Bog Gardens and Soft Fruit Great British Garden Revival

There's no doubt that Britain is a nation of very proud gardeners.

Our love of flowers and plants goes back centuries.

But there's a problem.

Not everything is rosy in our gardens.

Our iconic plants are under attack from foreign invaders.

Ancient woodlands are at risk of being lost forever.

And our favourite flowers are disappearing right before our eyes.

So we need you to help us in our revival campaign.

We'll be inspiring you to dig deep and celebrate the best of British.

As we reveal the country's most stunning gardens.

And sharing our top gardening tips.

It's time to rediscover our passion for plants.

And breathe new life into our gardens.

With purple loosestrife, pretty Persicarias

and fabulous ferns, just to name a few,

there's one style of planting that's low maintenance,

fantastic for wildlife

and performs particularly well in wet conditions.

It is the bog garden.

Although popular in the 19th century,

bog gardens fell out of favour.

But I think it's time to bring them back.

Now, stick with me on this one.

I know it doesn't sound particularly sexy,

but our gardens are being battered by increasing rainfall,

and there's also the risk of flooding.

So now may be the ideal time to plant a garden for wet conditions.

With over 90% of our wetland habitats damaged or destroyed,

by planting a bog garden, you really can make a difference,

and they're much more beautiful than the name suggests.

To convince you about my campaign,

I'll show you my top tips on how to build your very own bog garden...

I think that's enough rocks.

This is a bog garden, not a rockery, after all.

..see how fantastic they are at attracting wildlife...

Brilliant for dragonflies and smooth newts, common frogs.

Oh, it's beautiful out here, isn't it? Look at all the damsel flies.

..and I'll be getting to grips

with some supersized bog garden specimens.

-I haven't done much gardening by boat before.

-HE LAUGHS

To start my bog garden revival,

I've come to Cornwall, and a truly inspirational place.

This is Trebah Garden near Falmouth,

an exotic paradise of plants,

many which love the wet conditions of this Cornish valley.

The gardens are the result of 175 years of horticultural endeavour.

This bog garden area was planted just three years ago

and it shows what's achievable in just a short space of time.

There's a natural spring that runs down here,

runs all the way down the valley towards the sea,

and it widens out.

The planting gets deeper and denser and it surrounds a beautiful lake.

When I first started out as a jobbing gardener in London,

I used to maintain some gardens with beautiful ponds

with wet areas and boggy areas, just like this,

and I was always drawn to them.

I loved the way you'd plant a plant

and it would grow away really quickly,

and the volume of foliage and the lushness of the fill

was just magical.

In a city garden, to create something like this,

just transported you somewhere else.

A bog garden is simply a piece of land laid out and irrigated

to grow plants which prefer a damp soil,

or uses an existing soggy area to best effect.

Lots of gardens have problematic wet areas,

and with the increased risk of flooding,

we need to work with the water, not against it,

so let's forget the name and embrace the beauty of the bog garden.

Record rainfall over recent years has led to some epic floods,

which have been made worse by the loss of our natural bogs.

Now, bogs, whether natural or man-made,

help soak up the rainfall

and can slow down or prevent flash floods altogether.

Here in Old Windsor, the Thames burst its banks in January 2014,

flooding out homes and gardens far and wide.

It was the same story from Somerset to Surrey.

The loss of our wetlands was seen as a major factor,

but in densely populated areas where there's lots of homes and gardens

the bog garden can be part of the solution.

The concept of a bog garden comes from the wild bogs

and the interesting plants and flowers that can grow there,

such as the iris and the primrose.

They were pioneered by the Victorians,

who had access to exciting new specimens

brought back from all over the globe by plant hunters.

The gardens at Upton House in Warwickshire

have always been prone to flooding.

But this negative was turned into a positive

by pioneering gardener Kitty Lloyd Jones.

It was here in the roaring '20s that Kitty, fresh out of university,

designed these cascading terraces, using this slope beautifully,

complete with herbaceous borders and a lake at the bottom.

And just around the corner,

she also designed a rare and unusual bog garden

on the site of some medieval fishponds.

Today, Kitty's bog garden is maintained by Heather Aston.

What was she like as a person?

Obviously quite a pioneering gardener

and very keen plantsperson.

Yes, but she was also very strict.

She used to come down and watch the gardeners here working

and be very strict about what they were doing

and if it wasn't right, she would tell them as well,

she'd get them stuck in and tell them it wasn't right.

So this tree here, Joe, the Cercidiphyllum japonicum,

would have been one of Kitty's trees

which she would have planted here specially in the bog garden.

It's a beauty, isn't it?

I didn't know it was a real moisture-lover, I have to say.

No, that's right. No. It seems to do really well in here,

but obviously it loves the shade,

so it's, you know, a really good, shaded area

for this particular tree.

Yeah, and a lot of these bog plants need shade, don't they?

-They thrive on moisture and shade as well.

-Yeah, absolutely.

-This is an absolute beauty, isn't it?

-It is.

The Rodgersia is a lovely plant

and it's ideal for a smaller back garden as well.

Yeah, maybe not a huge block like this,

but I mean, just one or two plants,

and the foliage is that lovely purple tinge, isn't it?

It just gives so much depth to the leaf cover.

I think it's an absolute beauty.

We had the wettest winter pretty much on history last year.

How did this garden cope with those conditions?

Did it thrive on it or did it suffer?

Luckily, majority of plants survived. Being herbaceous plants,

they just shut down through the winter.

Is this completely under water, this area, in the winter?

It was, yes. It was at least thigh-deep,

so 2ft to 3ft deep for about three months.

-Up to about here?

-Yes.

You've got to be quite ruthless, haven't you? In a garden like this,

you've got to really attack the weeds and the plants

-when they get too big.

-That's right, yes.

We find they come up very quickly, so they're into life in May,

and probably go down again quite quickly in September/October time,

but throughout that season, they're growing very quickly, so...

That's the whole thing about a bog garden, isn't it?

That's what I love about them. Things grow so quickly.

-I think that's a positive.

-I think so too.

I wish more people would have bog gardens

and create some interesting...more interesting areas in their gardens.

One of the most extraordinary sights here at Trebah is this

Gunnera Passage.

Now, this is Gunnera manicata and it's native to Brazil.

It gets up to 5m, even 6m tall here.

It's deciduous, so this is all one year's growth just here.

It's amazing.

And in the winter, it dies back and it decays into the ground.

They really are extraordinary plants,

but you might not have room for even one of these in your garden,

but there are some plants that are more suitable

for the smaller bog garden.

Astilbes are right up there when it comes to bog garden plants

cos their feathery plumes just hover above that lush foliage beneath

and they look great in bud, they look great in flower,

and also when they've gone over as well.

They come in a huge range of colours.

They come in whites, reds, purples,

some of them get quite garish,

but for me, these soft pinks and whites combine beautifully,

especially when they're planted in a huge drift just like this.

A lot of us grow Hostas in shade, in moisture-retentive soil,

but they can also cope with really boggy conditions that are wet all

year round, and we grow them mainly for their sumptuous foliage which

brings a cool presence to the summer garden.

But they also have beautiful flower spikes too, just like this one -

a lovely lilac colour.

And it's reassuring to see that even here at Trebah,

they've got a bit of slug damage on their Hostas.

Well, haven't we all?

There are lots of other plants which thrive in damp conditions,

and I'm going to show you how to plant up your very own bog garden.

Now, this is the perfect area for a bog garden.

The soil's nice and moist and it stays moist all year round,

I've incorporated lots of compost, just regular garden compost is fine.

I've put plenty of air in the soil to stop it getting compacted

and affecting the development of the plants.

Now, I'm going to put some planks down to walk on, and a first job is

to position the plants to get a feel for how they meld together.

So I've got a couple of these beautiful Matteuccias.

That'll look really lovely next to the water here.

And then five of these Kirengeshoma palmata.

I'm going to use the smaller plants nearer the stream

and the taller ones further away, to tier the planting.

And then this lovely little Gunnera,

which works perfectly right alongside the water's edge,

echoing the line of the stream there.

All the pots are roughly the same size now,

but these plants are going to grow all different sizes,

and, more importantly, all different spreads as well.

So it's important that you do some research,

you work out how big each plant's going to get,

cos otherwise in a year or two, you'll be digging them up and moving them,

or you're going to have lots of gaps in the planting.

These Cimicifugas are beautiful.

Really tall, and it's sometimes quite nice to bring some taller

plants close to the water,

so it's not all just really low,

so actually the eye is drawn through.

And then these lovely little maidenhair ferns.

Already I really like that - those two foliage plants together,

looking great.

I'm also going to throw in a few stepping stones

to help create the look,

but also make it easier to maintain the garden.

I think that's enough rocks.

This is a bog garden, not a rockery, after all.

Right. Time to get planting.

Going in first is the shuttlecock fern

that'll eventually grow up to about 4ft.

The best fern for wet conditions.

We've seen huge Gunneras, but this is a tiny little one.

This is called Gunnera magellanica,

and it's really grown as a groundcover.

Like you have groundcover in any border, you also want

groundcover in a bog garden like this, to cover the ground,

stop the weeds getting in.

Down here in Cornwall, because they don't get deep frost,

this is absolutely fine.

It's slightly tender, so it won't get through the winter

in some of the colder parts of the country.

This is a really lovely plant.

You've got this really deliciously dark foliage.

This is called Cimicifuga 'Brunette',

and it's a great garden plant.

You don't have to have a bog garden to grow this,

but you do need moisture-retentive soil that doesn't dry out

and a little bit of semi-shade, catches a bit of sun

and it'll colour up beautifully.

And the common name is bugbane,

cos it's meant to keep bugs off your garden.

No guarantees though.

It's really nice, in planting like this,

to play with scale of foliage.

We've got some large foliage plants and we've got some real detail as

well that draws the eye in, and when you contrast those two together,

you know, a bog garden's never going to be boring.

And already you can see how these plants are going to work together,

grow together.

In fact, they grow so quickly, these bog plants,

I think I can hear them growing already.

Many people create their first bog garden

by converting part of an existing pond,

which can become home to some interesting wildlife.

Here in the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust in London

they've done this on an enormous scale.

A set of reservoirs in Barnes were landscaped for the millennium.

60 football pitches of water and bog plants

now give wildlife a home in London.

Adam Salmon is the manager of the reserve,

and he's witnessed just how fantastic bog

gardens can be for biodiversity.

-Hi, Adam.

-Hi, Joe.

-What are you doing?

Why are you pulling all the plants out of the bog?

Well, it's this bulrush.

They're a bit of an invasive plant, really, so if we leave them,

they'll just take over the place.

Right. What plants have you got here? Are these all natives?

Pretty much, yeah.

We've got the water spider growing in the water there.

You've got the greater pond sedge on the edge here,

which is really good for water voles as well.

They love eating that.

So if you create a habitat like this, the wildlife will just turn up?

That's right. Yeah, they'll find it.

It's brilliant for dragonflies and damsel flies especially.

There's also a lot of amphibians in here using it - smooth newts,

common newts, marsh frogs, common frogs.

Here at the Wetlands Trust, they like to innovate with gardening.

The latest addition is a rain garden.

This one was designed by Professor Nigel Dunnett

for the Chelsea Flower Show.

Rain gardens, are they the new bog garden perhaps? What are they?

Well, rain gardens are a way of soaking up all the rainwater that

falls on your garden, your roof, your driveways,

when you have a torrential downpour, when you have so much water

you can see it running off all your surfaces.

-OK. So how do they actually work?

-So the water falls on the roof.

We've got a green roof here, which is like a big sponge, which will capture some of that.

-OK.

-Any extra comes into the gutter

and it runs down this rain chain into this water butt.

You can then harvest it and use it in the garden.

When that fills up,

it overflows down this channel into the rain garden proper here.

It will fill up, up until the lip, if need be,

like a puddle, and then that will disappear.

This hasn't got a liner in it, it's not like a pond.

The whole point, when you're trying to capture the rainwater,

is you want to get it back down into the soil or evaporate back up.

So this overflows,

and then that will overflow into the next one.

You're trying to soak up as much water,

so by the end of a sequence of these sorts of features,

you really don't want any water left coming out of it.

So this one will fill up and then we have a final one, which is a little

bit more like a reed bed, with these ornamental reeds.

Fantastic.

I think this rain garden is fantastic,

and I know it looks really big,

but don't get overawed by the size of it.

There's so many simple ideas that you can take home

and incorporate into your bog garden,

and harvest all the rainwater that lands on your plot.

Trebah Garden is home to a huge variety of plants

and the bog gardens here are extraordinary,

with some wonderful planting, including this - the Hemerocallis.

Now, the common name is daylily, because the flowers only last a day,

but don't let that put you off, because there's another one, two,

three...six buds on this,

and it's going to keep flowering, so if you keep deadheading this,

it's going to flower all summer long.

Many plants in a bog garden don't require much maintenance,

but Trebah has some large specimens that do need

a bit of a trim in the summer.

I'm going to give head gardener Darren Dickey a hand with some

rather large tree ferns.

-If you want to jump in the back.

-Jump... I'm not going to jump in.

-I'm going to slowly and carefully...

-DARREN LAUGHS

-OK.

-So once you've settled down... Are you OK?

-Yeah.

-You've done this before, right?

-A few times.

I love the oar. That's a real gardener's oar, that is.

DARREN LAUGHS

It's beautiful out here, isn't it? Look at all the damsel flies.

I don't feel like I'm in the UK at all.

DARREN LAUGHS

Now, all we're going to do here is clean up these stems,

just so you can highlight the stems and see them from the water

and obviously see the reflection in the water,

so if we can just pull off all these dead fronds.

-Most of them will just pull out...

-Pull off by hand.

..because they're quite sort of old.

-Just break them up.

-We keep them in the boat?

-Yeah.

I haven't done much gardening by boat before...

-THEY LAUGH

-..I have to say!

Oh, it looks better already.

These tree ferns, Dicksonia antarctica,

came to Trebah from Australia in around 1880,

and are believed to be some of the oldest in the country.

The climate and setting here means they're thriving.

So how suitable would one of these tree ferns be

in a domestic-sized garden?

I think as long as you've got a reasonable amount of space

and a bit of moisture, really, just to let them do their own thing.

Some colder parts of the country you might need to put a bit of straw or something,

just into the top, just to protect those new fronds as they form.

Obviously love having the base in water

and then shade in the water as well.

This is how they should be grown, really.

Yeah, yeah, they really do look good grown by water.

Bog gardens can be created in the most unlikely places.

The Iver Environment Centre is 2.5 acres of land

owned by the National Grid in Buckinghamshire,

close to Heathrow Airport.

For 25 years, the local community has been able to come here

and explore.

I want to show you that bog gardens can be fun

and inspirational places for us all to enjoy.

Mike Shadbolt, a landscape gardener at the centre,

is working on creating a new bog garden.

-I made it across.

-You did.

-JOE LAUGHS

-You did.

What a fantastic spot for a bog garden.

It is, isn't it? It's perfect.

Well, it's full of bog, that's for sure.

So what plants have you got here, then?

We have some water avens here, comes in these little plugs like this.

We have some sneezewort. These are all native wildflowers.

Ragged robin here, and skullcap.

And you only need little plugs, cos they grow away so quickly.

-They will, yeah, they're much better like that. Yes, yes.

-They go mad.

Keep your feet in the water.

Debra Frankiewicz, from the Iver Environment Centre,

and a group of schoolkids from nearby Slough are here to help plant

and learn about the wonderful world of bogs.

-Yeah, cos all these...

-BOY:

-It looks like chocolate cake!

-JOE LAUGHS

Yeah, it looks like chocolate cake, but I wouldn't try eating it.

Now, bend down. Use your trowel and scoop away some of the mud.

Lovely. So you've got a little hole The water's filling it back up.

GIRL: Should I put it in now?

Yep, just put it in. Give it a little...little push on the top.

-That's right.

-She likes planting skullcap.

-Good planting, everybody.

-Beautiful.

-Sneezewort!

-Who would like to plant sneezewort?

-Don't sneeze while you're doing it.

-DEBRA LAUGHS

-Put it in.

-I love getting dirty.

-I'm getting mud all over me hands now. That's it.

-Yay!

What have you enjoyed about the bog garden?

Planting plants in the bog and getting my hands oozy.

Yeah, it's not bad, is it? You get into it after a while.

I like about this, the plants and insects living there

and there's lots of wildlife and nature.

Over the next year, it's expected that 4,000 schoolchildren

will come and enjoy this bog garden.

All the kids absolutely love that, getting their hands dirty,

building the bog garden,

and it doesn't look like much at the moment, but give it a year or two -

it will be full of foliage, full of flower,

and the perfect habitat for wildlife.

Here at the stunning gardens of Trebah,

they've been cultivating plants in their bog garden for 175 years.

And although their specimens are mature,

you can grow bog-loving plants from seed

and I'm going to show you how to do it yourself.

Candelabra primroses are really fantastic plants -

a shot of colour in a bog garden.

They start flowering in early summer

and you can see there's one or two just hanging on there for dear life.

Wonderful yellow flowers that tier up on these really quite tall stems.

But now it's late July, they've pretty much finished

and they're setting seed,

and naturally the seed would just drop on wet ground

and they would grow all by themselves.

But I'm going to take some of the seed and propagate them

to create some new plants for another part of the garden.

And all I need is a paper bag,

then I'm going to simply snip off a couple of stems

and they'll have loads of seed pods on them,

which is plenty for what I need.

So I've got my fresh Candelabra primula seed,

I'm going to put it to one side for a minute

and prepare the seed tray.

Now, all this is is a bit of plastic, really,

with some holes in the bottom.

You don't have to use a seed tray, you can use pretty much anything,

as long as it holds compost and it drains freely.

Now, the compost I'm using is a seed mixture,

so it's got a bit of sand in there, it's got a bit of loam in there,

and a bit of compost as well, but it's quite a fine mix,

and I'm just going to fill the tray up,

just give it a bit of a tap to even it out.

I find it's much easier if you water the compost first,

because after you've sowed the seed, if you water it,

it can disturb them, move them around a little bit.

So, if you wet it first, and now, this is bog garden planting,

remember, so it's going to like it nice and wet.

And that is pretty much all you have to do. And now the exciting bit.

Now we need to get the seed out of here,

and it's ideal to sow it

when it's still green, just like this - nice and fresh.

It'll germinate really quickly.

And within each of these pods, there should be...

Yep, there they are.

..loads of tiny little seeds.

Lovely little lime-green seeds.

Loads in one little pod.

Now, it's tempting to oversow these,

to put too many all together

and then they're quite hard to prick out later and to grow on.

So I'm just going to be pretty scarce with these

and just literally drop them

as finely as I can on top of the compost.

In fact, look at that - I've used one seed pod

and that has filled up this entire tray.

That's all you need.

So whatever you do, don't cover them with compost.

They're just in contact with the compost, and they're nice and moist,

but they can get light to them as well.

That's what's going to make them germinate.

What you do do, though, is cover them with a lid.

Now, if you haven't got a lid, you can use something like clingfilm.

Just wrap it over the top.

But this is a nice, simple lid that will hold the moisture in,

create a nice little mini greenhouse, a constant temperature,

and I would expect within three or four weeks,

these will germinate and turn into nice little plants.

When they're nice little plants, you just tease them out

with a little fork or a chopstick or something

and pot them on individually into a small pot, and they'll grow away.

It really is as simple as that.

These are one of the easiest plants in the world to germinate.

Now, if you can't get your hands on any fresh primula seed like that,

you can buy packets from any garden centre,

and these are dried seeds. So ideally, put them in the fridge,

'cause that'll break the dormancy and it'll bring them alive quicker

and they'll germinate better

if they've been cold for a little period.

But fresh seed are the best,

and that is really one of the simplest tasks in gardening.

Someone who's already bonkers about the bog garden

is Susan Hale, who's given over her garden in Cheshire to five of them.

We didn't design it, it just sort of evolved over time.

We thought, "We'll try a pond and then have a bog garden with it,"

and then we got so into the bog gardening

that we started just creating bog gardens without ponds.

Well, this area of the garden, which was the first bog garden we made,

is all green at the moment,

but it really is a riot of colour in the spring.

These are all Candelabra primulas.

You know spring's begun when you see those come out.

This was the second boggy area that we made.

As you can probably see, we're surrounded by mature trees,

and they absolutely rip all the moisture out of the ground.

So if we hadn't made the bog gardens,

we'd have no colour here at all, because it would just be so, so dry.

This is bog garden number three. It's next door to the chicken run.

It's beautiful in the spring, full of spring-flowering plants.

This is bog garden number four.

It's all left very wild,

because we have a lot of newts that breed in this particular pond.

This is the fifth of the bog gardens,

and this is my favourite area.

All the marginal plants that have spread onto the land into the boggy

bits just give an air of mystery,

and it's so lovely at this time of year.

I think bog gardens are wonderful. It looks wonderful all year round.

Definitely worth doing.

Well, I hope I've inspired you to put your wellies on

and embrace the opportunity that wet weather can bring to our gardens.

So if you've got what you think is a problem patch or want to create

a bog garden from scratch, then go for it -

create a wildlife haven that is low-maintenance too.

What's not to love about that?

Across the series, our Revival team are travelling the length

and breadth of Britain,

celebrating our gardens...

Get your nostrils in there.

..flowers...

Look at this strapping 7-footer.

..and plants.

-I never thought we'd be having children, Ern.

-At our age?

Next, Alys Fowler is on the campaign trail for soft fruit.

There is no greater taste of the British summer

than freshly picked berries from the garden.

But it seems most of us

would rather pick up our soft fruit from the supermarket

instead of growing it in our own gardens.

By not growing our own berries

we risk losing some of our oldest garden traditions,

and for me, that just won't do.

I want to bring berries back to our gardens,

and show you that these fruit are ripe for a revival.

On my revival campaign,

I'll investigate the secrets of the berry's power to impress...

They have been found and discovered to be a superfruit,

and, uh, the craze is going mad for them.

..uncover the grand fine dining tradition of the berry...

Formal dinners culminated in this serving of the most exquisite fresh fruit.

..and show you how to grow soft fruits in your own garden.

I think this is such a stellar plant that every garden should have one.

There was a time when every garden in this country grew all

manner of soft fruits.

Here at RHS Rosemoor, in Torrington, North Devon,

blackberries, blueberries, boysenberries

and my favourite, gooseberries,

are just a few of the many berries grown in abundance

in this fruit and veg garden.

I started growing soft fruits seriously

about seven or eight years ago

and I have taken every opportunity possible to cram

more into my garden,

because for me, picking sun-warmed berries -

that's one of the true joys of my garden.

And it's not just all about the eating.

Soft fruit plants are so easy to grow, with stunning form

and striking foliage,

they can bring interest to your garden all year round.

It may be a style of gardening which we've somewhat forgotten,

but it is one that I am determined to revive.

To begin my soft fruit revival,

I've come to The Secret Garden in Ashford, Kent,

and it's home to all manner of edible delights,

including some wonderful berries.

Food historian Jo Morgan

has been studying the history of kitchen gardens

and knows all too well

the importance of the great British berry.

We're surrounded by soft fruit right now.

How important was that for the kitchen garden?

It certainly was very important.

Soft fruit formed one of the fruits that were grown in order to

serve at a formal dinner.

Formal dinners culminated in the most exquisite fresh fruit.

I'm assuming this took huge teams to produce this?

Yes, so the head gardener would have a staff of anything from five to ten

to 20 people, depending on the size of the garden.

Sadly, changes in agriculture and increases in labour costs meant

that by the 1940s, grand kitchen gardens were no long viable.

I am happy, however, to see that there are

still some fabulous berries being grown here.

Look at these lovely jostaberries.

Mmm. Oooh. That one was a little tart.

Why do you think we aren't growing quite

so many soft fruit in our gardens these days?

I guess gardens are smaller, we have less time,

and we can buy so much fruit now in the supermarket,

and it's easy, isn't it?

It's a valid point, but supermarket berries are not always

grown in the UK, never mind in our gardens,

and that's what I want to revive.

One great alternative to buying soft fruit in the supermarket

is to visit a pick-your-own farm like this one in Kent.

Coming here to a pick-your-own is a really lovely experience

and so many people know it from their childhood -

their parents brought them, their grandparents brought them.

You know, hopefully they'll bring their own children,

and it's a lovely thing to do.

But it's missing one essential part,

which is the joy of growing your own.

This farm is owned by berry aficionado Tom Maynard.

So, Tom, how long have you had a pick-your-own farm here?

Well, my parents came to this farm in 1952.

I came back to work on the farm in 1984, so I've...

-You've been here a while.

-..been here all my life, yeah.

THEY LAUGH

I'm very interested in why people

aren't really growing so much at home.

People have been away, lost the skills to do it,

and they come and look, and frankly, redcurrants,

I shouldn't say this, but they're very easy to grow,

as are a lot of the other soft fruits.

What's your message, to getting people to grow more at home?

Try it. It's easy.

Although it's a bit wet today,

there are still some hardcore berry enthusiasts picking away.

You guys look like a pretty dedicated bunch to be out in the rain.

Why don't you grow raspberries at home?

I think there's something quite nice about coming out and picking it.

And it's less work, you know, than having your own.

We don't necessarily have the garden space at home to grow our own.

-Do you grow raspberries in your own garden?

-Not technically, no,

but our neighbours are very good at growing raspberries and some of them

grow through the fence, which is very convenient.

It's hard work, actually, and I just don't have the time.

-What's your favourite thing about picking raspberries?

-Um...

-..eating them.

-THEY LAUGH

So public opinion is that berries are high-maintenance, hard to grow

and take up lots of space, but none of this is necessarily true,

and on my revival, I want to prove just that.

Some soft fruit wants to take over the world,

like this blackberry here at Rosemoor, and trying to get

this into a small space would just be too much hard work.

However, there are plenty of lovely berries

that are happy in containers, and I've got a few to show you.

There are many soft fruits which you can grow in containers,

like this blueberry.

Now, everybody is familiar with blueberries,

and you can happily grow blueberries in a pot,

if you understand a few things about them.

Now, blueberries need to be grown in ericaceous compost.

It's really important that they're in acid conditions,

and you also have to give them a really big pot,

but you need to keep that pot well watered

and there needs to be space for the roots to grow.

Now, there's a lot more out there than just blueberries to

grow in pots.

This is a purple chokeberry, Aronia prunifolia, 'Viking'.

These wonderful dark berries really need to get incredibly dark

and soften and it tastes truly divine,

because it's so full of antioxidants.

However, the one that really has my heart

is this lovely Chilean guava.

Now, I think this is such a stellar plant

that every garden should have one.

And this is the one that I'm going to plant up.

So gently tease out the roots, make sure that it's well watered

when you're potting it up.

Into a pot, this lovely, beautiful pot. Plenty of space.

You will have to pot it on in time,

but this is good enough for a beginning.

And then fill it up with really good-quality, multi-purpose,

peat-free compost that is nice and open.

You need to have good, free-draining quality.

The roots really don't like to sit in a slump of water.

Make sure that the plant doesn't sit proud,

by which I mean it's at the same level of which it grew in a pot,

because if you leave a plant proud, the top layer of roots dry out.

That won't make it happy.

You give it a good water,

and then really remember to keep it well watered.

No fruit is going to taste delicious if it's allowed to dry out,

and so if you're getting tough, bitter fruit,

it means you need to do a lot more watering.

And that can be hard if you're away at work all day,

so there's some tricks to making sure the plant doesn't dry out.

If you're using terracotta pots,

you can line the inside of the pot either with cardboard or an old

compost bag, which will just keep that extra bit of moisture in.

You can also put a saucer under the pot, so that it gathers up

any of the excess water and keeps the pot nice and humid.

And it's worthwhile keeping lots of other pots around the outside,

because this essentially protects the pot

from getting very hot and baked

and keeps a nice, humid microclimate around the plant.

All of these things are essential if you want to get good berries.

Now, this plant has a berry like no other you will have ever tasted.

It's so extraordinarily exotic.

There's a hint of strawberry, a little bit of pineapple,

definite notes of guava.

It's truly something quite different.

And while you're waiting for those lovely berries to ripen,

you get to enjoy this really beautiful shrub.

And if there's one thing to take away about soft fruit, it's that

they may be delicious plants, but they are also truly beautiful ones.

For the next part of my campaign, I want to discover some other unusual

and interesting soft fruits that you can easily grow in your own

garden at home.

If you want to grow berries,

and in particular if you want to grow unusual berries,

then you need to come to a specialist nursery like this.

Here, at the Victoriana Nursery Gardens in Kent,

owner Stephen Shirley prides himself on the diverse selection of soft

fruit plants that he has on offer.

-So I spy the honeyberry.

-Yes.

-Uh, it's...it's the new fruit that isn't, I guess.

-SHE LAUGHS

They've been around since the 17th century, um,

but, they've been found and discovered to be a superfruit

and the craze is going mad for them.

-The craze is going mad, and basically this is a honeysuckle, isn't it?

-Yep.

But it's a shrubby honeysuckle, and it has a little,

tiny sort of grey-blue berry.

-Grey-blue sort of...

-Which is a bit like a blueberry.

-Yeah, yeah.

-A bit.

-Bit sharper, I think. Yeah.

So this is thornless tayberry,

and one of the good things about this is there's quite often

a trade-off between the thorned and the thornless in that the thorned

-have all the flavour, and the thornless don't.

-Yeah.

But with 'Buckingham' with the 'Buckingham' tayberry,

the fruits, as long as long as you pick them late, let them

sort of darken right up, the flavour is outstanding.

-Something like this thornless blackberry...

-Yes, which is a lovely thing.

..they're becoming quite popular, and very, very ornamental in the autumn.

Lovely red foliage.

Usually hangs onto its foliage all the way through the...through

the autumn and winter as well,

so it's...it's a bit of everything really -

lovely fruit and then ornamental as well.

I love the cultivated blackberry.

I feel like it's one of those things that have been really, like, left

off the list of things, because people think,

-"Oh, I can just go and get blackberries from the park," or, you know...

-Yeah.

They don't realise how good the cultivated blackberry is.

And some of the newer varieties are getting huge.

-Ginormous, aren't they?

-They're sort of a couple of inches,

and, yeah, no, they're fantastic.

And the flavour, they've got so, so much more flavour and depth

and, yeah, no, they're lovely.

No, it's a lovely thing. I'm very fond of that one.

It's not just strawberries and raspberries.

There are some weird and wonderful berries available,

but why aren't there more in our gardens?

I feel that perhaps one of the barriers to soft fruit for

particularly new growers is the idea that year one,

-you don't necessarily get an extraordinary harvest.

-No.

But year two, three, year ten - that's actually, you know...

And they build and build, and that is the thing.

And that's their genius, really.

Yeah, most certainly. And get larger and larger.

Stephen propagates all his soft fruit plants from cuttings.

At his display garden, he is currently upgrading to a rather

impressive fruit cage to keep out all the greedy berry thieves.

This is like a fruit cage like I've never seen before.

-This is the Rolls-Royce of fruit cages.

-SHE LAUGHS

And why did you decide to go to such extraordinary extent

with your fruit cage?

We... We have given up with other attempts.

So we've decided... We're using our own chestnut from our own wood.

We decided that we'd go for something

that hopefully is going to be here for many, many, many years.

-Well...

-And will keep the birds out and the fruit in.

And I can't resist getting stuck in and helping out.

-GUN HISSES

-Whoo!

I can see that this is a little bit addictive.

This is fantastic amount of fun.

I'm...I'm just, yeah, I'm mostly jealous,

because if you saw my fruit cage.

-I travel.

-Oh, no. Oh, no.

-He'll come and do one for you.

Not in my allotment. You guys would laugh so much.

Stephen already has some plants growing in the new fruit cage

and I've always got room to try one more delicious berry.

-And what's this one here?

-It's a boysenberry.

-Oh, OK.

-It's one of those funny ones.

-It's all the way from America,

and it's one of those classic ones that you're never going to buy

these in a supermarket, um, because they just literally will not travel.

It's one you're going to grow in the garden,

you're going to pick the fruits off, and you're just going to eat them

straightaway, cos they are just gorgeous.

Well, it's a funny looking thing, but it tastes delicious.

It's got sort of vanilla notes to it, hasn't it?

Yeah. Yeah, no, it's really, really nice.

And this family-run nursery already has the next generation of berry

enthusiasts getting hands-on with fruit.

So what's the best thing about having all this fruit at home?

Um, well, you get to eat it whenever you like.

So do your friends like coming over to the garden?

Yeah, quite a lot.

They like picking the raspberries and eating them off...

..straight off the bush.

Oh, I like eating your raspberries straight off the bush.

-THEY LAUGH

-They're delicious.

Here at Rosemoor, they have this wonderful fruit cage

to protect all this luscious fruit.

However, you don't need something quite

so grand to protect the berries in your garden.

So I'm going to show you a simple technique that will ensure

that your precious berries are safe from fruit-hungry critters.

The thing about ripe, juicy berries is ultimately they're delicious

and everybody wants them,

so if you want your fair share,

then you're going to have to protect them.

Blackbirds, robins, pigeons, mice -

anyone and everyone will have a go.

Now, I have made this lovely little raised bed for my strawberries.

Now, I've put some dowels in and then this is plumber's pipe.

You can pick it up from any kind of plumber or DIY merchant,

and it makes a perfect sort of structure

to put your netting over.

By crossing the pipes and attaching them to the dowels,

my structure is almost there.

Just secure the pipes with a cable tie in the centre

for added stability.

So what you need next is some form of protection, and that's netting.

Now, you can use all sorts of things,

but what matters is the size of the netting.

If you go and get netting which is too finely woven,

you will keep out your pollinators.

If you don't have pollinators, you don't get any fruit,

so that detail matters a lot.

Evenly layer the netting over your cage,

making sure that it comes all the way to the ground on all sides.

Those that are hungry for your berries will really persevere to

get them, so if you leave any gaps in your netting,

believe me,

the blackbirds will spend a lot of time working out how to get in,

so you need to make sure it's secure.

Now, around my raised bed, I have just left the screws slightly proud

so that I can get the netting on, and you need to pull it very taut,

because pigeons have a trick or two up their sleeve,

and they like to bang on the netting and if it's not taut enough,

they literally sit on it until they can get it to the ground

and then eat your berries that way.

Firmly secure the netting all the way round,

leaving the excess free at the back.

Always requires some degree of patience getting netting right,

but it's worth it in the end.

I'm just going to roll up this excess

and simply tuck it in the back, and this means I still have easy access,

because clearly you want to get back in to pick the fruit,

maybe to do some weeding and pruning.

And that should keep these strawberries perfectly safe

and, more importantly, mean that there's fruit for me to pick.

For the next part of my revival,

I'm bringing some soft fruit fun to the garden of England.

I've come to the Kent Show to get people growing

berries in the garden! Ooh!

It's rumoured that there are some expert growers here today,

and they've brought some berries.

Now, this is really exciting, because in here is the best soft

fruit in the country and possibly the best in the world.

First up, strawberries.

-SHE SNIFFS

-It smells absolutely fantastic in here

because of all these delicious strawberries,

and I can see that you've done incredibly well, because you seem to

have won first, second and third prize, so congratulations on that.

-MAN:

-Thank you very much. Yes, we're very proud.

So what are your top tips for the home grower?

I mean, if they're going to grow them at home, sunny spot,

but not direct sunlight.

Um, well-drained soil or, you know, don't overfill...overwet your pots,

and keep the rain off - very important.

And on the next table are some very impressive raspberries.

So as a first prize winner with some of the most beautiful raspberries

I have seen in some time, cos they're huge,

what advice do you have for the home grower?

Raspberries are very, very picky about soil conditions.

I mean, probably more so than, say, a strawberry or a blackberry,

so very well-drained soil and if you're on heavy dirt,

then definitely put lots of organic matter into the soil.

But the main one, if you're growing raspberries, is birds.

-Right. Yes.

-Get the birds off.

So, put them in a cage, uh, you know, in your little tunnel,

whatever it might be, but keep the birds off.

Well, prize fruit is one thing,

but I'm on a berry revival with a message for the masses.

I am about to go live on air to persuade the nice people of Kent

that they should revive their love of the great British berry.

Good afternoon. Welcome live to the Kent County Show, 2.27.

TV gardener Alys Fowler. How are you, Alys?

Very well, thank you very much.

I've come to the show today to try

and persuade people to revive the great British berry.

Really? Why?

Well, I feel that we're really underusing our gardens to produce

a lot more soft fruits.

We have a huge wealth of these amazing berries,

which are easy to grow, they're hardy,

they're perennial, so once you get them in the ground,

you have them for years and years to come.

Well, look, thanks ever so much for popping along.

Good luck with the program as well.

I'm hoping that got my berry message out to the people of Kent,

and I still have one more revival trick up my sleeve.

So I am going to do a demonstration with some berries from my garden

which I have grown and try and persuade these nice people who've

turned up that growing your own berries truly is worthwhile.

Now, I've chosen a faintly obscure cordial from the 18th century,

but you never know - it might just work.

For this historical beverage,

which is rather confusingly called a shrub,

I need some mixed berries from my allotment, combined with sugar

and, for tartness, some cider vinegar.

Really, the whole reason for making this shrub

is so that I can talk to you about growing berries,

and I was wondering how many people in the audience actually grow soft fruit at home.

What are you guys growing?

Blackcurrants and strawberries.

Blackcurrants and strawberries, and which are your favourite?

-Strawberries.

-Yeah, I can understand that.

The idea with the shrub is that you use it as, um, as a cordial.

You make cocktails with shrubs,

so this works really well with gin or vodka or stuff like that.

This is a kind of old-fashioned, slightly tart fizzy drink.

OK, so are you ready for the crazy Victorian drink?

I do quite like it. It's quite vinegary, but... Yeah.

-I have to say I enjoyed it.

-Really?

I was a bit sceptical, but, no, it was all right.

Do you think more people should be growing berries in their garden?

I think anything to encourage people to grow their own food, you know.

Grow something and eat it.

You get the connection, and you have a better...

You then get a better understanding of what farmers do,

what your countryside does.

If you are going to join my revival and grow some berries,

then it's important to know how to care for them.

I'm back at RHS garden Rosemoor

with fruit and veg garden manager Peter Earl

to show you some simple summer pruning,

which will keep your berry bush looking fabulous.

So this is one ginormous gooseberry.

It is a particularly vigorous variety.

It's actually a hybrid cross.

It's called 'Black Velvet', and you can see the extent of this fan,

and perhaps might be too big for most small gardens,

but you can treat any gooseberry in this way, and you wouldn't get quite

such a size result, but exactly the same principle applies,

and so we've trained it as a fan, which gets it up onto the wall, um,

makes picking much easier, netting much easier.

Mm-hm. And it makes it into this incredibly beautiful,

ornamental feature as well, isn't it?

-I mean, sort of elevates the gooseberry into something else.

-That's right.

But I can see that it needs a bit of pruning.

The timing's just right now, so we do the first pruning in June,

and then we'll come back to it in the dormant time

in the middle of winter and do a second pruning.

And... And this summer pruning is...is essentially just to make sure

that it's not all kind of wild-looking out here.

That's right. I mean, obviously these would break

eventually over time,

and to keep it maintained and trained as a neat

subject against the wall, then this is essential.

And you're right. I mean, the vigour is extraordinary.

-This is a single...

-It is. That's what it's grown this year, yeah,

-so that is incredible, isn't it?

-More than me.

-Yeah.

-HE LAUGHS

-So what we're looking to do now,

we've got the basic framework against the wall,

-which is a permanent fan shape.

-Yeah.

And then everything which comes off that,

we're going to be summer pruning back to five or six leaves now.

-OK.

-And then you'll get a little bit of regrowth

but then in the winter,

we'll take those back again just to one or two buds,

and leave a short bit of new growth.

-So by the winter, then, it must look fantastic.

-Oh, yeah.

-Cos you really see the framework, don't you?

-That's right.

And we're kind of encouraging more fruit bud to form doing this,

and the other beauty of it is we're losing all these soft tips

which is where any problems arise.

This is where all the aphids start, this is where the mildew starts,

so it's a good cultural way of dealing with these problems.

-Mind the prickles.

-Yeah.

A lot of pruning techniques, you know, you read the books and it's

very confusing and complicated, but this is so straightforward.

And the wonderful thing about a gooseberry

is it can be fitted into sort of spaces that it's quite hard to grow

-other things, can't it?

-That's right.

I mean, this actual wall is kind of one of the least favoured, if you like.

We've got the choice aspects of south-facing and west-facing walls,

but this is an east-facing wall,

so it sees a bit of sun until lunchtime,

but the currants and the gooseberries are perfectly happy on this wall.

And they taste very...

I can find a little fruit and they still taste lovely and sweet. It hasn't in any way...

They do. I mean, these are a really dark berry.

They have a bit of a tail on them, but they are beautiful, yeah.

They make lovely puddings and jams.

I love this little row of wild strawberries in front.

That's right. I mean, we kind of like to use every opportunity

to grow something a little bit different.

It makes a lovely edging.

So pretty, it's just really crisp and...

That's right, and productive as well.

A bush this big is going to produce pounds upon pounds of fruit.

-Do you actually bother netting it?

-HE LAUGHS

I mean, we could, because of the situation.

It would be quite straightforward to put a net here.

We haven't netted this.

I mean, we don't mind if the visitors come and sample a few.

That's part of the reason we're here, you know,

so they can try the different things,

and obviously the birds have got access.

But there's plenty of fruit still there that we can pick.

That's the whole point about a gooseberry.

-There's enough for everyone...

-There is.

-..even birds.

-That's right.

There is one soft fruit champion

whose love for the berry is second to none.

Barry Clarke's garden in Hampshire

features a wide range of the genus Rubus.

-BARRY:

-Basically Rubus are blackberries and raspberries

and mine is a national collection from plants from all over the world.

Barry has been collecting blackberries and raspberries

since the mid-'90s and has around 230 types.

One of the big questions that people often ask me

is what's the difference between a blackberry and a raspberry.

The actual definition is when you pull the fruit away,

if it comes away without a core, it's a raspberry.

If it comes with a core, it's a blackberry.

It's not just the fruit itself,

but they come in a form on a vine or on a plant

which is appealing in other ways too.

A lot, for example, have interesting foliage or quite unusual flowers,

or maybe it's just the way they grow.

There's nothing more fun than picking fruit from your own garden

and eating it.

HE LAUGHS

I can't imagine a garden without soft fruit.

They keep the pollinators happy, they attract wildlife,

they can be fantastic plants,

and if that isn't enough, there's a harvest at the end.

All you have to do as a gardener

is put them in good, fertile ground and wait for your bounty.