Episode 7 Gardeners' World

Hello. Welcome to Gardeners' World.

We're at that lovely time of year

when the garden is changing almost by the hour.

But there is still a real sense,

certainly here in the Jewel Garden anyway,

of the orchestra warming up - it's not yet really playing its tune.

It's changing all the time,

but at the moment it's all just different levels of green

with touches of intense colour, like the crown imperials,

like the Euphorbia characias. Just a few tulips starting,

but there could be twice as many tomorrow, and by next week,

probably they'll all be out - the change is happening so fast.

This week, Nick Bailey is on the trail of Shakespeare's poisons

and love potions.

Cupid's arrow fell on a little white flower,

turning it purple with love's wound, hence its power as an elixir.

We catch up with Frances Tophill to see how her

veg trail is going at RHS Rosemoor.

And last year in April, we went to Pashley Manor

where their annual tulip festival was in full swing.

Are the tulips going to come out on time?

Are they going to be desperately early?

Are they going to be late?

You know, people think I'm 85, and actually I'm only 58, you know.

And seeing as we're celebrating all things Shakespeare,

it's fitting that I'm continuing my new veg beds

because they are woven exactly in the style that

vegetables were grown in and during Shakespeare's time,

which coincidently was exactly the period that this house

and garden were first made.

But first, I'm going to sow some flowers in the new cutting garden.

Now, what have you got?

What have you got?

Those are the seeds I was going to sow, Nellie!

Right.

I was going to sow Bupleurum in my cutting garden...

and I'm not any more.

Come on.

Right, our second attempt.

So, not Bupleurum, but bells of Ireland,

which again are grown essentially for their foliage.

I've covered the ground just hoping it will keep it a little bit drier.

So, rake that off. That's not too wet.

There we go.

Using a board as a spacer, so I need to be that far away from it.

Now, bells or Ireland I always treat as a hardy annual.

Sow them direct after all frost has passed, but here,

even though it's fairly cold and wet here,

we've never had any problems with them.

My biggest problem are dogs eating your seeds before you can sow them.

Draw my drill.

As ever, it is quite important to try and sow these thinly.

Get the last one out.

It's funny how the last seed will stick in the crease of the packet.

There you go.

And then just sprinkle them along.

Now, this time of year, the soil tends to be damp and warm,

so it should germinate fast.

I wouldn't expect to see anything for a few weeks.

So, what bells of Ireland will give me, Moluccella,

is these greens which fade into a kind of almost yellow,

which against either bright colours or very pale colours

acts like a really good foil.

You need that levelling influence in any kind of flower arrangement

and therefore in your cutting garden.

I'm going to add now some plants. This is ammi, Ammi visnaga,

which is like a kind of posh cow parsley.

It has a slightly rounded umbel of white flowers

made up of hundreds of little florets.

And then, as you can see, very loose, finely cut foliage.

I'm just going to put a row along here.

And I'll use my measuring device again

and just plant them out.

Ammi, whether it be Ammi majus or Ammi visnaga,

grows much better if you sow it in September rather than spring.

You can get seed and sow it as late as early April,

but it never develops half as well.

So, if you haven't sown it now, buy it as a plant and then buy some seed

and grow them yourself for next year.

Around the time of Shakespeare's death in 1616,

tulips began to be amongst the most valuable things on this planet

and people made and lost vast fortunes.

And this beautiful flower became a symbol of greed and wealth

and man's insatiable desire to possess

that which it thinks is most valuable.

Well, here in the Spring Garden,

I try and use tulips in a completely different way.

I want them to weave in and out of what else is going on,

to blend, to highlight,

so you got the lovely lily flowered West Point.

It's yellow and these petals curve up and they twist and they open out.

And the Spring Green, which is chunkier,

but delicate because you get this green flash on a white background,

so you get this spring lightness of touch.

Now, of course, tulips are magnificent

and now we can just enjoy them as a flower, but very people grow them

in such quantity or with such panache as they do at Pashley Manor.

And we went along last year when were at their very best.

I've always, since the age four onwards,

been interested in gardening.

We moved here in 1981...

when it was, to say the least, a bit of a muddle,

but we have the most wonderful views and beautiful countryside.

My life is surrounded by the garden.

It's enough to keep me fully occupied every waking moment.

That is what I really enjoy.

It might interest you to know how this tulip festival started.

A friend of ours telephoned me to say,

"Do you realise what this year is?"

I said, "Not particularly."

And they said,

"It is the 400th anniversary of the first tulip to be landed in Europe.

"I think you should have a tulip festival."

So, roughly, that's what we did.

And we slowly increase the size, so we went for the second year

we were very proud of having 5,000 tulips in the garden,

and the next year 7,500,

and then we got over the 10,000 a year or two later.

This year we planted best part of 25,500 tulips.

I think it's 107 different varieties.

One of the things that's exciting is

the anticipation of the build-up to it.

Are the tulips going to come on time?

Are they going to be desperately early?

Are they going to be late?

You know, people think I'm 85, and actually I'm only 58, you know.

One of the great joys of this garden is Keith, our head gardener.

Keith has worked with us all his working life

and he came as a schoolboy in the holidays

and then he went to horticulture college and then he came back here.

And I appointed Keith at a very young age to be head gardener.

This board here has one of my favourite colour combinations

of tulips with the green star here

with the green streak as a lily flowered.

And then you have the white as well with it,

which is just almost a pure white version of it,

so they create a really nice combination together.

And we found it's a real winner over the years.

Tulips in containers can be really good.

You can create a really good, long lasting effect

if you double layer your planting.

Put one layer of tulips in quite deep into the pot, add two

or three inches of compost and then another layer of tulips above.

And the lower ones come through behind the higher bulbs

and you'll get a much longer flowering period

and helps to fill the pot and makes it feel really dense and full.

With the tulips, we'll use underplanting,

predominately forget-me-nots,

cos they'll come in most of the ranges of colours for the tulips.

We also use red Bellis in the hot borders.

You have a bit of a love-hate with them, I suppose,

because they're superb at this time of year,

they give us such a good show with this volume of tulips in the garden.

But we're almost cursing them at times because

it's putting us so far behind,

but they're certainly something we're never going to be without.

When we lift the bulbs off, they finish flowering,

they'll be boxed up and donated to local charities,

things such as hospices and nursing homes

and they'll plant them in their grounds

and then we'll have a brand-new,

fresh batch of bulbs for the next season

to guarantee the perfect flowering.

One thing is whether I have a favourite tulip.

It depends, really.

I suppose I would say Queen of the Night,

that near-black tulip.

It's so elegant and so distinctive.

But I particularly enjoy a tulip called Angelique,

which is very attractive,

and happens to be my wife's name,

so it all fits in nicely.

I'm often asked whether I mind our garden

being filled up with visitors.

They answer is, certainly no, I don't.

They spur us on to try and see that we do a good job.

And it's pleasure to show people something which

frankly we're quite proud of.

Pashley Manor is open for its tulip festival until the 7th of May.

If you go to our website you'll get all the details of how to get there

and what time it opens and all that kind of thing.

Hopefully I'll have this done long before the 7th of May.

This was how vegetables and herbs would have been grown

from medieval times right up till the Stuart time,

at the end of Shakespeare's life.

And then things started to change in the 17th century.

And when this house was built

this is how the garden would have been made,

with woven beds - I've used hazel,

just normal bean sticks that you can buy, hazel bean sticks,

and chestnut posts.

And I've done these four beds,

but I'm going to make another little one now.

And you start with a post, which have been sharpened

and I've cut down to size, but you can see they're pretty substantial.

Quite a lot has to go in the ground

because there's a lot of pressure by the sticks.

The upside of that is they're really strong.

And chestnut has two huge virtues.

The first is, it's really good at surviving in wet soil.

Makes brilliant posts, it doesn't rot.

Well, if it does, it does so very slowly.

And the second virtue is, it's dead easy to split.

So, if I get a splitting axe like that...

And that's it. I've got two posts.

That's the easiest bit of the whole operation.

The absolute critical thing if you're doing this yourself is

to get your post, whatever you use, dead straight.

You'll have to forgive me, I'm going to huff and puff.

Here we go.

And who said...

that gardening...

was a sedate activity?

So, I'm going to start that end,

and what I'll do is, so it doesn't break,

you twist at the same time as bending.

So, nail the top corners to stop them springing up,

and then cut the excess posts clean.

That's all there is to it.

A few weeks ago, Frances Tophill started a trial,

at RHS Rosemoor in Devon, of vegetable seeds,

and we went down there to see how she's getting on.

A few weeks ago, at the beginning of April, I sowed ridge cucumber,

sweetcorn and tomato seeds to kick off the veg trial I'm running,

to find out which varieties give the best crop

and, crucially, the best taste.

The cucumbers and sweetcorn aren't ready yet...

..but the tomatoes got off to a flying start.

Our tomato seedlings are up and ready to be pricked out.

Now, basically, you can see in this pot, it's quite congested.

We have six in here, and there's not enough room for them to grow -

but, as well as that, there comes a point in every seed's life

where it's used all the goodness form the endosperm in the seed,

and now it really has nothing to live on.

So, I'm potting it from this low-nutrient compost

into something a little bit more nutrient rich.

So, we've got a slow-release fertiliser in there,

just a basic multipurpose compost.

This is Tumbler F1,

which means it's very good for going in a hanging basket -

which is great, because all our tomatoes will be, eventually,

going into hanging baskets -

but, for now, they need to go into this slightly bigger pot,

where they will grow on a little bit more.

The idea with this is we want to get as much root out as possible -

always pull these plants out by the leaves.

If we crush this stem, the plant will not grow back again.

So, a damaged leaf isn't the end of the world -

a damaged stem is bad news.

And gently pulling,

so we have as much root as can be with the plant.

That can just be gently pushed in.

Generally speaking,

when you pot something from one container to another,

or even to the ground,

you want the soil to be at the same level in the pot

as it is in its new position, but with this tomato,

I'm actually going to bury it a little bit deeper -

it's about half an inch of extra compost -

and that just stops this plant from getting too leggy once it grows up,

makes it a more robust specimen.

And that's it.

A bit of water, and I'll put this back into the polytunnel,

where it'll get bigger and stronger until it's ready to be hardened off.

If you want to join our trial, then it's not too late.

You can go to our website for a list of the seeds that we're growing,

and you can let us know

how your plants are getting on via our Facebook page.

You can have that bit, there.

There we go.

We'll be going back to Rosemoor

to see how Frances is getting on very soon.

And this is done for the moment, this little bed, here.

It's designed for growing lots of lovely vegetables,

and, so, I think I'd better start.

Now, in honour of the Tudor nature of these beds,

and also Shakespeare's birthday and death,

I think we should have a Tudor vegetable in here first.

I'm going to plant some skirret.

In Shakespeare's time, it was a very common root vegetable -

in fact, right the way through from medieval England

up until the 19th century,

most vegetable gardens would grow it,

both for its vegetable,

which is somewhere between carrot and parsnip,

and also for medicinal purposes -

it was used as a poultice for sores,

and people believed that it warded off the plague.

They would fry them in butter or roll them in flour,

and they were sweet - and that was the key,

because remember, this is a time before sugar was widely available.

So, any sweet root vegetable was highly prized.

You'd simply plant them so that they're level with the soil,

and they will die right back in winter.

And if I put them here, this will stay here.

They like good drainage, but also plenty of moisture.

Well, they're going to get plenty of moisture, that's for sure.

As part of our celebration of Shakespeare's birth and death,

Nick Bailey has been looking at

the horticultural and botanical references in his work.

I've been head gardener here at Chelsea Physic Garden

for six years - but that's just a small blip in the garden's history.

It was established in 1673 to train apothecaries

in the identification and use of medicinal plants -

in other words, they needed to determine between

the good and the ill, the poisons and the potions.

A huge step towards this understanding came in 1597,

just as Shakespeare was hitting his stride as a playwright

when John Gerard published his Herball,

a general history of plants.

It really would have been the most extensive

book on botany at its time.

Now, it's unclear whether Gerard and Shakespeare

would have been aware of each other, but they were certainly neighbours,

they moved in the same in the same social circles,

and it's been that an illustration in the front cover here

is of Shakespeare - the only illustration during his lifetime.

Now, if this is true, it would mean that there's a stronger link

between him and this bible of botany.

So, let's look at some examples of plants,

potions and poisons in the works of the bard,

and see if Gerard can help identify what exactly they were.

"No warmth, no breath, shall testify thou liveth.

"The roses in thy lips and cheeks shall fade to paly ashes,

"and in this borrowed likeness of shrunk death,

"thou shalt continue two and forty hours,

"and then awake as from a pleasant sleep."

So, what was this mystery substance?

One likely candidate is Atropa belladonna,

also known as deadly nightshade -

but which in Gerard's Herball is known as sleeping nightshade.

Gerard says that while a small amount leads to madness,

a moderate amount causes a dead sleep -

just what Juliet was after.

There's plenty of skulduggery in Denmark, too.

"Upon my secure hour, thy uncle stole

"with juice of cursed hebenon in a vial,

"and in the porches of mine ears

"did pour the leprous distilment."

This time, Shakespeare explicitly identifies the substance used -

hebenon, or henbane.

And, again, Gerard is a possible source.

It causes an unquiet sleep, and is deadly to the party.

Henbane really can be deadly, but the reason we grow it here

is because of its historic medicinal use.

Of course, I'm wearing gloves to protect my hands

while I'm collecting the seeds, and, if we break down that seed,

we've got where the most toxic, toxic part of the plant is,

where the poison is.

Now, later in the play,

Hamlet kills Ophelia's father,

and this, of course, triggers Polonius' son

to seek revenge on Hamlet.

Poison is, again, the chosen method,

but this time on the tip of a sword -

and, for Gerard, the ideal concoction for this

kind of foul play was aconite, or wolfsbane.

He writes, "Wolfsbane is a deadly medicine,

"wherewith the hunters poison their spears, darts and arrows

"that bring present death."

Now, like henbane and like atropa, aconite is very, very poisonous,

but the difference is,

this is actually a useful garden ornamental.

You can see the buds are starting to form just here,

and it produces this really intense, deep, deep blue flower -

all round, a great garden plant, well worth growing -

keep your gloves on.

Of course, it's not all tragedy in Shakespeare.

There's the odd comedy, too -

and, once again, plants loom large,

often in the form of handy love potions.

"Fetch me that flower, the herb I showed thee once.

"The juice of it, on sleeping eyelids laid

"will make or man or woman madly dote

"upon the next living creature that he sees."

Love-in-idleness is, in fact, Viola tricolor,

which has a long history of use in herbalism.

Shakespeare's story has it

that Cupid's arrow fell on a little white flower,

turning it purple with love's wound -

hence its power as an elixir.

There's no evidence in Gerard or anywhere else

that Viola tricolor has any love-inducing effects.

In fact, today it's more commonly used

to scatter across the tip of a salad just for pretty adornment.

I've tried it, and I must say,

it's had no perceivable effect on my love life.

The thing that I love about Shakespeare

and plants is you feel that he's describing them

from personal experience - it's intimate and it's personal,

and that really comes through in all his work.

But one plant that was around in his time -

it was introduced just about the time of his birth -

was the potato,

and I'm sure he wasn't intimate and personal what that,

because it was regarded with suspicion

when it first arrived - and, in fact, for the next 200 years,

as food only fit for animals or the very poorest.

And the delicious potatoes that we savour now

certainly wouldn't have been a Shakespearean experience.

However, the ones that I've been growing in bags

have been doing well,

and it's time for the next stage.

You may remember that I planted a couple of seed potatoes

in this bag a few weeks ago.

I put them in the greenhouse, kept them watered -

and they've grown, they've really grown well.

This is about 18 inches tall. They are romping away.

But as soon as you see them reach the top of the bag,

it is important to earth them up.

I'm just using a normal, peat-free compost,

and just pop them around the growth.

You won't harm the growth in any way by covering it up.

I'll let this grow back up another foot or so,

and then I'll top it up again to the top of the bag,

and that will maximise the quantity -

and hopefully the quality - of the tubers I harvest.

But remember, keep them well watered.

That is the key to good potatoes.

Now, you may not be growing potatoes in a bag,

but here are some other jobs you can do this weekend.

Now is the ideal time

for planting out any kind of potatoes.

If you're short of space, a very good way to grow them is simply

to make a hole in the ground and pop them in using a grid pattern -

and this is especially good if you're growing them in raised beds.

The new growth of the potatoes won't appear for a few weeks,

so, to use the ground to the maximum effect,

plant out seedlings of lettuce, rocket, or sow some radish -

and this will grow and be eaten

before it gets shaded out by the potatoes.

If you haven't yet cut back your pelargoniums,

this is something you should do now,

and this will stop them getting leggy

and encourage nice, strong, fresh growth.

Also, give them a feed - liquid seaweed is fine -

and feed them once a week

for the next few months.

If left to its own devices,

sage becomes a woody shrub with fewer and fewer leaves,

but if you cut it back hard,

this will produce a mass of fresh leaves

that are ideal for cooking with.

Now, don't compost the clippings.

Either use them in the kitchen

or, if you've got a fireplace or a barbecue, put them on that,

and they'll fill a room or flavour the food with the most

beautiful fragrance of sage.

LAMBS BLEAT

Come on.

Now, you want a drink, too, don't you?

Nellie will give you a hand.

We've got a couple of orphan lambs...

Get down now, this is not for you.

..which we're having to bottle-feed, because the mum died,

and we're having to look after them.

Which my son, who is a sheep farmer,

has delegated to me for the next four weeks.

Go on, there you go. There you are.

The dogs are rolling all over the chionodoxas,

which I planted last year for the first time.

They're a little late, but they're coming up.

Everything is bursting out.

Well, from all the varied animals here at Longmeadow, and me,

that's it for today -

and I'll see you here next time. Until then, bye-bye.

Come on, let's go back.