Episode 8 Gardeners' World

Hello, welcome to Gardeners' World.

Now, this week we are at the Malvern Spring Show.

Malvern is my own local show - it's just down the road from Longmeadow -

and of course it is set against this fabulous backdrop

of the Malvern hills.

And today, and it doesn't always happen at Malvern,

we are blessed with wonderful weather.

Now, helping me discover all that we can find here

is Carol and also Adam Frost,

the Chelsea gold medal-winning garden designer, and we will be

distilling the essence of Malvern over the next half an hour

and, hopefully, finding time for a bit of shopping too.

Now whilst, of course, it's lovely to have sunshine, you know,

it doesn't matter what the weather is like at Malvern because

it's so much a seasonal show.

You see spring expressed gloriously in the show gardens and the stands,

in the floral marquee with all the thousands of plants.

And I'll be going into those floral marquees

later on looking for a very particular type of plant

to be at its best as regards fragrance in the evening.

I'm going to be looking at why plants have scent

and with nursery people here gathering all their best

wares together, I know I am bound to find something that is

really going to tickle my nostrils.

I'm going to spend my day looking for design ideas for small spaces

and with so many show gardens here to see,

there's got to be loads of ideas to take home.

One of the perks and privileges of my job is I get to visit

the floral marquee before it is open to the public

and yet when it's ready for judging,

so everything is looking and smelling perfect.

Lilies are one of those iconic perfume flowers that will

smell rich and delicious morning, noon and night.

There is one called Zambesi here, which I like the look of,

and it has got wonderful perfume.

I suspect that most of us don't grow Clematis primarily for fragrance

but many do smell really good.

This is Lunar Lass.

It grows very slowly,

so that's no good for a pergola or sprawling over a large area,

but if you see it spilling down,

it then becomes really interesting.

I really like it and think that might work well

spilling over the wall on the mound.

Those are Phlox divaricata Clouds Of Perfume.

Good colour, very pretty flower and as the name suggests, good perfume.

But it's one that stays on an even note throughout the day -

it doesn't get better as we go along -

so I'm going to pass on that.

But if you wanted one by the back door to greet you

in the morning, it would be ideal.

Right there is one of the muskiest, richest scents of all.

That's Brugmansia, and though unfortunately, in recent years,

although I've grown them perfectly successfully in the past,

I've not been able to get my Brugmansia to flower.

Excuse me, hello.

Hello, Monty.

I really like Brugmansia but they've stopped flowering for me.

The best thing with the Brugmansia is they do like a lot of feed.

They like a high-phostrogen feed, like a tomato feed,

if you've got that, and plenty of it.

The key, which I've been doing wrong, is really feed them.

Feed them every week if not twice a week.

And how poisonous are they?

Extremely. All parts of the plant, if ingested, can cause issues.

-So you wear gloves.

-You wear gloves.

As long as you treat it with respect, then it will reward you

with their beautiful flowers and incredible perfume.

I'm going to bear this very strongly in mind.

-Excellent choice.

-Thank you.

As the gates open, people make a beeline to the show gardens

and Carol is right there with them because she is a woman on a mission.

So, welcome to Villaggio Verde, the garden of romance.

It really is the most breathtaking garden

but it's not just that it takes your breath away,

it fills your nostrils with all these gorgeous scents and perfumes.

It's just like being in the Mediterranean.

And over here, there are great banks of rosemary,

a typical Mediterranean shrub.

It's the foliage here which is centred.

It's really pungent when the sun is beating down from above.

On the back of each of these leaves

are tiny glands which contain essential oils.

They have sort of exuded into the air

and make this great cloud around the shrub.

And that actually keeps the air cooler and protects the shrub.

But not all plants do it in the same way.

This gorgeous rose, Alba Garcia,

has the most enchanting perfume.

It's rich and gorgeous.

The perfume is produced on their petals

and it moves out in great plumes into the surrounding air.

Pollinating insects can sense it, smell it,

so they move in,

pulled into focus by this perfume,

find its source and actually take the pollen

and pollinate the flower.

It's a superb sort of relationship and a very successful one.

Unusually, this is a tulip with scent.

It called Brown Sugar and it flings back its petals in full sun

when its toffee perfume is at its strongest.

But it isn't just a question of how plants emit their scent,

it's very much a matter of when that happens.

If you are a daytime flowerer, say a rose,

then you want to bring in all those daytime pollinators -

bees and hoverflies.

But what if you've evolved to be pollinated by moths?

In the case of this glorious Gladiolus tristis from South Africa,

that's exactly what has happened.

The two have evolved side by side and if I lean over now

and sniff these gorgeous flowers, I can't smell a thing.

But if I am still standing here as dusk descends,

then this plant is going to emit these clouds of perfume

and of course, all the moths will gather.

And if you want to grow this delightful plant yourself,

it needs the shelter of a sunny wall.

If you haven't got one, grow it in a pot

and as it starts to burst into bloom, bring it outside on

a hot summer's evening and you too can enjoy that delicious perfume.

-Hello, Adam.

-How are you?

-I'm very well. Very nice to see you here.

I gather this is your first visit to Malvern.

It is, yeah, I'm normally in West London at Chelsea

building my own garden. It's lovely.

And what do you feel about it as a show?

You are a very experienced show hand now - what are you looking for

when you are going round a garden?

First of all, it's that sense of theatre,

so it's that feeling as if you want to be drawn into the place,

but then the detail.

You know, I think ideas for small spaces,

ideas that people can take home.

I mean, look at the Italian garden - I walked in that

and had that sense of theatre. I got goose bumps, you know,

so it was absolutely amazing.

But also, there's loads of ideas for small spaces.

You look at this garden - this garden, in a sense, has got it all.

We play with levels - great for small spaces -

and the boundaries. People don't think about their boundaries.

They just think "I'll fence and I'll paint it,"

but actually, if you think about it,

there's as much surface around the garden as there is in the garden.

What we have here, which I like, is the levels.

You naturally sit here and the garden is happening at eye level.

Exactly. All of a sudden, if the wildlife come in,

you get to view the wildlife in a different way.

-But also, the built-in seating.

-Yeah.

It's a great way of sort of... All right, it's a retaining wall,

but if we had a table and chairs sat in the middle of here,

we wouldn't get the amount of seating that we've got.

Well, I'm going off now to look for some scented plants,

-so hopefully they will be ready and I'll find some.

-Good luck.

You are going to go and keep on looking at gardens.

Yeah, all those ideas for small spaces.

-All right, I'll see you later.

-See you later.

What I really love about show gardens...

You know I really could be sat just in someone's garden,

not in a showground.

On top of that, the amount of wonderful ideas

you can take home for small spaces.

I mean, this garden here, it could be a front garden,

it could be a lovely path going up to a front door.

You feel like we need acres for a meadow,

but this garden proves different -

a lovely little meadow wraps round the edge

of this near-perfect rock pool.

Then on top of that, when you look back,

I've got this beautiful little water feature, drops into my pool,

and it will pull in masses of wildlife.

So this really proves to me that you do not need a big garden

to have a beautiful space.

This is another cracking idea.

You might look at it and just think, "Simple wall with a seat on top."

But, actually, if you had just put a bench in here,

you would have hidden all this wall.

And what I think's so clever,

by actually building the bench in, you're leaving the wall exposed,

and more or less created a whole alpine garden

in a really small space.

One of the questions I get asked a lot

is about plants for small spaces.

I think we look at our books and we look at large shrubs,

we look at a medium shrubs,

and we automatically sort of think we can't grow those.

But do you know what?

You can prune and manipulate an awful lot of our plants.

You know, look at this wisteria. It's a prime example.

It's been beautifully pruned.

You would not think that you could grow a wisteria,

necessarily, in a small space, but look at it.

It would make a great focal point for any small space.

It looks beautiful.

It doesn't matter what kind of show garden you're making.

You have to put incredible attention to detail.

But the smaller the garden, the more you have to distil that down.

So literally every square inch becomes significant.

And last year, Emily Sharpe won the People's Choice Award

for best small garden, and also a Silver Gilt medal.

And this year, she's back here again,

and a few weeks ago, Joe went to see how she's getting on.

Broughton Castle -

a fortified manor house dating back to the 1300s,

set in the Oxfordshire countryside...

..and where Emily has found inspiration

for her show garden this year.

So, I was asked by a charity called UCARE

to design a garden based on Broughton Castle.

Broughton Castle is home to

Lord and Lady Saye and Sele, who are patrons of the charity,

and so there was a link there

between Broughton Castle and the charity.

I wanted to include the architecture of the building,

the gardens and the landscape,

so you create a picture of what Broughton feels like.

It's got its own air and character,

a very particular sense of place which makes it feel very special,

and I wanted to reflect that in the garden.

You're trying to capture all this

and put it in a relatively small show garden at Malvern.

-That's the plan, yes.

-Sounds like a big job.

The first thing Emily wants to show me about her design inspiration

isn't anything in the gardens, but something inside the house.

So, Joe, this is the oak-panelled drawing room.

And when I first visited Broughton Castle,

this was the room that I loved the most, really.

I've taken most of the inspiration for the layout from the garden,

and, in particular, the actual pattern in the oak panelling.

So I've arranged the borders

based on the shape of the panelling that we've got.

Do you often get inspiration from the inside of a house?

Not necessarily, but Broughton Castle is so special

and I was so inspired by the building itself

that when I came to this room,

and just with the light that's falling on it at this time of day,

it just looked so beautiful, and immediately gave me an idea

of how I could use the shapes within the garden.

Really beautiful.

The roof is the perfect place

to see where other key elements used in Emily's design came from.

We've seen the inspiration from the inside.

What in your garden relates to what we see here?

So, I've taken inspiration from the box hedging in the Ladies Garden

to define the oak panelling

that we saw downstairs in the drawing room.

And I've also taken inspiration from the mature trees

in both the gardens and in the parkland.

I've chosen some large, mature Cornus controversa,

and those are the three trees within the garden,

which will not only sort of give maturity

so it feels like the show garden is older, perhaps, than it is,

but will also enclose the space

and make it feel like a private space for people to enjoy.

The trees all work really nicely.

They'll give that lovely dappled shape beneath,

like a tonal contrast.

But also, you've used a show garden trick

of bringing them to the foreground

so the visitors will look through the trees and see the trunk

and it sort of creates that lovely depth of field.

I think it also balances out the structure

of the upper space within the garden as well, by doing that,

rather than having too much empty space in a sort of higher level.

It was important to include water in the garden for me.

The moat is such a key part of the gardens here at Broughton

that I wanted to bring that into the garden.

And I've chosen to keep it in a sort of quite linear shape,

as the moat actually is here.

-Well, you can't have a castle without a moat.

-No!

The gardens at Broughton Castle

are designed to be at their best in summertime,

and not much is in flower just yet,

so I want to see what Emily is using for her show garden

in only a couple of weeks' time.

The starting point

has been the beautiful pink tulip, Tulipa Caresse.

And then I've picked

a colour palette that goes with the tulip

so that we've got a nice, bright,

uplifting set of colours in the garden

that represents the aims and ideas of the charity.

The timing of plants for show gardens

is the trickiest thing, isn't it?

Especially this year.

It's been so cold. The nights have been so cold.

Have you had a real problem getting hold of what you want?

It's been very difficult.

I planned a palette of colours based on what I knew was flowering

this time last year at the Malvern show.

But this year, everything is so much behind.

It's been a very cold spring, despite the warm winter.

Plants aren't as far along as I would like.

I'm going to have to compromise

on what I originally wanted to put in the garden.

What have we got exactly?

The geranium was something that I wanted to have in the garden from the beginning.

That's something that's been there through the choice of my colour palette.

And I really like Samobor because of the markings on the leaves.

And, again, it's giving me that texture and colour

within the foliage.

And this orlaya.

It's really good for me to be able

to fill in with something that's got that nice, light, frothy foliage.

Originally, I didn't want to put so much white into the garden.

Again, I'm having to be flexible

because of the growing conditions this year.

And at the end, you just say,

"Well, that's exactly how I wanted it in the first place,"

and everybody's happy.

They won't now be, because I'm on film

saying that it was going to be different!

So, last year, you got a Silver Gilt

and a People's Choice Award as well, didn't you?

-I did, yes.

-So, this year...

-It's a privilege to design a show garden, so...

-Oh, come on!

I've heard that one before. How do you think you're going to do?

It would be nice not to go backwards on last year's results,

so to get a Silver Gilt would be fantastic,

and I know that the charity would be happy with that.

That's very diplomatic, that is. That is very diplomatic.

-How did you get on?

-We were awarded a Silver Gilt.

-Happy?

-Yes, very happy.

With everything that we have put into it,

and all the weather problems,

to achieve a Silver Gilt is really good.

Joe was trying to pull out of you whether you wanted that Gold.

It would have been wonderful to have a Gold,

but I've learnt so much doing this.

It's my first time doing a large show garden

so, given that, I'm really, really chuffed.

Cool. Feedback from the judges?

Generally quite positive on the layout,

and points to work on were the planting.

So I need to just work a little bit harder

on bringing the plants together and making it more cohesive.

Are you going to do it again?

Not immediately, no. It's been such fun.

I've done show gardens for two years in a row.

I've promised my husband

that I will keep away from them for a good few years,

so we'll see what happens.

But I'm not planning on jumping straight back in in the next...

I've promised my wife and my family that I wouldn't go back to Chelsea,

and there's a little bit of me thinking,

-"Am I sure I said the right thing?"

-Yeah.

I think it will draw you back in, ultimately, but take that break,

make the husband happy, and come back later.

-And then bring him back in a few years' time.

-Exactly.

When you're surrounded by such horticultural excellence,

it must be truly daunting

to bring your plants here and put them on public display.

For the very first time,

Stella Exley from Hare Spring Cottage Plants has done just that.

She's brought her plants all the way from Sheffield

at the foot of the Pennines.

I first saw camassia

in a garden in South Devon

probably about 17 years ago now,

and we actually went to view the property to buy it,

but I was more interested in what I saw at the edge of this woodland.

There were these bright blue, star-like flowers

that just captivated me.

It just touched me and since then I've been hooked.

And I suppose, looking back now, that's when my passion,

some say obsession with camassia really started.

What I really, really love about camassia is not just that

stunning deep blue colour but I love the foliage.

When the foliage first starts to appear in spring,

the sap's not only rising in them but it rises in me too.

I get so excited every year.

It's just a visual feast for the eyes.

They're absolutely incredible and they just take my breath away.

Camassia are very easy to grow.

They're happy in virtually any environment -

so from deep shade to full sun.

You can grow them pretty much anywhere.

Nothing touches them. Slugs and snails don't eat them.

They're incredibly easy to propagate.

So even if you're a beginner you could easily learn to bulk up

your own collection of camassia, so plants for free.

The weather doesn't bother them.

So whether it's snow, whether it's a hailstorm,

they're virtually bombproof.

Camassia could possibly be the perfect plant.

I've realised it's not just about me and my love of them,

I want to share that with a much wider audience.

My first opportunity to do that was

when I met Chris Beardshaw last year and he asked me to grow 4,000

individual pots of camassia for his garden at RHS Chelsea.

It was an enormous undertaking.

After seven months of virtually not sleeping, rotating these

beauties around, trying to get the best out of them, I did it.

Huge lorry appeared,

got them loaded up and off they went.

And Chris Beardshaw won a gold medal

and my camassia were one of the main feature plants in that garden.

I was so proud and delighted to see them on such a worldwide stage.

Achieving that last year, I decided I wanted to challenge myself

even further, and I thought, "I'm going to go solo.

"And I'm going to fly solo and I'm going to apply to RHS Malvern

"Spring Flower Show because that is perfect camassia flowering time."

This time next week is judging for my exhibit.

As you can see,

some of them are just starting to show a little bit of flower.

So what I need to be doing now is my twice a day,

up and down the rows of camassia, checking those plump buds,

checking which ones are going to make it for me.

Nudging them in or out of either the greenhouse,

in and out of the woodland area.

Any bits of weeds I find, pull them out.

And then I'm checking the flower spike, there it is.

I want lots to choose from so I've got a good variety

and they all look perfect and sparkling for Malvern.

-Stella, you've done it. How did you get on?

-I got a silver medal, Carol.

-I'm absolutely thrilled, delighted.

-Over the moon.

I really am over the moon.

It's a lovely feeling but how did your camassias perform?

The camassia performed, perhaps not quite as well as I wanted

for judging but throughout the week they are going to look stunning.

So the people who come at the weekend will get the full

-benefit of these beautiful flowers. Well done.

-I'm thrilled.

-Utterly gorgeous.

-Thank you. They are.

It's always lovely to come to a show, relax,

enjoy a garden without having to do any work.

But the work isn't going to go away.

So here are your jobs for the weekend.

Herbaceous perennials are growing very fast at the moment.

And sooner or later they will need support.

But it's important to put this into place before it's necessary.

It doesn't matter what you use, I'm using metal hoops but string

and twine will do the job, as will brushwood.

And whatever it is, put it in so that it doesn't hold

the plant in a straitjacket but is gently propping it up.

If you've kept tender plants like pelargoniums under

cover in a greenhouse or a conservatory over winter

they will need some acclimatisation before they go to their final

position outside.

And this hardening-off process should last for at least a week.

Put them somewhere sunny and out of the wind and group them

together, which provides more protection.

And just in case we still have a frost, have some fleece handy

to protect them overnight.

If slugs weren't problem enough, pigeons can be real nuisance at this

time of year, especially with young brassica plants like these cabbages.

The best way to deter them

is to provide a barrier in the shape of netting.

Put up a framework that is tall enough

so they can't reach down through it and stretch netting across it,

pegging or weighing it down firmly.

Here you are.

I don't know about you, I'm hot but happy.

Yes, and where better to sit than under an olive tree.

We've all been shopping, what have you bought?

It's a camassia and it's called Blue Heaven

and I just fell for these very pale blue flowers.

I just love the way that they mix with the green of the buds

-and give this turquoise-y effect.

-It is heavenly. And what have you got?

I've got an acer, Acer ariadne,

inspired from a visit to Julian Dowle's garden.

It's east meets west, I loved it.

Acers I've always wanted to have in the garden

but wind has always been the problem.

You've had a problem with wind?

I've had a terrible problem with wind with acers, only with acers.

-They do need shelter.

-They do.

In nature, they are a semi sort of woodland tree

so they like that dappled shade, quite sheltered,

leaf mould round the bottom so this will go in a pot

but it will be put in a cool place and hopefully she'll be happy.

I'm really intrigued, you've had a day...

For your first day at Malvern, what do you think?

I've had a fantastic day, honestly. It's been amazing.

I've been able to walk round the show,

I've been able to buy something.

And this is quite a special show, isn't it?

It's my first visit but the atmosphere here is really,

really lovely.

Carol, you've been here lots of times,

lots and lots of times showing and seeing and telling us about it

and all that sort of thing.

-27 years.

-Has it still got its allure?

-Yeah.

-I came as a young girl, of course.

-Yes.

LAUGHTER

Yes, it really has got its allure.

There's nowhere like it really, at all.

And this sort of weather is just perfection.

-Especially in a garden like this, eh?

-It makes sense, doesn't it?

It all comes together, nice sort of southern garden, heat baking down.

And it looks as though the weather is going to stay good

so if you want to come along, do.

There's lots of room to park,

lots of room to walk about and the show is open until Sunday night

and if you go to our website, you'll get all the details.

That's it from us from Malvern.

But I'll be back at Longmeadow at the normal time next week

so have a great weekend and I'll see you next Friday.

Bye-bye.