Norfolk Glorious Gardens from Above

Britain has some of the finest gardens anywhere in the world.

For me, it's about getting in amongst the wonderful plants

that flourish in this country

and sharing the passion of the people who tend them.

However, there is another way to enjoy a garden.

And that's to get up above it.

I love ballooning,

because you get to see the world below in a whole new light.

From up here, you get a real sense of how the garden sits

in the landscape, how the terrain and the climate has shaped it.

And I want you to share that experience with me.

I'm above Norfolk today, and Noel Coward said, "It was flat."

And he was right, as flat as a flipping pancake.

But there's more to this county than that.

Norfolk. It rolls on for miles.

One of the ancient counties of East Anglia,

with a rich Anglo-Saxon history.

A tapestry of fields and spires, old and new.

A man-made landscape, where you can attempt to grow anything.

I don't want either of you two to throw a wobbly.

-There's a reason.

-I hope there is, cos I've got two strange men

digging a hole in my garden.

A fertile county, where everyone can have a go...

If anybody gets an opportunity to form a community garden,

they should grab it with both hands because I think it'll

probably restore their sort of faith in human nature.

..and where imagination and innovation have forged

fashions in British gardening that are here to last.

Alan Bloom took conventional horticulture

and blew it apart with the creation of island beds.

Norfolk is all about our ability to mould the landscape to fit our ends.

And it's all laid out like a picnic blanket below me.

Vast horizons, massive skyscapes and despite the fact there's all

that water down there, this is one of the driest and sunniest counties

in the country, and that makes for some very exciting gardens.

Invaded, defended and invaded again. This is Norfolk.

The land of Boadicea, where Vikings

and Danes fought for the right to rule the Anglo-Saxons,

where King Canute held back the waves

and where the RAF held off the Luftwaffe.

And it's home to one of my favourite gardens,

East Ruston - an oasis of colour in an agricultural landscape.

The brains behind this exciting and invigorating garden is Alan Gray.

And from above, you can just see how maverick this character is.

He's created garden rooms, vast landscapes brought into the garden.

It exudes passion and I just can't wait to get down there.

On the north-east coast of Norfolk,

you'll find these wonderful gardens, just over a mile inland.

Alan Gray and his partner, Graham, have owned East Ruston

since 1973 and, over the years, the gardens have grown

and grown under Alan's guiding hand.

From two and a half acres, 40 years ago,

it's grown to 32 glorious acres.

This is garden-globetrotting without leaving Norfolk.

East Ruston Vicarage Garden, for me, is like being in the biggest

horticultural sweet shop that could exist.

Kaleidoscopic colour in every single garden room.

Colour, passion, exuberance, and that's what excites me.

While I'm here, I should really give my mate, Alan, a hand.

-Hi, Alan, how are you?

-Hello, Christine, how are you doing?

I'm fine. What are you up to here, then?

I want to make a gap through here

because I want to put a pathway through here.

So I've got three plants I want to take out.

-Do you think you could give us a hand?

-I'll give you a hand.

-Good.

-Yeah. Yeah, I mean this is just typical of you, isn't it?

-What?

You grow it, you chop it down, you change it.

Well, it's refinement, isn't it?

So I'm going to take a gap through here now this hedge is established.

-LAUGHING:

-Taking a dirty great hole out of the hedge is refinement.

-No, it's progress.

-Come on.

-It's progress. Come on, give us a hand.

-Come on, let's get chopping.

-Let's get stuck in.

I've known Alan for nearly 20 years.

I've watched him and this garden evolve.

Together they've grown into a garden and gardener.

So how did you get into gardening, Alan?

Well, you know, I had two very indulgent sets of grandparents

and I was the youngest of all their grandchildren and so,

aged seven, I had three gardens - one at each grandparents' house and

one at my parents' house. And it's been with me ever since, really.

Alan went to London to seek his fortune,

but knew his roots were in Norfolk and so he and Graham bought

East Ruston, coming back at weekends to start this gigantic project.

How experienced were you, at that stage, in gardening?

Reasonably experienced, I think. I've had no professional training, though.

-Well that doesn't matter, does it, really?

-Well, I don't know.

I think if you garden from your heart and that's what

East Ruston is really about, you will create things just naturally.

-Yes.

-Qualifications don't make you a better gardener.

The way you learn to garden is by gardening.

Yes. Do you think I passed the test?

Yeah, I think you could do with a little lesson on using a saw.

I knew you'd say that.

But, you know, apart from that, I think you're fine, mate.

You know, somebody might think this is a bit brutal, mightn't they?

But you've got to move a garden on all the time, haven't you?

Well you have got to, actually.

-Have you got it?

-Yeah.

-Well done. Brilliant.

Now you can see the formation of the gap

and you can actually see where we're going through.

Yeah, and just go straight through.

So what makes East Ruston so special to you?

Well I was born in south Norfolk and Graham's parents

and grandparents are buried in the local church because

they actually came from Happisburgh, so that's the family connection.

-Yeah.

-So really, that's why it is special.

East Ruston has been a labour of love,

fuelled by a maverick attitude to gardening.

The soil in the vicarage garden is excellent,

a sandy loam that will grow almost anything.

And Alan's done just that with no training, but a huge imagination.

What often impresses me here at East Ruston, is Alan's desire

and ability to plant a tropical garden next door to a desert garden.

This is no traditional English vicarage garden.

It's a worldwide tour of garden design, in one very large patch.

A truly spectacular combination of design, planting and sheer bravado.

There's the Dutch garden, packed full of fuchsias

and brugmansias, which have matured into trees.

There's the Diamond Jubilee Garden, a recent addition,

diamond in shape and just as high carat.

Alan's designed a Mediterranean garden,

which you might think shouldn't grow here.

It's possible because of Norfolk's maritime climate

and Alan's determination.

But the wind cuts like a knife across this flat county.

Understanding the need for high hedges as windbreaks

early on in his gardening career means that today Alan employs

one man who takes 11 months a year to clip the hedge shelter belts.

-The biggest highlight was gaining that sense of enclosure.

-Right.

Which is what we lacked.

And then that allows you to relate to scale and form

-and all the rest of it.

-Yes.

But as well as you've got the outer shelter belts,

you need inner shelter belts as well

because otherwise the wind comes up and down.

-Forms an eddy and rips everything up.

-Yes, absolutely.

So you need to hit something else to keep the series of waves going.

And so lots of those inner shelter belts have now gone

because they did their job to let this hedge grow that we're now...

-Now taking out.

-..we're now mutilating.

-Yeah, yeah.

But they allowed this hedge to grow,

and this hedge is now doing the job that the shelter belts did.

So that the garden evolves and you've got to keep

maintaining it and regenerating it and constantly moving it on.

Nothing is set in aspic in horticulture, is it?

-Yes, quite.

-It's completely evolving, the whole time.

Time has certainly not stood still since Alan took on East Ruston.

Before he arrived, the land was an average vicarage garden.

But under his guardianship, it's expanded hugely.

Come into the greenhouse, Christine,

-there's something I think you'll be interested to see.

-All right.

-Here we have an aerial photograph.

-Oh, look at this.

Now that was taken some time ago, you see,

because that is the original parcel of land that came with the vicarage.

-At the end of this little dogleg here, I had a vegetable garden.

-OK.

And I'd go out to cut the salad or pick some beans, to find

that they'd gone ugh.

The problem was, the sprays in those days were much more toxic than

they were today, so you couldn't eat anything

and then we sort of spoke to the farmer about it.

What could we do, and he suggested that we have some extra land

and I said, "Well, could we have nine acres this side?"

-He said, "Only if you have the seven acres the other side as well."

-OK.

-"And put a barrier." So that's what we did.

-Right.

Now you see, I find this quite fascinating cos

I remember it feeling - on the extremities of the garden, you'd

planted up at that stage - very much like an aerodrome,

you know, that flatness, that isolation, that vast skyscape.

-Yes.

-Now I can see why.

A century ago, the fields averaged 15 acres each.

They were individual smallholdings but,

as the area became Britain's bread basket, growing wheat

and barley, and more recently oil seed rape, the fields were combined.

Bigger fields means more effective farming.

St Mary's, the 14th-century church next door to Alan's vicarage,

has stood sentinel throughout the changes to this landscape.

Once the heart of a thriving community,

the church is the last remnant of the village that surrounded it.

There are some things that progress just can't budge.

But while St Mary's stands bare in its solitude,

next door, Alan's flamboyant gardening technique

creates a landscape chock-full of plants.

Do you know what's really striking me from this aerial perspective,

is just how many flipping plants you're going to need.

-I mean...

-Well yeah, you're absolutely right, do you know.

-Millions.

-Yeah, but do you know, I think what you learn very quickly,

and you know this as a plantswoman, you learn how to propagate

plants yourself, because if you don't, you go bankrupt.

Well, propagation is interesting, isn't it? Because, you know,

so many people will go and buy plants, but one of the great

pleasures of gardening is chopping and reproducing things. And the

only way you would survive, on this scale, is by doing that, isn't it?

Absolutely, yeah, absolutely.

Alan's garden wouldn't be so well stocked

if he didn't grow his plants himself.

And one plant that he grows in profusion here is dahlias.

Plant their tubers in the garden after the last spring

frost for a late summer display of vibrant flowers.

There aren't enough colours in the rainbow to compete with

the hues from dahlias.

Their showy flowers come in so many varieties,

some specially cultivated to produce spectacular show-offs like this.

With so many flower heads, it's always a temptation to cut them

and bring them indoors to share.

Owning a fabulous and famous garden like this is a joy and a burden.

They have no children, so I wonder what Alan and Graham will do

with their creation when they're pushing up daisies.

How are you going to move it on, you know, what of the future?

I would like, in my heart of hearts, for it to be used educationally,

if possible, because I think that's lovely.

But also by the visiting public as well,

because I think that's important, because it's a garden full of ideas

and I think that people should be able to take ideas home with them.

I would like it to be a garden that's carried on creating.

I mean, I'm going to leave it how I like it.

The next person will change that.

My last request is that I have a mausoleum in the middle

of the garden, so I can keep my eyes on every person that works here.

Are you going to put the wind up them from the grave?

Well hopefully not, but you never know.

THEY LAUGH

32 acres of gardens, as imaginatively

and densely planted as East Ruston, requires a team to maintain it.

Apart from three full-time gardeners employed on site,

in recent years, Alan has taken on a single volunteer.

Kathryn Skoyles is East Ruston's gardening groupie.

The minute I walked into the garden, I was absolutely bowled over.

I couldn't believe it, it was so amazing to see this enormous,

beautiful planted garden, right in the middle of the agricultural

plains of the north Norfolk coast.

So I started visiting and before long, I found I was visiting

once, sometimes twice a week, and it just kept carrying on.

Kathryn was a lawyer in London

when a friend introduced her to the gardens at East Ruston.

From then on, visits became habit-forming,

until there was only one option left to Kathryn.

I became a volunteer because I missed it in the winters,

when it isn't open to the public. And eventually I thought, "Well,

"I wonder if Alan ever has any volunteers." And I asked him,

and he wasn't terribly keen.

So I'm afraid I pestered him to death.

Eventually he gave in and said, "Well, OK." And we tried it for

a couple of months and the couple of months came and went and actually

I was still happy going and we never really talked about it after that.

I just turn up every week.

That was in 2013, and now Kathryn is a year-round garden fixture.

I get to go there in the winter.

I get to stay in the garden when it's not open.

I see it in the evenings.

I love going there, it's a refuge, it's a

place of peace and quiet, but it's also a place to learn.

I'm very much an amateur gardener myself

and I'm getting a brilliant teaching course in how to do things

properly and I've learned so much, not just from Alan,

but from all the other gardeners in the garden. And I've taken

ideas from there and brought them back home to my own small garden.

Things like planting up pots very, very densely, with tulips

and other spring bulbs.

It's the kinds of combinations in the summer,

that Alan puts in the pots.

The architecture as well as the immediate planting of a garden.

I've watched Alan's ambition for his garden grow,

so I'm keen to meet the person who's won his trust as a volunteer.

Do you get the opportunity to contribute to the garden,

-do you think?

-Well I hope so.

I think you'd have to ask my colleagues that.

I like to think so.

I come here once a week and I weed

and I think I now can recognise a weed from a plant.

I'm occasionally allowed to wield the secateurs,

which I think is quite an accolade.

Absolutely.

I hope I'm good with the visitors, too, because I love this place.

I think it's one of the most magical spots in Norfolk and I'd

like a person who visits here to go away with that sense as well.

Do you have a favourite bit of this garden?

Well, I have a number of favourite places.

At this time of year, I think it's where we're sitting -

the exotic garden.

The planning makes you believe you could be in the middle

of the Mediterranean.

I love the colour here and the vibrancy.

In the winter, probably the pelargonium house.

It's warm and yet you've got all these beautiful,

exotic plants that simply wouldn't survive outside.

It's a series of experiences. And sometimes when I show visitors

round, you can see in their face, they've suddenly thought, "Wow, this

"is magical, this is extraordinary, where did this come from?"

And that's what I love to see.

And this garden's all of that, isn't it?

It's vistas, it's rooms, it's landscape, it's good planting.

I mean it is just magic.

Kathryn's devotion to East Ruston is the kind of dedication that

remarkable gardens produce in people.

Alan has taken on the elements here, holding back the wind to

create a man-made oasis of colour amidst the sprawling fields.

It's what Norfolk folk have been doing for centuries.

The Norfolk broads covers an area of 120 square miles.

Creating a lattice across this flat landscape are 110 miles

of accessible waterways.

That's seven rivers and 63 broads,

the man-made waterways for which Norfolk is famous.

During the Roman occupation, Norfolk was largely under sea water.

But during the following thousand years, the area dried out

so that by the time of the Norman Conquest,

the land was thriving under the plough.

Lurking beneath the tilled surface was a rich seam of peat.

These channels are the remnants of peat digging by medieval Broadsmen.

One custodian of the heritage of the Norfolk broads is

Broads Authority Education Officer Nick Sanderson.

The area was excavated essentially for peat,

for fuel. And most of the trees, by the medieval period,

had been felled and new sources of fuel were needed.

East Anglia was a very populated part of the country.

Norwich was second only to London in terms of importance and so there

was a staggering need for fuel to burn, for cooking and for heating.

The plants that could grow here would become the perfect

source of sustainable fuel for the locals.

Peat is partly decomposed plant matter.

Over centuries, all this kind of fen vegetation has built up

and sinks down into the mud.

And because it's waterlogged,

it doesn't particularly rot down.

Peat forms at about one millimetre every year, and so peat that's

dug from depths could be hundreds, if not thousands, of years old.

But the incredible thing is

that you've got all these intact bits of plants that come out of it.

We can see fragments of reed and rush.

It's not difficult to see why, when this is dried out,

it makes excellent fuel.

The technique for extracting peat blocks hasn't changed much

over the centuries.

The digging tools haven't altered either.

Men and women used to cut a straight line, called a face.

This area of cut turf was called a turbary.

The right of turbary -

the right of ordinary people to cut turfs on common land -

is one of six ancient common legal rights, like sheep grazing.

It's these worked-out turbaries that form the shallow

waterways of the Norfolk broads.

But peat digging was a short-lived free

source of fuel for our medieval Norfolk ancestors.

The more they cut,

the more vulnerable the land became to freak weather and floods.

We know that the broads started to flood.

There was a great storm in 1286 that probably started

the decline of the industry off, flooded most of the area with

sea water and then it would have taken a lot of effort to

actually pump the broads to allow for meaningful peat extraction.

By the middle of the 14th century,

the peat industry had virtually ceased.

The Black Death, which decimated the workforce,

was the final nail in the coffin.

Over the centuries,

nature has encroached on what's left of this man-made landscape.

Today, extraction of peat for commercial use is limited.

The beautiful landscape that's evolved from the peat

industry is now a destination for holiday-makers

and a home to thriving and diverse wildlife.

But the notion of common land has not been forgotten.

It's still every Norfolk man, woman and child's right.

When there's a patch of unused common land going free, well,

you'd be daft not to put it to good use!

Hello, troops. All right?

On Norfolk's north coast is the small town of Sheringham,

where a local school's horticulture project has turned

a scrap of scrubland into an abundant vegetable and fruit garden.

ALL: Welcome to The Patch.

Matthew Smith is the director of The Patch.

We live in the heart of north Norfolk.

Farming and agriculture is a large part of what's

done in the industry and the community.

So it's about being able to give those skills to our young

children and adults here.

The project employs a full-time gardener and facilitator.

John Comerford lends a guiding hand whenever it's needed.

When I grew up in Sheringham,

sort of in the 1960s, most people had fair-sized gardens

and an awful lot of people used to grow their own produce.

People's gardens are smaller now,

the new builds have next to no gardens.

There's certainly very little room to grow vegetables and stuff.

So this gives a lot of children an introduction to gardening,

which might turn into a hobby, might turn into a career, if we're lucky.

Norfolk is a rural county, that is our main industry,

whether it's sheep farming or whether it's arable land.

This is how the county's made its money and I think that's

important that they stay in touch with their rural roots, if you like.

Norfolk's wealth has come from its use of the land.

And a patch like this couldn't go to waste.

Previously, it was doing absolutely nothing, this bit of land.

I think it's a lot better if it's given to productive use.

The Patch sits between three schools,

which decided back in 2008, that they could turn the area

of common land that separated them into a joint horticultural project.

The first landscaping had happened by 2009 and, since then, The Patch

has become a place for fresh air, fun and a lot of learning,

supported by adult volunteers and professional teachers.

Carol Lennox is the horticultural instructor for Sheringham schools

who runs a GCSE course for the older pupils.

The children come out here and,

not only do they gain from doing the qualification in horticulture,

but they also gain from working together in teams.

So they learn to work with other people and gain new skills

but the amazing thing for me

is that they gain confidence from what they're doing.

When I leave school I would like to be a farmer.

Well I'd like to get a qualification and study agriculture,

and so this is going to be a big help.

But understanding the realities of gardening is a hurdle Carol

has to overcome with each new class that joins her outside.

They don't want to wear the boots,

they don't want to get their hands dirty. But once you actually

start getting them into it and they can see what they're doing,

they can see that they're growing, they're part of a team,

they come out, get stuck in and it's all part of being outside

and learning about working together, supporting each other.

And being a part of the community.

I think we're quite lucky really, cos we don't...

not many schools get to have the opportunity to do this.

I like the fact that everyone can work as a team

and that we get to be together and not just do a lesson-based activity.

The Patch has been so successful that they now supply fresh food

to the school canteens.

From the Patch to the kitchen is a total of zero food miles.

-He likes you.

-Yeah, he does like me, yeah.

But he likes cabbages even better, that's the trouble.

For primary schoolchildren,

The Patch is an introduction to all things to do with the garden

There is something for everybody to do here,

that's the main point, I think. Anybody can get involved.

It might get them sort of doing things for the first time,

like using a wheelbarrow or something like that.

Across the spectrum, the kids are interested in growing things,

basically, but also in the flowers and the colours,

so there's a whole range of things for them to do up here.

I like it because it's very colourful, with lots of insects.

Projects like this make my heart leap.

If you can catch them young, they'll have earthy hands

and a belly full of fresh food for life.

Corporations, small local businesses, individuals,

lots and lots of people have helped us here.

I think if anybody gets an opportunity to form a community

garden, they should grab it with both hands because I think they'll

get an awful lot of satisfaction and it'll probably restore their sort of

faith in human nature, to be honest, to see how generous people can be.

It's very, well, heart-warming, for want of a better word.

In the south of the county lies Bressingham Gardens,

the life's work of a famous plantsman.

Like East Ruston, this garden was created through one man's passion.

Alan Bloom took conventional horticulture

as we knew it historically and blew it apart with the creation

of island beds. That took British horticulture on another journey.

Nurseryman and steam enthusiast, Alan spent 50 years

of his long life living and working at Bressingham Hall.

He built a nursery that today covers 220 acres of former

agricultural land.

When he was 16, Alan's father gave him a 15 acre plot of his own.

His father had grown plants for the cut-flower market,

but it was a struggle to make the business work,

so Alan decided to grow herbaceous plants for sale.

By 1930, Alan's nursery business had become one of England's

largest growers and suppliers of plants.

And the rest is horticultural history, because Alan's passion for

herbaceous plants gave birth to a revolution in English garden design.

Alan invented the island bed and turned the six acres in front of

Bressingham Hall into an archipelago of richly planted herbaceous beds.

Today, his son Adrian Bloom is chairman of the family business,

with a passion of his own.

-Hello, Adrian, how are you?

-Oh, hi, Christine. Fine, thanks.

How did your dad go about creating this garden?

Originally, of course, my father was a nurseryman and one of the largest

growers of perennials, till the early '50s, but he collected a lot

of different plants and he wanted to show them off because he had

some new ideas and that was using perennials in a very different way.

Up until that time, perennials had been grown, you know,

in mostly formal borders, one side of the hedge.

So his idea was to use the island beds, taller plants in the middle,

shorter ones round the outside and they help support the others.

He's really one of the heroes, so to speak, of the perennial world.

I'll say.

I wanted to do something similar to what my father had done with

perennials, but I wanted my own sort of field, if you like, of plants.

Things that he didn't know much about.

So I started with dwarf conifers and heathers and then of course,

he'd done a perennial garden, so I wanted to do a garden with

conifers and heathers, to learn really,

because I had no horticultural training, learn about plants.

But why conifers?

I saw more in them. Year round interest, year round colour.

I felt they weren't being represented largely,

particularly the so-called dwarf and slow-growing and there was a

lot more varieties out there than most people were aware of.

And so Adrian carved a niche for himself within his father's

business, which had grown into a visitor attraction,

complete with its own steam train.

Conifers are not so much in my line, but when my son Adrian

came to join me in the business, he said, "I don't just want to follow in

"your footsteps, I want to do my own thing." And I thought a bit about it.

Well, I thought, that's what I did with my father,

so fair enough, that's what he could do with me.

I suppose now we must have got nearly 50 acres of conifers,

amounting to two or three million plants.

Conifers have been with us for over 300 million years.

The world's tallest and longest-living trees are all

conifers, like the giant redwoods in America.

Conifers are softwoods,

and there are many species easily grown in modern gardens,

like the blue spruce, which we know as the Christmas tree,

originally a native of Colorado.

But there are mutations like dwarf conifers, that,

when cultivated, retain their miniature size.

But don't be fooled.

Sometimes a dwarf conifer can grow into a giant.

Well, this is Little Spire, the tree I was telling you about.

Little Spire.

Yeah, do you think it breaks the trade description?

Yeah, I mean, at least eight of me. Little Spire.

Go on, get off with you.

It's becoming a bit of a block. I think we have to have it down.

I mean, this is nearly 50 years old, this garden, and obviously, I've

had to thin out conifers. And so it's been a really good exercise in

trying to look far enough ahead to thin things out, particularly where

one conifer's spoiling another, which they often are, because

they're evergreen and therefore, if you've got three growing together,

by the time you've cut one out, the other two are not looking very good.

-That's right.

-Dead on that side.

And it's that timing, isn't it? All of the time, with conifers.

As soon as they meet, you know, that's

-when you've got to do something.

-Yeah.

We're probably going to need to get a bit of help with the chain saw,

otherwise you and I could be here until it gets dark.

I like a gardener who's not scared to tackle an unsightly plant

and give a new one a chance.

How are you going to move this bed forward?

One's looking at plants that will actually give year-round appeal,

but not get out of hand like this Little Spire did.

Little Spire. It's a great name for a big tree.

Yes, true enough.

But do you know, what I've found so enjoyable about today

is that this is one of the few gardens where

all of the principles of gardening come together in a very

gentle way, and the principles grow as the garden grows.

I've been extremely lucky to be able to sort of adapt a garden as it's

grown from a field to this stage. And obviously, it has to continue

for the future and at the same time, create these really,

hopefully, very striking combinations,

which people can learn from as well.

And you do it so well, so just keep up the excellent work.

OK, I'll do my best.

Taking agricultural land and turning it into fabulous

gardens like East Ruston and Bressingham takes true creativity.

What was once flat and featureless, has burst into vibrant,

high-definition colour.

Taking raw materials and creating art is a talent, an instinct.

And I've commissioned a piece of art that has nature at its heart.

And I'm donating it to Alan's garden at East Ruston.

Local blacksmith, sculptor and artist Toby Winterbourn

has accepted my challenge.

I've started by welding the nails together in a clump

and then I've welded it to a stem

and I'm just going to put it in the forge and forge this bit part into

smooth and then I bend the nails out to make the actual seed head.

I always liked wild flowers

and I'd see the cow parsley on the side of the road.

Part of me is taking something that is, you know, a weed,

you'd consider it something that you'd throw away,

but then making something out of it, because there are little

details in things that they've got beauty to them, in themselves.

My sculptures look quite solid and big and that,

but they're also quite delicate in a way, and I quite like that.

With metal you can do that, it can be delicate

but actually be quite strong.

After moving from London, Toby trained as a general blacksmith,

but it's creating art from molten metal that excites him.

The next step is welding the bits together.

It was really lovely to get a piece in the Old Vicarage

at East Ruston, because the gardens are beautiful anyway.

They're quite well considered around here, you know,

people really love them. And when I was asked, it made it really.

So this is the final piece and the rest of these parts are going

to go off to galvanising and they'll be away about a week.

When I get them back, I have to just clean off any sort of drips

and stuff like that, which is left from when they pull them

out of the hot tank and then it'll be ready to go off to East Ruston.

Galvanising will put the sheen on this piece,

making it glint in the sun.

And I know exactly where I'd like to display it.

People have left many marks on Norfolk over the past 1,000 years.

But the 1940s saw a desperate moment in Britain's history,

when Norfolk once again underwent a transformation.

The county's flat landscape

and proximity to Europe served a grim purpose.

During the Second World War, this area

of Britain was one of several in the east that stood

directly in the firing line of the Luftwaffe's nightly raids.

As the Phoney War came to an end,

and the fight was brought to British shores,

the RAF hurriedly established new bases around the East Anglian coast.

Built in 1939, RAF Oulton became one of a ring of bases

defending the nation.

And it's where Navigator Sydney Pike was

stationed from the summer of 1944.

We lived very near to RAF Hornchurch,

which of course was... Initially, it started off with the old bi-planes.

They were flying around in my youth,

then they converted to Spitfires, towards 1939.

We often used to see the aircraft flying about, but I don't think

we really understood the meaning of total war, not in those days.

It was some time, 1942 and there on, when the raids in London

took place, then we really began to understand what was going on.

You could hear the bombers coming in at night, to bomb London,

and the fighters were deployed,

but I don't know that we had a great deal of success at that time.

Civilians as well as aircrew suffered unsustainable losses.

More men were called up to replace the pilots, who were dying daily.

Aged 21, Sydney, keen to volunteer for the RAF,

headed off to war, finally training as a navigator on Flying Fortresses.

On finishing our training, we crewed up, as one does in the RAF,

you know, chuck them all in a room and, "Sort yourselves out, lads."

We came here, to Oulton, a very quiet part of Norfolk.

At RAF Oulton, part of Bomber Command's top secret

network of bases, Sydney became involved in counter-measures.

One was radar-jamming, to stop the Luftwaffe tracking British

and American squadrons departing Norfolk.

We had a transmitter in our bomb bay, which had been converted,

and we could jam all the VHF frequencies used by the German

fighter controllers and the anti-aircraft battery controllers.

We were flying missions all over Europe

and we could be sent anywhere.

We were going to Dresden, Magdeburg, Leipzig,

which were quite long distances. Eight-hour flights or more.

Flying over Germany, Sydney's job was to drop quantities of "window",

aluminium foil strips, which flooded German radar with false echoes.

It fooled the enemy into believing it was a bomber stream

approaching, when in fact, it might not be.

It's a long way from today's electronic counter-measures.

But the theory and the outcome were the same,

to put the enemy off the scent.

It's reckoned that about three or four aircraft throwing out window

could represent something like a bomber force of 300 aircraft.

So it was useful.

It was a deft trick that Sydney believes saved many British

lives and aircraft.

It did help considerably and it helped in shortening the war,

I'm sure of that.

For Second World War pilots heading back to base,

churches like St Mary's at East Ruston were centuries-old

beacons in the flat landscape.

Here, Alan has reinvented his own corner of Norfolk, taking

farmland and creating a paradise amongst the expanse of prairie.

He's a gardener who's grown into his garden,

so I want to honour his work with something that encapsulates

how I feel about Alan's achievements here.

Now, I don't want either of you two to throw a wobbly...

about us digging a hole.

You know, it's, um, there's a reason.

Yeah, well, I hope there is, cos I've got two strange men

digging a hole in my garden.

Well, these two young men are actually very talented.

This is Toby and this is Will.

Hello, Toby, pleased to meet you. Hello, Will.

And I thought it would be really nice to bring something

together that really celebrated East Ruston.

Alan has a spectacular garden.

He's designed a horticultural worldwide tour.

But I think my offering should be something very English,

like cow parsley.

Now then, what do you think to this?

My gosh, wow. Where did you get that idea from?

It's a umbel.

The countryside, the architecture, the vision, the passion,

it's all there.

It's all there in a seed head.

What do you think, Kathryn?

Well, I think it's absolutely stunning.

It encapsulates everything that we've been talking about.

-Thank you.

-There you go. Pleasure.

That's why we were digging a hole in your grass.

Right, can you see why?

-That is absolutely magical. I can't thank you enough.

-A pleasure.

A just stunning thing and I wonder how many visitors to the

garden will go, "Look at that up there,"

and they'll deviate from the plan and come straight to look at it.

-It's fantastic, fabulous.

-Yeah, well, I'm glad you're happy.

I'm happy.

That sculpture, to me,

encapsulates everything that East Ruston is about.

You know, the people, the garden, the magic of it all,

and there it is in a piece of very beautiful sculpture.

Christine Walkden, you have made my day.

-Cheers.

-Thank you.

Norfolk - a county where the common man has made his mark on the land.

And what achievements have been etched on this landscape.

East Ruston and Bressingham have been labours of love for men who,

in my view, have earned their places in the horticultural hall of fame.

And there's a new generation taking their corner of Norfolk

and reinventing it for their future as gardeners.

Centuries of man's relationship with the land lie beneath me,

in this quilted county.