Sussex 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 getting to ready to float high, high above a county

blessed with some of the most stunning landscapes in Britain.

Today, we're in Sussex, a county that's made up of chalky downlands,

forested wields

and some of the most heavily-populated coastal areas.

Sussex lies right to the Southeast coast,

bordered by Hampshire and Kent.

What an amazing view.

This is my chance to view wonderful Sussex

as I've never seen it before.

Sussex is officially

the sunniest county in England,

and that's why this part of Sussex

has some fantastic gardens.

Today, I'm dropping in on two magnificent gardens,

both of which have undergone a transformation.

-This was the visitors' car park.

-The car park?

It was just concrete and tarmac.

That's amazing.

And they have the power to change the lives of the people

who tend them.

When I came, I ended up meeting my now fiance, so...

-Ahh.

-He's a full-time gardener here in the gardens.

We'll be exploring this country's earliest formal garden

and finding out how the Romans

transformed British gardening forever.

And, of course, I'll be lending a hand too.

-Looks like a hairnet, mate.

-THEY LAUGH

I won't say what it reminds me of.

Go on. Go on. Up you go, lad.

-Wahey!

-Oh, that's enough.

Sussex might be sunny but,

here in the foothills of the South Downs,

the land is deluged with over 40 inches of rain a year.

Fortunately, the chalk soil allows water to drain through it quickly,

meaning plant roots never get soggy and gardens can flourish,

none more so than the first garden I'm dropping in on.

West Dean is renowned the world over

as a showcase that can inspire any gardener,

and it lies seven miles north of Chichester.

There's been an estate here since the 17th century,

but the 90 acres of garden and parkland we see today

took shape at the start of the 19th century.

North of the manor house, which is now a college,

almost half of the garden is devoted to arboretum.

It was planted in the 1830s and is filled with mature beech,

horse chestnut and cedar trees,

as well as rhododendrons and azaleas.

I won't have time to take a stroll through it today

but I know one place I'll definitely have a saunter.

Just south of the arboretum

is one of the garden's most remarkable features,

a 300-foot-long Edwardian pergola running across the lawn.

It looks spectacular from up here.

I can't wait to see it close up.

When viewed from above, West Dean Gardens really comes alive.

You can see the intense amount of care

that goes into that productive garden.

The greenhouses, the straight lines of vegetables,

the fiery borders,

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

Surprisingly, the garden hasn't always looked this wonderful.

In 1987, a great storm hit the south of England.

With ferocious power, it smashed and uprooted millions of trees.

West Dean had to be closed for a year just to recover.

I've been visiting West Dean Gardens for the last 30 years

and have seen them grow.

This garden speaks of horticultural excellence,

and it's not just in this beautiful, productive vegetable garden.

The pergola, the wild garden, the arboretum,

the execution of excellence in this garden is outstanding.

It makes me tingle every single time I come

because, to see that level, is wildly exciting

and is a standard that we should hope to attain -

beauty, excellence and magic.

But beauty, excellence and magic don't happen in gardening by chance.

23 years ago,

a couple arrived to inspire a bold restoration that transformed

these 19th-century gardens into a 21st-century masterpiece.

Garden supervisor Sarah Wain

arrived here with a, "G'day," from Australia

and a passion to make these gardens bloom again.

-Hi, Sarah.

-Hello, Christine.

-How are you?

-I'm very well, thanks.

-How nice to see you.

-And you too. Welcome to West Dean.

Well, great pleasure to be back. Now, what are you doing there?

I'm tying in these tomatoes

so that they scramble all the way up the wigwam.

Right, and is this just one plant, then?

No, it's more than one - it's three.

-It's really just an experiment.

-OK.

-Looks good, I think.

It does look good, yeah. Can I give you a hand?

-Yeah sure.

-Tying and sort of doing things.

-Got a knife?

-Yeah, I've got a knife, no string, though.

-Here's some string.

-Great.

OK, so you're just doing standard tying in and not really tight.

Yeah. Just onto the structure or the string here.

So, how did you actually get into gardening, Sarah?

Well, I suppose through my parents.

I'm Australian. We had quite a big garden, my dad did the veg,

my mum did the flowers.

How did you get into the UK?

Legally.

-THEY LAUGH

-Yeah, we know. Well, hopefully.

How did I... I came over in 1979

-and I was lucky enough to get a job at Kew Gardens.

-A job?

-Yeah.

-Great. So, had you trained in Aussie?

I had yes, yeah. I did a three-year diploma.

And how did you find Kew?

I would say Kew was like doing another three years of education...

because there are a lot of knowledgeable people there

and, funnily enough, it's also where I met my husband.

-Really?

-Yes.

'Jim, Sarah's other half, is head gardener at West Dean,

'and he's also Sarah's boss.' We were just talking about you.

It's hot work nattering, so I thought I'd bring you a cup of tea.

That's very kind of you.

Mmm.

What I want to know, since I've got you together - do you squabble?

Do we squabble?

Daily? Yes, daily.

THEY LAUGH

But we always make up by the end of the day.

What's the vision for the garden? You know, you've got this

level of excellence, people come expecting it to look superb.

How are you going to move it on? How are you going to develop that?

Our strapline at one point was,

"High-class horticulture in an historic setting."

-OK.

-Which, we kind of felt, was what we wanted to do, really.

We've taken something which was rather tired

and rather run down

and made it into... Well, I feel a bit embarrassed saying this,

but I think it is a bit of a showpiece now.

It is a showpiece and, when I think of West Dean, I think of excellence.

Well, that's a nice compliment from an old pro like yourself.

I mean that nicely.

-You mean old or pro?

-THEY LAUGH

And, like the old pro I am,

I'm off to help Sarah in one of West Dean's star attractions.

The Victorian glasshouses.

She's got a job for me

that that I used to do with an old bit of hosiery.

-This is the melon house, Christine.

-Wow, look at this lot.

They're great, aren't they?

Wow. Look at the quality of these leaves.

Normally, they look quite manky.

-They are spectacular, Sarah.

-That's the right reaction, Christine.

Wow. Now then, come on, I know you want me to help you tie them

but, being a shorty, I'm going to have to step up

-cos I can't reach otherwise.

-Poor girl.

Great.

We're just going to support some of these fruits.

I used to use tights or stockings in the old days.

-Right.

-And, as the fruit grew, they actually expand with them,

so this is... This looks like a hair net, mate.

I won't say what that reminds me of.

-SHE LAUGHS

-Go on. Now, go on,

tell me about these fantastic greenhouses.

I mean, it's an amazing range.

I can't believe for two minutes,

when you came to this garden, they were in good nick.

No, they hadn't had any money invested in them

for a number of years.

And when we came 23 years ago,

they were in a state of dereliction

and we were given the opportunity to renovate them all.

And how many do you have?

We have 13.

13 glasshouses of different styles. So, we've got three vineries,

two fig houses,

three devoted to tomatoes.

We grow aubergines, chillies - most importantly,

and we have several display houses

for growing things like fuchsias, ferns,

pelargoniums, tropicals, bromeliads.

You know, you name it, we grow it.

Glasshouses like these at West Dean didn't come cheap.

In the early 19th century, glass had a huge tax imposed on its sale.

And, in a double whammy,

you paid a property tax based on how many windows your home had.

It was a tax on light and air in all but name.

By the 1850s, those hated taxes had disappeared.

Landowners, grown rich from the Industrial Revolution

and the expansion of the British Empire,

had the wealth to build greenhouses

and fill them with fashionable, exotic plants

or extend the growing season of our own fruit and vegetables.

With Victorian innovation and engineering,

glasshouses grew both larger and smaller.

As Sir Joseph Paxton was building the Crystal Palace in London...

..Victorian manufacturers were making plain and functional

self-assembly glasshouses

for the increasing demand of the rising middle classes.

Whether you were growing an exotic pineapple in your glasshouse

or a humble tomato in your greenhouse,

the Victorians finally let the light shine through.

They are wonderful documents, in a sense,

of the importance of late-Victorian horticulture

and the work that was done by the pioneers of that time.

Well, it's such a treat and this is how we used to do it,

and that relationship between a person understanding

not only the horticultural requirements

but the engineering skills that brought it all together.

I mean, gardeners are awesome beasts and I really believe it.

You know, not only can we grow

but we have to be able to control our environment,

we have to understand about ventilation,

we have to understand about heating, we have to able to maintain it,

we have to know about boilers, we have to know about torque pressures,

and you're passing on those skills to younger gardeners.

It's a privilege to be able to work in this sort of environment,

I recognise that.

And also, it's a privilege to able to hand those skills on.

It's one of the things I love to do.

Come on, let's see what we can do.

Sarah's so right.

It's so important to pass down our gardening knowledge

to the next generation so they can be inspired

to leave their mark on our horticultural landscape.

And that's just what's happening over on the Sussex coast

in Brighton.

All right, folks, unload the tools and we'll take it up to the site.

Young volunteers for the Sussex Wildlife Trust have been

transforming this once-neglected green space on the Craven estate

into a flourishing community garden to encourage local wildlife.

But, even though it's wild, it still needs a little taming

from time to time.

If we could open up quite a nice, big area here,

we'll then take some of the topsoil off

and we can use that as our area to plant

the tray of flowers that I've got there.

The head man leading the Youth Rangers today is Huw Morgan.

We carry out a wide variety of practical conservation tasks

on sites around the city,

and that can be anything from gardening for wildlife

that we're doing today, to putting up dormouse boxes,

clearing out ponds, improving pathways,

whatever really, so, a wide variety of activities.

This can come out, the rosebay willow herb,

cos that has a tendency to take over,

so they can be pulled...pulled up as well.

-Huw.

-Hello.

I've got some netting over here.

What do you want done?

Uh, OK, I wouldn't...I wouldn't worry about that.

That's a bit of old weed matting.

I think it'll probably be easier to work with it there.

Rather than trying to pull it up, we can cut into it

and plant through it if we need to.

OK.

This is an area where it's sort of been overtaken

by this long, rank grass

that just takes over everything and no flowers can grow.

So we're cutting back the grass and clearing the topsoil here

so we can mix it up and plant some wild flowers which we've got,

sort of some native, wild flower species.

It's really great fun and people are all really nice.

It's just a fun thing to get out and do in the sunshine

like this, and it's also conservation work,

which is what I've always sort of been into.

So, yeah, it's really great fun. Love it.

It's nice to see an area that the community's going to be able to use

again cos it just looked kind of like an overgrown mess when we

arrived in the morning, so it's really nice to see it

really coming together.

By no means do all the volunteers

come from a horticultural background.

In some cases, the day job can even come in handy.

I'm normally a mobile hairdresser.

My hair clients are always quite surprised

that I do this on the side

cos it is something completely different to

the beauty, fashion industry.

Mainly, what I get out of it is

just knowing that I'm helping out, really,

helping reserve little nature reserves around Brighton.

It's just quite a rewarding thing, nice for the community,

it's benefitting lots of people.

Some of the volunteers can remember what the wildlife garden looked like

before all their hard work.

The area has really transformed since I've lived here.

For instance, all the orchard, growing of the trees,

the wildlife areas.

Over the last six years, it's massively transformed.

Last job of the day is planting some wild flowers to attract those

all-important bees and butterflies.

All right, fantastic effort today, everybody. It looks brilliant.

Really, really good.

I'm really pleased with what we've done on a very, very hot day,

so thank you all very much.

THEY APPLAUD Lovely.

It's so inspiring to see a new generation

taking their first horticultural steps.

And just like at the Craven estate,

Sarah and Jim have introduced a wild garden to West Dean.

It's a beautiful spot with swaths of grasses,

cowslips and meadow flowers, all attracting local wildlife.

The alliums in particular are loved by the butterflies.

Alliums, also known as ornamental onions,

are grown for their showy flower heads,

which come in a range of sizes.

Colours vary, but most range between purple, lilac and white.

Planted in the autumn, they should pop up and bloom the following year

but, even when they've lost their flowers,

they're still a stunning architectural feature.

They look their best when they're planted throughout a border...

..where they stick up like lollipops.

I'm meeting someone rather special here in the wild garden,

one of West Dean's large team of volunteers.

So, Laura, how long have you known the garden?

I first came here when I was a teenager

and, since then, have been revisiting off and on pretty

much all the time, with a slight break when I was at university.

Has it changed much over the years?

Hugely. The first time I came is probably five years in

to when Jim and Sarah had arrived and started doing

all the restoration work in the walled garden.

And then this part, the wild garden, the spring garden,

the sunken garden, that's all sort of ten years in.

They were really sort of pushing out and building up the garden

and it's just a complete transformation.

But, just as people can transform a garden,

a garden can transform the lives of those who love it.

Only a few years ago, Laura was a City high-flyer in London.

I ended up doing a law degree first of all

and came to the end of that and decided I didn't want to be a lawyer

and didn't really have a plan B, as such,

so tried out a few things

and sort of, by accident, ended up in head-hunting,

which I certainly didn't envisage I would stay in for almost ten years

but those things happen.

Time passes and you kind of do what you do

and, suddenly, I sort of realised,

I don't think I want to do this for the rest of my working life.

I'd almost grown quite resentful of the whole travelling of the city,

just being sort of crushed and just the busyness and people everywhere.

With a yearning for green spaces,

Laura moved back to her Sussex roots and the countryside.

Revisiting childhood haunts like West Dean

provoked a strong reaction.

It was quite a guttural kind of feeling, just instinctive,

I should be in these kinds of places, not stuck in an office.

After that discovery, Laura began investigating

the idea of becoming a volunteer gardener.

So, how did you get to come here?

I was looking, really, to get some practical work experience,

and the first garden I wrote to was obviously here,

and asked Sarah if she'd possibly take me on and she said, "Yes."

-And do you think it's made you a better person?

-Um...

Calmer, more reflective?

I think it's made me, probably a truer version of myself.

I think I probably was trying to kind of live the city life

and do the city thing when I was in London,

now I certainly think I'm a much happier person doing this

than I could ever have been staying in London doing an office job.

It's been just a fantastic adventure, really,

and I hope it continues for many more years.

You see, because gardening's not just about cultivating plants,

it's about cultivating people.

Bring the two together, they grow and they bloom.

Absolutely right. My experience has certainly proved that,

and I would urge anyone who's even thinking about it

to make that step into it.

Now, it wasn't just plant knowledge you gained from this garden, was it?

-No. Rather amazingly, I met my now fiance here.

-Ahh.

So, he's a full-time gardener here in the gardens.

When did you first meet?

Well, I saw him the first day and I said, "Good morning,"

and then we ended up going out on our first date here,

actually, at the cafe for a tapas evening, three weeks later.

Three weeks?! You was in there pretty quick.

THEY LAUGH

And then, yeah, and the rest, as you say, is history.

We ended up, yeah, coming back and moving to Chichester in January.

Now, is it just plants that turns you on in the garden?

No, I think the wonderful thing here is the sort of back story

of the college, which was once a fantastic country home.

But the last person who lived here as a resident was Edward James,

who was hugely involved and very passionate about the arts.

In fact, he was a major friend of Dali

and kind of all the surrealist painters and artists.

So you have this sort of imbued through,

and going into the college where you have some incredibly wacky

and interesting pieces of art and interior design.

And things like the fibreglass trees

which he left in the garden, which are kind of his last stamp,

it's just amazing.

It kind of gives it that added quirkiness and interest

to the whole thing.

West Dean has given me

and many others so much pleasure over the years.

I want, somehow, to honour Laura and the other volunteers

for their hard work.

Heaven forbid, but if you was to leave and you was to place

a tribute here,

would it be a plant or would it be a piece of artwork?

I think I'd probably say a piece of artwork cos it would happily

link together the kind of history of the college

and Edward James' legacy and the garden as well.

It'd be really lovely to combine the two.

With this in mind, I've asked Jon Privett,

head of metalwork conservation here at West Dean College,

to make a tribute honouring the work of the Garden's volunteers.

I was really, really pleased to be asked to make

something for Laura to give to the gardens

and spent a bit of time racking my brains, really,

about what I could make for her.

I walked out for a tea break and saw the weather vane

on top of the clock tower outside and thought, that's it.

I like the way she's walking forwards,

it shows her kind of busy and in motion.

I took that and then put it on a computer and got a silhouette.

And then I can stick it onto a sheet of copper,

and what I'm going to do is just roughly cut out the main shape.

If anyone knows Laura, they'll be able to recognise her.

Just ten miles southwest of West Dean, as the crow flies,

is another Sussex garden which has undergone a transformation.

And, from the sky, the view is magnificent

Set high on a hill,

Arundel Castle simply commands the Sussex landscape.

Built at the end of the 11th century,

it's been the family home to the Dukes of Norfolk

and their ancestors for nearly 1,000 years.

Just across the road is another breathtaking building...

Arundel Cathedral.

But it's the castle gardens lying between these two magnificent

buildings that I've come to see today.

Like West Dean, Arundel has a sheltered

and traditional kitchen garden.

And, besides the glasshouses,

box-edged beds filled with bursts of hot colour, then tempered with cool.

This side of the garden is quite formal

and enclosed with shingle paths and hedging.

But as you head towards the chapel, it becomes much more open,

and there's another garden I've particularly come to see.

This is the stunning Collector Earl's Garden.

It's hard to imagine, but only eight years ago,

this entire space was covered in concrete.

The Duke of Arundel's archivist, John Robinson, is going

to fill me in on how this magical garden came into existence.

So when was this amazing garden opened, John?

It was opened in 2008.

And what was here before?

Ah! Well, this was the historic kitchen garden, but it was

given up, like so many of these gardens in country houses, after

the Second World War, and latterly this was the visitors car park.

-The car park?!

-It was just concrete and tarmac,

there wasn't a tree a bush or anything in it.

-Crikey!

-Just the outside brick walls.

That's amazing.

Hard surface throughout.

So what was the inspiration behind it?

Well, the history of the Howard family here.

There's somebody we call the Collector, Earl of Arundel

in the early 17th century,

and he had a garden, which we know a bit about because there are designs

by Inigo Jones, the great architect for gateways and pavilions, and in

the background of portraits, you have glimpses through into the garden.

So, on the basis of those few clues, it was decided to do

a sort of recreation of that garden.

-But it's imaginary, really.

-Yes.

-I mean, it's...you know.

-So it's Jacobean in style.

-Yep.

But how would you describe the layout of this garden?

Well, it's a formal garden because it's divided into enclosures,

by hedges and the big pergola across the middle

and then you've got very strong axes -

cross axes and the central axis and so on.

And what about the architecture? I mean, it's amazing architecture,

but what's the story behind that?

Well, it's partly buildings that we know existed, but they would

have been stone or brick or whatever in the garden. And the whole

point about this, it was all done in what's called green oak.

The thing about green oak is it's not...it doesn't mature, you know.

You cut it and you build it and then it goes this silvery grey

colour, and this gives it a slightly zany, naturalistic, organic quality.

But, you see, it's incredibly theatrical.

-Yep, yep.

-Just smacks Italy, to me.

I'm on the Isola Bella and I'm there on the northern Italian lakes.

I'm looking at theatre and drama and the heat of the sunshine.

It's Italy on the south coast.

That was the inspiration. I mean, he was a collector who went to

Italy in 1610. And when he came back, everybody sort of rather

joked that he'd gone native.

He spoke Italian, he liked Italian food, he ate snails.

-Ugh!

-Things like that, and you know and his garden was all 'al Italiano.'

-Yes.

-As they put it. So things like these urns are an Italian design.

I just think it's frankly, truly amazing.

The Collector Earl's fascination with all things Italiano

predates the Grand Tour that young,

upper-class men of means undertook in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Since then, Italian influences have been felt in art,

architecture and, of course, gardening.

But, an earlier Italian invasion has left its mark, too.

Just a few miles west of Chichester is Fishbourne Roman Palace,

home to the earliest formal garden in the country.

Archaeologists first unearthed this site in the 1960s

and, as well as the wonderful mosaics on the inside,

they also discovered how the palace garden was laid out.

And guess what?

Those Romans were very green-fingered,

as Fishbourne's Head of Learning, Katrina Burton, explains.

The Romans introduced gardening.

People in the Iron Age wouldn't have gardened for aesthetic pleasure.

The Romans, however, changed all that and they planted massive

formal gardens, using plants like this box hedge, actually, to really

make a statement about the fact that they were changing the landscape.

They had this control over nature,

and that's something that would have been completely alien to

those Iron Age Britons living here before the Romans arrived.

We know these hedges were planted in this way because of the

archaeological evidence, because those original excavations uncovered

the bedding trenches for these particular hedges, so we know they

were in this really ornate geometric pattern that you see down here.

So, it's the differences in the colours of the soil which really

indicated that there was something quite special about this garden.

It's thought the palace was inhabited by someone of high rank

called Togidubnus, who was a Celt loyal to the Roman Emperor.

Built on four sides around a central garden,

the site covered an area as big as two football pitches.

We know that he had these enormous gardens, these very

impressive gardens, and it would have taken a large number of slaves

just to keep them up to scratch. And we imagine that Togidubnus

was meeting very important people and he was really showing off his

wealth, his status, by the entrance way, by people coming through

these gardens as they came up to meet him in the audience chamber.

This is one of the tools they would have used here in the Roman gardens.

We've got a pair of replica iron shears,

and these would have been used for trimming the hedges.

And you can imagine trying to keep all these hedges under control here

at Fishbourne, would have required an army of slaves.

But these invaders to our shores didn't come alone.

The Romans brought new and exciting plants here from across the whole

Roman Empire, shipped in clay plant pots across the English Channel.

Things like marigolds

and roses, the things you'd expect to see in an English country garden

actually were brought in by the Romans nearly 2,000 years ago.

But an army marches on its stomach, not how prettily the garden grows.

The Romans brought with them a wide range of edible vegetables,

things that we take for granted nowadays.

Things like garlic, and we've got some elephant garlic here,

cucumbers, walnuts, rosemary, a lot of our herbs.

The Romans also brought in pears and apples, a lot of the fruits

that we're so used to seeing in our orchards.

We know that the soft fruits, they also tried, but some of them,

particularly things like olives, of course didn't grow so well

in this climate, so it was the hardier varieties that

survived right through to the present day.

But what about us poor Brits?

Where were we while these fancy Romans were gorging

themselves on their Mediterranean diet?

People in the Iron Age living round here would be

reliant on sort of cereal crops - they'd be growing wheat and barley,

using it to make potage and breads.

They'd be making use of wild vegetables, wild fruits

like these blackberries here, but of course you'd be very reliant

on what was available at what time of year.

And sometimes, like these blackberries,

the crop wouldn't necessarily have come out as well as you'd expected.

For the Romans, a garden wasn't just for growing food.

It was an important outdoor pharmacy.

All manner of medical ailments had a Roman garden cure,

even if today some sound a little far-fetched!

In fact, it's difficult to imagine what our traditional British gardens

would have looked like if it wasn't for those Italian men in togas.

Over the last 2,000 years we can see how their both culinary

and horticultural legacy has stayed with us and actually has

influenced British cooking and British gardening even today.

Here we go!

Over at Arundel Castle, we seem to have slipped back in time, too...

Oh, well done sir.

..as a historical jousting tournament

is taking place on the castle grounds.

How many revolutions?

I'm not sure what medieval gardeners got up to...

Hopefully not jousting - I'm no good on a horse!

I'm off to meet Arundel's Head Gardener, Martin Duncan,

in the kitchen garden.

Hi, Martin.

-Oh, hello, Christine.

-What you up to?

Ah, bit of apple pruning, summer pruning.

-OK.

-Very important for apples at this time of year.

It also exposes the apple to the sun as well, and that ripens the fruit.

So... And this is something that people get confused about, isn't it?

Because a restricted form,

so on the cordons, the espaliers, the fans,

those that are smaller in size, what we're trying to do is change

all this vegetative growth into fruiting wood.

-Yeah.

-But you see winter pruning is all about regeneration of wood.

Wood, and getting rid of canker and all sorts of disease.

It's just two different pruning times, isn't it?

And it if there's one which is sort of eight centimetres

-or eight inches long, like one over here...

-Leave it.

-That's it.

-Cos that's got the fruit for next year.

That's what you want, yeah.

But this is an interesting variety, isn't it?

It's a stunning apple called Peasgood Nonsuch.

Great name.

And one apple of these you can do a whole apple crumble or

one of those baked ones because they reach at least four times that size.

Many would consider an apple the quintessential British fruit.

Food writer Edward Bunyard wrote in 1929,

"Let the Frenchman have his pear,

"the Italian, his fig. But for us, the apple."

Training trees against a wall or a fence is a perfect

space-saving way of growing apples, if you only have a small garden.

There are over 2,000 apple varieties to choose from

and our climate is perfect for growing them.

Most of the apple production in Britain is limited to a dozen

or so varieties you see in the supermarket,

so why not ring the changes and pick a heritage variety?

As a gardener, I love apple trees in the spring

when they're full of blossom, but I also love to eat the fruit, too.

Hey, baked apples where you take the centre out and you fill it with

sultanas and then you put a blob of butter then a blob of marmalade.

-Ah!

-And you cook 'em, and the marmalade caramelises

on the sulta... It's delicious with lashings of thick yellow custard.

-That sounds delicious.

-Oh, it's best way to eat an apple!

-It is, and especially picked fresh from the tree.

-Oh, yeah.

We're just so lucky here, you know. We've got a tropical area,

we've got an Italianate area, a stumpery, and we've got a

stunning cut flower garden and this lovely organic kitchen garden.

So there's a surprise around every corner.

And one of the new surprises visitors can discover

is the stumpery.

Trees have always had a place in our gardens,

but trust the Victorians to turn that idea on its head.

A stumpery is an arrangement of dead tree roots placed

upside down or on their side.

This stumpery is only a couple of years old and,

in a very modern touch, has been adorned by bright and exotic plants.

But the first ever stumpery is a much darker and foreboding place.

This is the original stumpery,

built at Biddulph Grange in Staffordshire in 1856.

It's both strange and beautiful at the same time.

It's looked after by gardener, Paul Walton.

It's very eerie, prehistoric, a bit scary almost, you know.

And you just wouldn't have seen this in Victorian times at all.

You come round the corner

and you've got this almost grotesque prehistoric look to it.

You can almost imagine the ladies with their posh frocks on snagging

their dresses on some of the stumps, I imagine they'd be quite shocked

at what they saw and almost saying, "What on Earth have you done here?"

Seen as Victorian oddities,

stumperies could be described as gothic.

Or they may have been inspired by the Romantic movement,

which emphasised the beauty of nature.

But there were some very practical reasons for their existence, too.

During Victorian times, they commissioned quite a few

plant hunters to go overseas.

The plants were brought over, then the areas were built to house

the plants, and then this fabulous stumpery is ideal for fern.

It creates little pockets for planting them and showing them off.

To create an area which worked really well

for that kind of plant was brilliant.

Pull that barrow out, Bob.

Right, Rob, if you take your end round.

Whack it on that stump there.

Despite the trees being dead, a stumpery still needs a lot of TLC.

Quite an effort getting them in.

We can't get any machinery here neither, so it is...

it's pretty well much man power.

What I would do, Rob, I'd maybe sit that down there a little

bit lower and try and get them two spikes up.

What we want to do is create this canopy coming over, really,

and, well, feel like you're a bit enclosed,

a bit daunting almost when you walk through this bit.

It's all right, that isn't looking too bad now.

You come through here now, got that height there,

there's other areas we've still got to do, but this was quite

an open area, so I'm really pleased that we've got that sorted today,

so... Brilliant.

What was once dull and lifeless has been turned into something

vibrant and alive.

Now that IS a transformation.

Back at Arundel Castle,

another other-worldly feature awaits me at the Collector Earl's Garden.

This is a version of Oberon's Palace, a fantastic spectacle

designed by Inigo Jones for Prince Henry's entertainment in 1611.

Oberon was the King of the Faeries in medieval

and Renaissance literature,

and Martin thinks I might be royally entertained by what's inside it.

This is an amazing building.

That's shell, isn't it?

-It is shell. This is all made out of mussel shells.

-That is stunning.

All pasted on but looking as urns, but quite, quite stunning.

I mean, beautiful!

But what's really exciting is, let me show you this.

-If you would like to turn this.

-Right.

Just slowly, and see what happens.

Maybe a little bit quicker.

Oh, I can... I can...

-You're worried now, aren't you?

-No, I'm not.

You're not, no, no.

Go on, go on! Up you go, lad! Wah!

Wheee!

Whoo... Oh, I've done it. Up, up she goes.

And down she comes.

I can tell you're enjoying this.

Up and down. Oooh, going up there!

-Whee, come on!

-Down you go.

Come on, down you come. Gently, gently.

-Once more and I'll...I'll catch it for you.

-OK, bring it down.

Oh! Look, look at that.

-Wow.

-It's fantastic, isn't it?

And what... I mean, what a toy.

Now you know why I wear a hat inside.

That, I mean...I mean, what a party piece, Gs and Ts,

and have your friends and... Oh-hoo! Up and down, up and down.

Fantastic!

Even though Arundel Castle is a thousand years old,

a garden is a constantly evolving thing.

So whether you simply plant a new herbaceous border or transform an

ugly car-park into a Jacobean-themed vista, a garden is ripe for change.

Back at West Dean, you can really appreciate the scale and

dimensions of the garden from above, especially at the Edwardian pergola.

But I want to take a closer look.

The 300-foot pergola was designed by architect

and gardener Harold Peto in 1912.

It's a wonderful structure, which unites great planting

and architecture.

As you look through it,

it frames the parkland as a living landscape painting.

I thought it looked fantastic from the skies,

I think it's even better on the ground.

Former high-flyer Laura gave up a career in the City to

volunteer at West Dean, and it's changed her life.

To thank her and all the other garden volunteers,

I've organised a tribute to mark all their hard work.

So, Laura, I thought it would be quite nice to leave something here

that you might be able to look up to in years to come and enjoy.

So... What do you think?

Wow, great.

CHEERS

That's incredible.

Now, the key thing is, do you recognise the shape of the person.

It looks vaguely familiar, yeah.

-Yeah, because it should, because it's you!

-Yeah.

It's all there, the garden, the history,

-the people and these plants hiding in the wheelbarrow.

-Yes.

I've never seen someone so joyfully pushing a wheelbarrow.

There you are!

You see, now the only job is that it's got to go up there.

Oh, God, do I have to climb up the wall?

No, you don't because... Where are you, Jim?

I'm behind you. Look who's behind you.

I think...I think it's your job.

Now, you tell me when.

Now. No, no. No.

-I thought above the door.

-Above the door?

-Come back.

Above the door yeah. Right, whoa, whoa.

Lovely. Lovely.

-Now what do you think to that?

-That looks great.

I can't quite believe I've been immortalised in metal.

Absolutely.

Yes, well, I think you've done a splendid job.

And I think that will look lovely there.

-I wonder how long we can leave him there.

-Not very long.

I think Laura's weather-vane is a very appropriate symbol of her

story and connection to West Dean.

But it does remind me that good flying weather is few

and far between.

It's been such a treat to see these Sussex

gardens from my vantage in the sky.

And what I can see is the changes here at West Dean.

Arundel Castle.

Even the Craven Estate community garden

have not only transformed the gardens,

but they've changed the lives of the people who care for them.

Sometimes you need to see things from a whole new perspective

to truly understand them.