious display

for a brief few weeks in March and April.

The thing about cherry blossom

is that the season is unbelievably short,

and within just a few days, all of this will be gone.

And so it has come to symbolise those fleeting moments

in our lives, and how we must appreciate every one of them.

And what better way to appreciate

one of those fleeting moments than this?

The blossom may not be out yet at Alnwick.

They have a website, so if you go to the website

and check it out they will flag up when it comes into flower.

It should be in about a week or two.

I've never been, I confess.

It's one of those places I'm dying to go and see at any time of year.

The blossom here at Longmeadow begins with this.

This is a damson.

It is light and frothy and borne on bare branches.

And then over the next few weeks, with the crab apples and the pears

and the cherries and the apples, the whole garden just blossoms.

Come on.

Come on.

The cottage garden used to be the vegetable garden.

And when I made the shift, I thought that we must have some topiary

to get that spirit of the traditional cottage garden style.

And this is my Nigel topiary.

Early days, not nearly finished, but it's beginning...

Come here, you can... Come here, Nige. There we go.

You're facing the wrong way.

It's coming into being.

Now is a really good time to plant evergreens.

And yew, or box, makes the best topiary.

Yew is perfect, because the harder you clip it,

the denser the regrowth.

And you can clip right back into the wood,

and that will sprout new shoots.

So, we're coming along here.

But there is a little bit of a problem

because we're missing two vital elements,

which is Nigel's right front leg and his rear hind leg,

so I'm going to plant them now.

I'm using cuttings that I took two or three years ago.

I realise that we're going to have to have a yew ball in his mouth.

Because he's standing looking at me

because that is really what he wants. BALL SQUEAKS

We need a ball there, and then he will pose. Go on, you can take that.

OK. I don't want to plant it too deep. There we go.

There we go.

We will tie that into there.

Try and use twine that is softer than the material you are tying.

So if anything is going to break or rot or be damaged,

it's the twine and not the plant.

You should be thinking about tying in, not cutting.

It's not a good time to trim topiary.

And most people cut their topiary in August or September.

Those two cuttings are planted,

and all I want them to do for the next year or two

is establish into nice, strong, fast-growing plants.

Then I can worry about the details of turning them

into reasonably lifelike legs.

One tip I would say is that any plant is going to grow much

more strongly if it is growing vertically than horizontally.

So, like his tail here, I've left growing up.

And when it reaches the length that you want,

and this applies to any part or any type of topiary,

then you can tie it to the horizontal.

But as soon as you tie it down, that will slow down the growth.

I'll give these a little bit of water.

And your back leg, Nige.

I realised that I'm going to have to plant another topiary for Nel,

and have the pair of them.

And it's right and proper that Nel will be a bit slower

and a bit smaller and take a while to catch up.

And if it's anything like the real dog,

the topiary will take off in the night,

dig holes where I don't want holes,

and generally be very naughty indeed.

Now, I have been sent a picture by Geoffrey Bright,

and he sent it via Facebook,

which is a really good way of communicating with us, of his dog.

There we are.

It's good. A slight touch of the wild boar about it, perhaps.

But then I think looking at my Nigel,

I'm in no position to criticise anybody,

and I don't want to,

because quirky, individual topiary is fantastic,

and please send us pictures, if you've got them.

Now, I realise that not everybody does topiary,

so here are some jobs that we can all do this weekend.

Gooseberries, redcurrants and white currants

can all be pruned now to open them out.

This is not the case with blackcurrants.

Cut back any inward-growing branches

or any that are crowded or crossing.

Any growth that is left can be cut back by about a quarter.

What you are looking to achieve is the strong framework

of an open goblet.

Rubus tibetanus and Rubus cockburnianus

are ornamental brambles that look fantastic in winter,

with their white downy coating

over plum coloured stems.

But they can be very invasive.

When the stems touch the ground they layer and form new plants.

And also they are horribly prickly for the gardener. So coppice them.

That means cutting back all this year's growth, right to the ground.

Clear them away, and new shoots will soon appear.

Mophead and lacecap hydrangeas can be pruned now.

Cut-off last year's dead flowers,

plus between a quarter and a third of the shoots,

cutting back to a pair of nice, healthy buds.

Remove any branches that are crossing or damaged

so you have a nice, healthy framework.

Well, I have given this hydrangea,

this is Hydrangea macrophylla 'Veitchi',

a bit more of a hard prune because it was all over the shop.

And what I've really looked for is a decent shape.

But the principle is exactly the same.

Just cut back by about a third, move any crossing branches,

and it's fine.

And it feels pretty fine also on these lovely spring evenings.

It's been a funny day.

Started cold, got rainy, and now has ended with lovely spring sunshine.

So, I hope that sunshine stays with you all weekend.

And I'll be back here next week at Longmeadow. Until then, bye-bye.