High Summer Life in a Cottage Garden with Carol Klein

I'm Carol Klein,

and this is my garden, nestled in the heart of north Devon,

15 miles from the coast,

and surrounded by this tranquil and beautiful countryside.

I've taken care of my garden for 30 years.

I know every inch of this place and every plant.

Each season brings its own delights.

There are plenty of challenges too, but that's what makes it so exciting and so fulfilling.

It's high summer, and the abundance of colour and flora are everywhere to be seen.

Over the next half hour, I'll be showing you the glorious change my garden makes

as it reaches the height of this season.

It's during July and August that the garden builds up to its peak.

By the time we reach the end of August, plants have assumed their absolute zenith.

Things are never going to get any bigger, nor any brighter or more beautiful.

First of all it's geranium pratense, and then there are gorgeous lilies

with beautiful perfume, especially on these sort of sultry, languorous days.

But it's not a question of just letting it all roll over you and enjoying it,

there's lots to do to try and maintain that peak and to keep the whole picture going.

You've got to be deadheading...

..cutting things back, staking things.

And there are cuttings to be taken of all these herbaceous plants because you've got lots of them,

but you want more, and now's the time to do it.

It's not just a question for sitting back and enjoying it.

You've got to be busy.

Getting these two beautiful geranium pratense

out of the front of the hotbed.

Now, geranium pratense is just the best self-seeder everywhere.

And these two have decided to make this their home.

Well, I've given them a chance.

I've let them flower, but I know it's time for them to come out.

I wouldn't normally be lifting geraniums at this time of year,

but no,

they've got to make way,

cos I've got these wonderful ricinus that have grown on so beautifully.

They're going to be one of the most important features in here,

but if I don't get them in now, they really won't do their wonderful, tropical best by September.

They should be sort of up here, really expansive,

and giving the whole place that kind of really exotic look.

I seem to have been waiting ages to do this.

Way back in January I sowed the seed.

And then potted it on,

cos it germinated really well.

And just kept on potting it on until we got these fine, magnificent plants.

I've no idea what these roots are like, but I can see some coming out of the bottom of the pot.

Look at that.

So I'm going to lower it very gently into position.

Where it grows all around the Mediterranean it makes a huge, great big, well, tree, really,

but because they're tender they'll never do that in my garden.

But because I'm giving them such a lovely position

they should really burgeon and become enormous, with these great, big, dramatic palmate leaves.

And they're going to set the scene for this whole hot border.

Lilies are one of the stars of the July show.

Hemerocallis, or daylilies, kick off the display.

The individual flowers last only for a day,

but regular deadheading really helps prolong the show.

Later, trumpet lilies provide a splendid boost to the borders.

They're big and spectacular, either grown in the ground or in pots.

When I'm planting up my bulbs, I detach a few scales, snapping them off cleanly from the mother bulb.

I'm putting them in a plastic bag filled with damp vermiculite.

Then I put the whole lot into a pot to exclude light.

After a few weeks, baby bulbs are formed at the base of each scale.

Then I just line them out in a seed tray full of gritty compost.

Eventually, after a couple of years, they'll make big bulbs,

and they'll start to produce flowers of their own.

It's July, and the garden is burgeoning.

But at the same time, it's teetering on the edge.

You get the feeling that it's wonderful but almost out of control,

like one of those hairdos, you know, that's still all right but only just.

I mean, take this rose.

It's lovely at the moment,

sander's white, absolutely beautiful,

but already some of the flowers are beginning to die,

and it's up to me to try and prolong that beauty

and get as much out of it as I can by a bit of discerning pruning.

And you walk along here, and everywhere you look,

you just know that although you're enjoying it and it's wonderful at this moment,

at any second a storm could come along,

cos the weather's so unpredictable in July,

and the whole thing could be flattened.

The reason the weather in my garden changes so rapidly

is that we're so close to one of the world's greatest oceans, the Atlantic.

I just love to come to the seaside.

It's so alimental, it's nothing but sky and sea and sand.

It's wonderful.

I don't do it nearly often enough, but when I do, this is one of my favourite places to come.

It's Braunton Burrows.

It's strange to think, standing on these sand dunes

and looking out at this lunar landscape,

that my garden's only about 15 miles away from here.

But this is where our weather comes from.

This vast sky, and these huge clouds that belt over at a rate of knots.

And the weather changing so rapidly too, so fast.

One minute, brilliant sunshine,

the next, big, dark clouds and torrential rain.

It's Atlantic weather, I suppose,

and it's what our gardens are influenced by, it's what it's subject to.

It's beautiful.

Well, this is a plant I've really come to see.

This is eryngium maritimum, true sea holly.

And Braunton Burrows is one of the places where it really thrives,

because the conditions are totally perfect.

This is a plant which has evolved with its environment,

and it's a very specialist environment,

and very specialist adaptations that it's got.

Just look at this. It's incredibly prickly.

You're certainly not going to get

any grazing animals tucking into this,

and it's a bad place to have a picnic, too,

because each of these cones of flower

is protected by these incredibly fierce bracts.

I mean, these spines really hurt,

and the bracts and the basal leaves are covered

in this thick sort of wax, to resist the sea spray,

to protect the cuticle of the leaf and to allow the plant to go on growing.

Eryngium maritimum is a native plant so I'd hoped I'd be able to grow it,

but no such luck,

cos it must have pure sand to grow in, and, of course,

it loves to be by the sea.

But what I do grow is eryngium bourgatii,

and it's in a specialist sort of blue form,

and the place it thrives best in my garden is in the raised bed.

It likes high fertility, but it also demands really sharp drainage, and that's just what I give it.

And as it's ready to be pollinated it does exactly what this one does.

All these flowers go from silver to brilliant blue,

but in the case of my bourgatii, the stems and all the bracts go blue too,

so even though I yearn for that steely foliage, I'm very happy growing that.

It's just a couple of weeks ago that I was at Braunton Burrows.

It was so beautiful. I really should go there more often.

In fact, it's tempting at this time of year

just to enjoy yourself.

The garden's looking, well, pretty special,

but there are a few things that I've got to do right now, otherwise they won't get done.

I've got to strike while the iron's hot. That scoop will do. That's it.

And some grit.

We're taking cuttings of my favourite herbaceous perennials.

This is it.

This is aster lateriflorus horizontalis.

I adore it. It's this gorgeous dark colour, but it sticks its arms out like this.

You can even make a hedge.

And it's one of the plants that I've added to Annie's border.

Look at how this has come on. It's astonishing.

But it's got another sort of era that's just coming on,

all these gorgeous asters.

But before this one starts to flower,

I want to take these cuttings, and all you do is just

pull a little piece down like that with a heel,

and you can raid these plants, and you really won't know I've been here at all,

and I'll get several brand new plants out of it.

It's not crucial what length these are,

quite sort of short and strong, and each with this little heel.

So if I have half a dozen from there to start with,

and then all you do is just strim

these basal leaves off like that between your thumb and finger.

And if there are any nasty little sort of extra bits at the bottom

where you've pulled a bit too much of the stem,

just take a sharp knife and trim them up, and then you just plonk them round the edge of this pot.

You can try this with all sorts of herbaceous perennials,

anything that produces these sort of side shoots.

Water it well. Keep it somewhere sort of nice and bright,

but not in full sunlight, not so it bakes.

And they root surprisingly quickly.

They'll be decent little plants if I keep repotting them.

Bit of grit over the top.

I can probably get a few more in there.

I'm always too greedy when it comes to things like taking cuttings.

How's that?

Well, it's mid-August, and we're more than halfway through the year.

My brick garden's come a long way from the bleak days of mid-winter.

It's brimming with the expectation of late-season colour,

but the best is still to come in September.

The canopy in the woodland's completely covered in,

and soon it'll be drifting into its resplendent autumnal hues.

Alice's garden reached its peak in June.

It's still going strong,

but lots of the early flowers have already set seed,

and I can't wait to start collecting them.

At the beginning of the year, Annie's garden was a scene of complete devastation.

I cleared it out and replanted the whole space.

I was a bit worried, a bit apprehensive,

but just look at it now.

I can't believe it's recovered so quickly.

Jake Hobson created a beautiful cloud effect on the box hedge in, my hot borders way back in April

but now his hard work's smothered with masses of exotic foliage,

and the hot, hot colours beginning to emerge.

But there's always room for some more.

In this bottom corner of the hot borders,

this ricinus that I've planted,

just a matter of weeks ago, really got established.

Look at them, they're almost like little trees,

but look at all this bare soil here.

I want to fill it up, and I think these are exactly the right thing.

This is rudbeckia rustic dwarf, all grown from seed this year,

and this big wide range of hot colour,

and this little cosmidium, so pretty, look at that.

I've never grown this before but it's ideal,

it's going to mix in really well.

What do you think, Sylv? Yeah?

But this is what I was going to show you. Come and have a look at this.

I put these willows in, just as stakes, big, strong stakes,

to hold up this fence panel, but they've taken root,

and they've grown up to the sky.

They're absolutely enormous.

But meanwhile... I came over to think about sawing them down,

but look what's on here.

Hornets.

And they've stripped the bark off some of these.

And I don't know whether it's to build a nest.

I doubt it, it's too late in the year.

It's probably some sort of sticky deposit on there, sugary,

and they're tucking in and really enjoying it. They look quite drunk.

Might be aspirin, of course, it's a willow.

Perhaps they've all got a headache!

My hot borders are really beginning to come into their own now.

But cotinus coggygria grace is really taking over.

Way back in March, I pruned it hard,

cos I wanted it to burst into growth,

but it's done more than that,

and the lovely rudbeckia and crocosmia that I planted underneath it can hardly see the light of day.

So I've got to be brutal and take my pruners to it,

and I'm cutting it back really, really hard.

Staging the hot borders is a major event, and it's really great having Neil around to help.

Lots of the plants are hot and fiery and all those we're adding are tender, so I keep them under cover,

and when they're doing really well and just about to come into their prime, out they go.

'At the beginning of July, I gradually bring them out and start staging.'

I've got one back. It was so sad when that one died, wasn't it?

Yeah. It was a veteran, wasn't it, that one?

A bit tender, I suppose, was it?

Very tender. And that winter really polished it off.

I think these red-leaved ones are, you know, the most tender of the lot.

But this is going to be brilliant.

Woo-hoo.

Not too bad, is it?

Then, as we move into August, I add the final touches.

I love doing this. It's like creating a show garden.

The transformation's instantaneous and wondrous.

This is really, really heavy.

I'll pull a bit up here.

Just make this as intensely red as I can.

This is the last part of staging these borders,

but look how well everything's doing in these hot borders.

All these rudbeckias, look at that with that ricinus.

And the hedychiums, they've only been out a couple of weeks but they're brilliant.

And the crocosmia, that one's actually called flame,

so it's ideal.

And all this rudbeckia and helenium.

It's beginning to look really magical,

and sort of what I had in my head.

You never really know, though, but this is a beauty.

Already masses of these red flowers.

This one's bishop of Llandaff,

and I think it's the most fabulous dahlia, and perfect for this spot,

because these flowers are the most brilliant sort of vermillion red,

and they just set the tone for here,

and look how they're going to mingle with all this ricinus, and with banana.

That's been out a few weeks, too, but it's grown, I'll swear it.

I think it's sort of magnificent.

At this time of year it's great to have a plant like cosmos purity to just put into place

and scatter right the way through the garden. You can put it in pots,

You can plant it out in the border.

And it brings this lovely sort of touch of levity,

of movement, with these very fine, feathery leaves,

and these big, white flowers.

I sowed these way back in, I don't know, February, March, I think, because it's a half-hardy annual.

And I just sowed them in half seed trays,

sprinkling the seed finely on the surface,

and they germinated within a week or so. Up they came.

And I potted them on and potted them on until they made these fine, big plants.

But what's really important now at this stage is to get in there and deadhead them,

and all you do is take off the individual flower heads

when they've lost their petals, or near enough have.

And the plant begins to look shabby if you don't do this,

and you want this to be pristine and glowing out right the way through the garden.

To get anywhere in the garden now you really need a machete.

Everywhere's growing so sort of lush and so fulsome,

and in Annie's garden, that's particularly the case.

You can hardly believe that this whole border was completely stripped out,

there was nothing in it, it was laid bare earlier this year.

And everything was replanted, and it's had huge sort of peaks.

Geranium psilostemon just flowering its head off.

Delicate pink phlox,

and spiky veronicastrum.

Masses of colour through here.

Unfortunately, Annie hasn't been around to see it,

and I was really hoping that she'd be here today, but she's not,

she's still away travelling, but I hope she can catch up with it later.

But I want to add a few things, because at the moment,

everywhere's sort of quiet, and I want the interest in the border to continue right the way through.

So I'm adding these nicotiana langsdorffii.

Now, it's not what you'd call, you know, smack you in the eye sort of plant,

but I love it, it's got these long, green trumpets

and little blue anthers in here. It's just such a pretty plant.

And I can remember in March or so, sowing the seed of this,

very, very fine seed on the surface of a tray of compost.

And it took ages to germinate, but once it did,

it moved on quite quickly,

and I pricked out all those seedlings into separate modules,

and then potted them on into pots,

and some of them I put out into the garden when they were nice, chunky rosettes.

But I always save a few and keep on potting them on,

so I've got some big, resplendent plants that I can just drop into spaces where they're needed,

and I think they're ideal in here now.

And that apple tree at the end, now, earlier in the year it was for the chop,

it had such terrible canker,

but it reprieved itself cos it was full of beautiful blossom,

and now it's laden with fruit.

It's going to be a picture in a few weeks' time.

We'll just have to see what happens to it at the end of the year.

You know, July and August, it's been wonderful, really.

There's been such exuberant colour everywhere, marvellous,

but now, you get up in the morning, you come out, and it's shivery.

You can feel the cold, and you look up at the trees,

and you get this hint of russet and orange.

And that's what September's going to bring.

It's as though somebody's swept across the garden with a giant paintbrush

and joined all those colours together so they all become soft and subtle and mellow.

I'm looking forward to it,

but for now I'm going to really make the most of this.

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