Letter O The A to Z of TV Gardening

Welcome to The A-Z of TV Gardening,

where we sift through all your favourite garden programmes

and dig up a bumper crop off tips

and advice from the best experts in the business.

Flowers, trees, fruit and veg, letter-by-letter,

they're coming up a treat on The A-Z of TV Gardening.

Everything we're looking at today begins with the letter...

'..O.

'Here's what's coming up. We go out searching for rare wild orchids.'

-They're like the plant equivalent of diamonds.

-A girl's best friend.

-A guy's best friend, too, because I like them.

-Know your onions.

Monty Don on getting them all year round.

The theory is, you store your main crop now and they will last you

through to about April or May, and these follow on in succession.

And organic planting - the history of how it went mainstream.

And when I've said, "Stop spraying," nobody has believed me.

That's all to come, but first we look at a flower that is

so common these days, you wouldn't dream

it was once on the brink of extinction.

O is for orchids.

'And Carol Klein is going back to school to learn the dos

'and don'ts of growing them.'

Writhlington School, it's an ordinary school with an extraordinary secret.

Through the gates and up past the bike sheds,

is an enormous old greenhouse.

Inside, there's always a myriad of activity.

'Pupils and orchids everywhere. And it's all down to their physics teacher.'

When I was at school, people weren't growing orchids.

It wasn't on the national curriculum, was it? How did it all come about?

It's been going here a long time.

This is my 19th year at the school

and orchids have become a really big part of what we do.

If you arrived at school now, aged 11, you could volunteer

and come along to greenhouse club and then get stuck in.

Once you'd shown an interest, you get a group

of your own plants to look after and get ready for shows and propagate.

So, girls, what are these you're growing?

These are the hardy orchids,

and they are ones that can grow in English weather so they don't

have to be in hot temperatures and you just put them out in your conservatory.

-So they're great orchids to start with, aren't they?

-Yeah.

-This is a Masdevallia.

-And it's growing on a lump of wood.

Yes, what we do is, in cool, wet conditions,

we get the plant and put the roots in the bark of the wood.

And that's all it needs.

Just a bit of bark. Couldn't be easier, could it?

-Yeah.

-I think this is one of the most beautiful orchids we've seen in here.

Yes, it's called a Bulbophyllum picturatum

and it smells like rotten fish.

Eurgh! Why?

-Because it attracts flies and insects.

-And they pollinate it?

Yeah, and also what is unique about it is a little part inside moves.

-If you want to blow on it, it will move.

-Come on, let's have a go.

One, two, three.

-Oh, look! It's quivering, isn't it?

-Yes, it's really nice.

# We don't need no education... #

-Can I join you, please?

-Yes.

I have an exam later on,

so I want the low-down on the simplest way of growing orchids.

If I'm growing them for the first time, what do I have to remember?

Not to over-water. Water two to three times a week with rainwater only.

-Right, brilliant.

-Don't over-pot your orchid. They prefer to be pot-bound.

Right. So keep your pots small. Fantastic.

Don't choose the wrong compost.

Orchids grow on trees,

so the main component of any orchid compost should be air.

-So, what else?

-Don't be impatient with your orchid as, unlike tomato plants,

they do grow very slowly and it could take a couple of years before they fully flower.

You also have to try to keep your orchid in the right

temperature zone, around ten to 15 degrees.

I have learnt loads about orchids, but now it's time for the big test.

OK, today were going to do an exam on the dos

and don'ts of orchid growing. Question number one.

What is the main component of any orchid compost?

Right, then, which of these pots would be best to pot this plant in?

Which of these would be the worst ingredient to use

as our compost? We have a bit of perlite, soil or bark.

No conferring.

So, assuming it's a Cymbidium, what would be the best temperature to keep it at?

Last question, question number five.

I want two examples of something you shouldn't do to your orchid.

If you could put down your pen or pencil. The test is finished.

Carol, we will be revealing your results at Gardeners' World Live

but in the meantime, we have a book we want you to take away.

It's our orchid book we've written, The Dos and Don'ts of Orchid Growing.

So get swatting.

-So, Luke, how did I get on?

-Well, you got five out of five.

Whoo! I'm no good at exams!

Except for question four where you put two answers down,

so you cheated a little bit, but...

-It always pays to hedge your bets.

-It does, yeah.

-That's fantastic!

-And all down to this little book.

-Yeah.

It's so packed with information, it's terrific.

-And to having a very good teacher, too.

-Aw, thank you.

We'll continue in the subject of orchids

and head to Lullingstone Castle in Kent to meet Tom Hart Dyke, a man

so passionate about these flowers that it's almost cost them his life.

This is the World Garden,

and this is where I have quite a good selection of hardy orchids

from all over the world, and the idea of the World Garden

is to show you where things originally come from

in the miniature landmasses here, and who introduced them.

For Tom, studying them in the wild is the best way to learn how to

cultivate the orchid.

They are the largest family of flowering plants on our planet.

Every single continent, you have the orchid family on, except Antarctica.

Some grow under ice within the Arctic Circle.

It's the variety of flower colour, their exotic look, their rarity,

the challenging places that they actually grow,

and when you do find them, it is fantastic.

And this one here is actually a hybrid originally from Table Mountain in South Africa.

It's a Disa, or Disa uniflora.

It's a real sod of an orchid to grow.

It requires rainwater.

The hard water here, with all the chalk in it, would kill it.

A sort of acidic, slightly peaty mix.

I've never flowered this before.

It's been two or three years, waiting for it to flower,

and it's only come out in the last couple of days.

The secret of his success is following in the footsteps of the Victorian plant hunters.

But Tom's quest to see orchids in the wild has led him

to some of the most dangerous places in the world.

On a journey into the Colombian jungle, he was kidnapped,

beaten and held under threat of execution for nine months.

His parents presumed him dead.

For the Victorians, it was a lucrative trade that led them to take risks.

But for Tom, it's something more fundamental.

I have green blood cells. My heart is pumping chlorophyll around me.

It becomes an addiction, trying to find things in the wild.

Here we have one of my most exciting orchids, Encyclia pentotis.

But it's no ordinary orchid.

This is one of the family I was looking for whilst being in

captivity and whilst I was travelling in that area after being kidnapped.

Tom had never had much success flowering this variety

until he'd made that ill-fated trip to its natural habitat in Colombia.

You can read all the books you want,

you simply can't beat seeing things in the wild.

I've flowered this more in the last five or six years than

I ever have before, because I've seen the perfect drainage that they need.

In comes the rain, batters the shrubs with pouring, torrential rain.

Then within ten minutes, there was not a cloud in the sky.

It's blue skies, and the sun bearing down on those plants

dries it literally to a crisp within half an hour.

So, in cultivation, let them dry out between the watering.

It's hugely helpful.

While many tropical orchids may be fussy plants

to nurture indoors, there are over 50 native varieties that grow

wild here and enjoy our climate.

So it's not surprising that Tom grows some of his most prized

orchids in the coldest part of his garden.

It's here, for me, this is

most exciting hardy orchid that we have growing at Lullingstone.

This is from two plants, four years ago.

They are amazing how they've spread.

Bletilla striata, known also as the Hyacinth orchid, or the Windowsill orchid,

which is a misleading name because they are hardy,

outdoor orchids, here in the more purple form, with the deep

purpley-pink centres and creamer upper part of the lip,

or "labellum" here.

Very attractive. And this from, in more of a white-ish,

Alba form, as you can see with a lovely, pink, purplish

lip at the end, are really, really easy to grow.

In pots, on the patio, rockeries, they're excellent.

What I would say is not direct, all-day, baking sunshine.

A bit of light shade.

It's a woodland plant, after all, from Japan.

So hardy orchids can be just as exciting as their tropical cousins.

We'll come back to orchids later on.

But now we move on to a style of planting that is so common these days

that we forget it was once considered highly controversial.

Our next O is for organic planting.

And we're looking back at how it was first approached on Gardeners' World

by Geoff Hamilton through the eyes of his fellow presenters.

I think perhaps Geoff went through that crisis of conscience

that all gardeners of our relative age went through,

who were brought up on chemicals and control-freakish gardening, if

you like. When anything appeared that was untoward, you wiped it out.

I think he saw organics as a personal journey.

He wasn't evangelical about it, and for quite a long time,

he would give you both options. "If you're organic, you do this.

"If you're not organic, you use that chemical."

But it was something that evolved.

I think that the control plot, first of all,

whether you feed organically or chemically,

you really have to give your plants something. Those really are pathetic.

I've had the odd spot of trouble with my melons.

I am trying out an organic growing bag and comparing it with

an inorganic one that I've used successfully for many years now.

We can't use slug pellets because it's an organic plot,

so I'll try a new method.

This is very coarse bark.

This is the organic herbicide, the good old hoe.

And the organic plot, it speaks for itself.

It certainly is a viable alternative.

I actually personally discouraged Geoff being too organic,

but in most cases, the presenter's views were what you got.

So all in all,

I am convinced that organic gardening is a viable alternative.

I think that he realised that he needed to change.

And he took you with him as a viewer, and that was very powerful,

because you trusted him. You didn't quite know where you were going,

but you were quite happy for him to take you there.

It took five years of trials, all shared with Gardeners' World

viewers before Geoff stopped using chemicals altogether at Barnsdale,

convinced that organic gardening was the way forward.

When I've said, "Stop spraying," nobody's believed me.

Well, here is the proof of the pudding.

This is my honeysuckle and it's thriving without a sign of

greenfly or blackfly, and it has never been sprayed with anything at all.

My theory is that if you spray indiscriminately, then you kill

the things that eat the greenfly and the blackfly too

and just build up troubles for yourself.

There was a huge backlash from the chemical companies who felt

they were no longer being adequately represented on a Friday night on the flagship gardening programme.

They were, and still are,

an enormous section of the commercial horticulture industry,

and they felt that they'd... not only had they lost a voice on a Friday night,

but they were actually now being criticised.

So what? He had much higher aims, much higher views.

He cared more about the planet and the plants in your garden.

And we stay with Carol Klein as she helps Russell

and Jo Ash to go organic.

To find out how,

they're visiting a pioneering centre of green gardeners.

In 1973, in the mountains of Mid-Wales,

a small community of people got together,

all joined by a single desire to create a sustainable future.

Their home had begun life as a disused quarry near the

Welsh village of Machynlleth.

But as they worked to find new ways of solving environmental issues

affecting the planet, the community soon had a new name -

the Centre for Alternative Technology.

Initially, there wasn't much support for these eco pioneers,

but slowly, their financial aid grew, as did the number of volunteers.

'Today, CAT is Europe's leading eco-centre.'

So I suppose everybody who came here was a pioneer?

-Did you feel like that?

-Yes, we did, actually.

In those days, we really did. It had that air about it.

We were going to change the world.

And do you think you HAVE changed the world?

There are so many people who come to visit now

who are interested in these sort of ideas, aren't they?

It's true and there's windmills erupting all over the place

and solar panels, they're seeing the importance of that.

Not using chemicals for the gardening.

I mean, organic gardening at one time was thought of as something

daft that people with sandals did.

The locals regarded as "the BLEEP and wind place."

Cos we used human manure in those days.

We're not allowed to use it now.

'But it's how they garden at CAT now that I want Jo and Russell to see.

'I've brought them here to experience sustainable gardening

'practices in their purest form,

'in the hope they can take a taste of those techniques home to Devon.'

You just don't expect it, do you,

a place like this in the middle of a quarry?

-I know, it's wonderful, isn't it?

-It's cracking.

We brought our soil along with us, as well,

so perhaps we can get that tested. And see where that's at.

Everywhere you look, it's full of intriguing ideas, isn't it?

Little pockets of things here and there. I can't wait to investigate.

-If you want to take out two level spoons of that.

-OK.

-That's it.

-Brilliant.

Then we just top it up with this water here, which is

deionised water, and this is just a little tablet that you crush,

you put in there and crush it down.

What will happen is, we wait a minute.

The colour of the water will change.

So, the soil we have in our garden, if we live fairly close to the sea,

do you think it might potentially have a certain amount of sand in it?

It depends where you are.

The rocks out in the coast is a type of sedimentary mud

and sandstone mix.

You'll probably have a sandy soil,

which means it's quite free-draining but in the summertime,

you're more likely to suffer from drought problems.

If you look at this, if you hold up to the light.

Try and figure out which of the colours is most like that.

-It has a bluey tinge.

-Yeah, yeah, yeah.

-Certainly not yellow.

-It's not that blue.

-It's not blue, no.

-So, something around 6.57, which is fairly neutral.

-Neutral, yeah.

You can get away with pretty much anything,

as long as they're not acid-loving.

It's 6.5, so it's slightly acidic,

-so you have a good range you can plant in there.

-OK.

You don't have to worry too much.

Recycling will be an important part of gardening for Jo and Russell

and while they're here, they want to learn as much as possible about it.

Top of their list is composting.

Composting doesn't really begin in the garden so much as in the kitchen.

With the kitchen scraps from CATS' point of view,

that's what we're always trying to get people to do is start

composting their kitchen scraps

and their cardboard, so it doesn't go off to a landfill site

and instead get used as compost and gets put in your own garden

to feed your plants, to get the nutrients back in your soil.

Is their a limit to how much cardboard you can put in?

There's a good ratio to have, which is

two parts of green stuff to every one part of what we call "browns," which is

the cardboard and more woody waste and stuff like that from the garden.

Leafmould is great for adding bulk to the soil

and it can be used as a mulch as well to suppress weeds and things like that.

Basically, just put all the leaves into one bin

and leave them to themselves to get on with the process of decomposition.

So the wormery is great for a small garden.

You could even have it on a balcony if you wanted to, or a small backyard.

And that's it? It's tiny, actually, isn't it?

It is quite small, isn't it? This is a commercial wormery.

It's very easy to get hold of and it comes as a kit.

There's three different levels to your average wormery that allows

you to fill up one layer.

When that's full, you put another empty container on and the worms, once they've finished

composting one level of waste, they go up into the next.

They all have holes in them.

You can see underneath, this is the more composted waste,

so the worms are really doing their job on this one.

The kind of worms that work in this bin are not earthworms,

because earthworms like to burrow into deeper soils

when it gets too warm or too cold.

These are called Tiger worms

but again, you can get these quite easily from a supplier.

-Then there's a liquid given off, isn't there?

-There is, that's right.

One of the things people don't realise is that the way

plants take up the nutrients from compost or soil is through liquid.

They don't eat the compost, they take it up through the roots in liquid,

so what you get from out of here is a liquid that you can

use as organic fertiliser.

'Let's hope Russell and Jo found that helpful.'

Still to come, we look at the best way to plant olive trees

and find out how you can turn your garden into an ornamental one.

But first, let's learn the basics of an eye-watering crop.

'This O is for onions, and here's Monty Don.'

(Put that to one side.)

First of all, I think I need to rake that over.

If you remember, we had potatoes in here which I lifted.

These were Charlotte and they were good, but when I lifted the potatoes,

I added compost, forked it over,

and although it's rather dry, that's good soil.

Over-wintering onions are sometimes called Japanese onions.

A lot of them are Japanese varieties.

I have a couple of varieties I have grown before, are reliable

and I like the taste of. And taste is always the important thing.

I have two varieties. There's a white onion called Radar.

Good enough, but quite delicate taste. Which I like very much.

And also Electric Red.

Red onions add colour,

the add glamour and also they tend to be slightly sweeter.

The best thing to do is just dib holes

about four or five inches apart.

Obviously, the wider apart they are, the bigger the bulb.

I don't like onions too big.

I think a tennis ball is perfectly big enough.

Let's do a row along there.

These will be ready for harvesting about June, early July,

so just a month or six weeks ahead of main crop.

But the theory is that you store your main crop now and they will

last you through to about April, and then these follow on in succession.

There's very little else to do but you need to keep an eye on them

because birds tend to come along, see this thing wiggling up and they pull at it.

It's quite common to come down in the morning and find them

scattered around, and that is birds.

The best way to counter that is to cover them with fleece

and weigh them down until you see good green shoots, which means

the roots have grown and anchored into the soil.

It doesn't always happen, so I won't fleece them straight away.

Now you dib a hole to put it in

because there is a basswood plate that the roots grow from and

if you just ram it into the soil and almost screw it into the ground,

there's a real danger of damaging that and therefore affecting root growth.

I actually quite often use my finger instead of a dib.

Though you could argue my fingers were made for dibbing.

Now I'm watering these in, just to make sure that the soil,

which is very dry, firms around the bulbs.

I'm using a rose, rather than a direct jet,

which would just knock the bulbs out of the holes.

Right, that's a job done.

If you've planted more than you need,

Toby Buckland will show you the way on the skill of onion storing.

I've had a really good year for onions and now is the time to store them.

The key thing when it comes to storing these bulbs

is to dry them first,

so these been sitting under glass to make their skins

go papery-dry and rustly.

What they like is good, airy conditions. That just keeps them fresh

and keeps the rot away. Give them that and they'll last well beyond Christmas.

My favourite thing is to string them up.

They look so ornamental when they're put on strings

and there are also easy to harvest from.

On the bottom, I'm doing a hangman's noose.

I've got the standing piece of line

and I wrap the end round it a couple of times

and then just tie a couple of... I believe they're called granny knots,

in on the end. So I've got my loop at the base and I've got my onions.

This one is called Stuttgarter. It's is quite a flat onion, a flat bulb.

I like it cos it's got a very mild flavour. It's a good keeper, too.

I also grew some Mammoth Improved but what makes these

so lovely is that they're sweet.

Those go into that loop at the base, just get wrapped round

once or twice. I'll have a big 'un... Bung that in there.

What I'm doing is making a solid base

at the bottom of the string.

I've got those three onions there, they're hard to hold onto,

but by sliding the knot down, it just pinches them in place.

If you do this and they fall away, it doesn't really matter.

Just reload the loop

and it'll start to tighten on itself as you wind on more onions.

Go with the Stuttgarter next. Look at that - this is the type of onion you don't want to keep.

You see it's got that little bit of brown or blacking at the base.

That means it's starting to rot.

That, if it was left, could spread to the rest of my onion string.

If I cut it open, you'll see.

Just in the base there, the rot's already going into the flesh,

making it soft.

This one, and any others like it,

will be buried deep in the compost heap,

but certainly not kept.

Next onion, nice and firm, good and rustly.

Then the name of the game is just to keep adding onions,

working your way around the string,

or the cord, right the way up to its top.

Sling it on, slide it down.

The place to keep them is somewhere cool like a shed,

nice and dry, though, where the temperatures are even.

Simple. Thanks, Toby.

Next, a tree that we normally associate with warmer countries,

but is now so widely grown that its fruits are one of the most

extensively cultivated crops in the world.

O is for olive trees and we're joining Mark McDonald

and wife, Emma, as they prepare for their first

appearance at the Chelsea Flower Show.

A lot of people buy olives to remind them of their holidays.

It's as simple as that.

There are still a lot of people who believe they won't grow here.

The nursery started in 2004

and this was a totally bare-field site.

It was Emma and I and my father, who has retired,

but said he would give us 3½ years.

Then Emma's father came on board. He retired about three years ago.

It's very much family.

We hand-pick all of our stock.

I've done about 50 or 60 trips to Spain now,

so I sort of know exactly what I want and where I'll find it.

We are always looking for specific things.

This last trip, I was trying to find certain trees that met certain criteria for the show.

We go to more northern regions and inland regions of Spain

because it gets cold in the winter.

So when they come here it's no shock to plants.

Mark's the one that makes things happen

but I just tend to just work out if it's really going to be possible

and sort of cross-question him and, "Do you think we can do that?"

And Mark's sort of, "Yes, we'll do it."

Emma's background is more garden design and seeing the whole thing,

the layout of it, which I can't picture at all.

Yeah, I like putting them together with other plants

and making it all knit together and making it look more in keeping.

Basically, we've gone for two raised beds each side.

Cos it's quite a big space and we thought a variation in heights

would work quite nicely and it would just elevate the two main big trees

up above the crowns of the smaller trees in the middle.

And also the gnarled trees do work really well,

if you can slightly look up to them.

Chelsea is very important for us.

The biggest problem we have is the size of root ball.

And then the weight of the plant.

Basically, we've got two trees, and they're on the corners,

so hopefully people will get nice and close

and will be able to touch the bark if they want to.

The trees we have on site in the UK already that we've had over the winter

won't be in flower at Chelsea.

I'd like them to be in flower,

but they wouldn't be in flower in the UK normally at that time,

so we're leaving the delivery from Spain for another few weeks

to try and bring them on more, so they'll be in flower in May.

The risk is they'll come on too much and they'll have flowered and gone over.

In which case, you probably wouldn't be able to use them.

They were just be full of...

..blossom that's gone over.

Well, Mark, they're not quite in flower, are they?

They're just coming into flower right now.

Yeah, another week to ten days and they'd have been just been perfect, but there we go.

But olives don't need to be in flower,

they're a fantastic plant, evergreen foliage, lovely, silvery colour.

I use them all over London, brilliant on roof terraces.

This is your first time at Chelsea. You're trying to get the point across that there's different

-varieties available, really.

-Yeah, absolutely.

There's hundreds of varieties available.

We're trying to show some varieties that will do well in the UK

with good potential for fruiting.

So you're sort of trialling them, really? Pioneering?

It's a bit of grand word but, yeah, OK, I'll take that.

But you want people to benefit from your trialling in a way to get better fruit.

What do you do with the fruit of an olive?

I tried it straight off the tree once. It was so bitter.

Yeah, you need to cure the fruit in saltwater to remove the bitterness.

We did try with unlimited fruit last year, making oil,

which was a complete disaster.

After a couple of days, I had enough for about two salads.

It's ornamental use, mainly?

Ornamental use, but we use the fruit we produce, as fruit.

At the moment, we're just using it for ourselves.

-How long in saltwater till you can eat one?

-It's about three or four weeks.

I need to change the water every few days.

There's different methods of curing.

The Greeks, the Spanish and the Italians all do it in a different way.

I didn't know there were so many varieties available. Fantastic.

-You've got a bronze. Your first time at Chelsea. Congratulations, well done.

-Thank you.

Olive trees are often used to add a touch of decoration to

a garden, which is what we're looking at in our next subject.

This O is for ornamental gardens.

And we're getting advice from Harlow Carr's senior supervisor,

Alison Mundie, on how to create one.

Here at Harlow Carr,

we treat the vegetable area the same as anywhere else in the garden.

It's got to be very decorative, but it's also got to be productive.

And choose the varieties with that in mind.

Vegetables should be a feast for the eyes as well as the table.

I'm really passionate about vegetables. I'd really like people to grow them as well.

But not feel that they have to got to get into these great allotment

situations or have a great, complicated time of it.

Just choose a bit of bare earth that you've got and you can grow just about anything.

We use a lot of pots in the garden.

It's a great opportunity to use spaces that are occurring

naturally throughout your herbaceous border or shrubberies throughout the year,

so we've actually got pots we've sowed with vegetables,

salads, and then, as these are harvested or go over,

we can have some more waiting to go in.

Some of the pots, we'll just sit on the surface and some of them

we'll put a little further back and sink them slightly so they get the

benefits of keeping the roots cool and you don't have to do so much watering.

In this bed, we've chosen a combination of plants to give

some height in the kitchen garden.

The amaranth over here is a relation to the Love Lies Bleeding amaranth.

This is a grain plant. We've never grown it up here before

so we'll be interested to see what happens with that.

Sunflowers, of course, are great for the wildlife.

They attract lots of bees, hover flies, and later on,

when the seeds form, you get a crop, of course,

of sunflower seeds that you can eat yourself.

At the front here, we've got a beautifully coloured runner bean.

I think this combination works really well as a whole.

Flowers are a great thing to have in the vegetable garden, of course.

As well as looking attractive, they bring in lots of wildlife, and several are edible.

For example, the Borage flowers, the Nasturtium,

and also Calendulas, or pot marigolds.

And, for more inspiration, let's join Joe Swift on a visit to Alnwick Gardens in Northumberland.

This is the ornamental garden

and it's one of the most exciting spaces here at Alnwick.

It's packed full of plants with some great combinations.

It's set within a very traditional walled garden,

but what's interesting is everything here has a modern twist.

There is a strong geometrical layout, combining squares,

rectangles, circles and triangles to form a structured framework.

New buttresses planted against the old brick walls are really nice

touch, adding a simple rhythm and a sense of solidity to the space.

What really excites me about this garden is that when you first look at it,

it feels so familiar, then you look a little bit deeper

and the plants they use here are really quite unexpected.

For a start, we've got these wonderful pleached crab apples.

that are defining this area here.

I've never seen crab apples pleached like this.

But they are a brilliant choice

because they've got great, autumn colour

and look at them at the moment -

they've got wonderful fruit all over them.

They look absolutely perfect.

And precision is key, because they are the tallest element in the garden.

Then we have the yew hedges, exactly half the size

of the crab apples, and then a Cornish hedge, which I have never seen

so formally before, that's exactly half the size of the yew again.

Then, within these defined spaces, you take a close look,

and again, there's something being reinvented here.

We see a traditional rose garden,

standard roses, which has normally just got soil underneath.

A bit boring, but here it's been planted with blueberries,

which creates an understory to the planting

but also you get blueberries all summer long. But look at them now.

Fantastic autumn colour, extending the season of interest,

so yes, the structure feels pretty familiar

but the plants that have gone into it feel fresh and right up to date.

We're almost at the end of today's programme and, as promised,

we're returning to the subject of orchids.

So, here's Mike Dilger, who is in Kent,

looking for Britain's rarest wild specimens.

The Kent Downs are an area of outstanding natural beauty

and support a wealth of plants, including a number of rarities.

And it's on this chalk downlands I'm hoping to track down

some of our most glamorous and mysterious wild plants.

Queendown Warren is a pristine downland valley,

which in summer is full of flowers and insects.

What am I after? Orchids - the femme fatale of the plant world,

and Kent is a great place to look for them,

not just for the sheer numbers, but for some of the rarest, too.

Alison Wright of the Kent Wildlife Trust,

what is it about orchids that people love so much?

-They're wonderful, aren't they?

-They are amazing.

I think it's just that they are rare, they are usual,

they have fascinating habits.

They are just like the plant equivalent of diamonds.

-A girl's best friend.

-Oh, yes.

-A guy's best friend, too, cos I like them.

And they're just diverse. Look at how many species we've got here.

We have Fragrant orchids, just over there we have a Pyramidal.

Just coming into flower,

so it's showing its pyramid shape that gives it its name.

Because they can flower anything from late spring,

right the way through to late summer,

so it is a good time now - in the middle of June is great, isn't it?

The best time is now, when you have so many out in the flower.

But you can see them right the way through the spring and summer season.

Wonderful.

Now, I reckon this orchid is at the top of everybody's must-see list...

It's the Bee orchid, of course.

You can see how the lip perfectly resembles a bee.

It also smells like a female bee, so that attract bees to come in

to take away these little pollen sacs.

But this one's a virgin because the pollen sacs are still stuck there.

Ironically, it doesn't even need to attract a bee,

as the orchid is perfectly capable of self-pollination.

'Now this one isn't so colourful but believe me, it's a real treasure.'

Alison, what a cracking little orchid.

I know, the are amazing, aren't they?

It's called the Man orchid for a very obvious reason, isn't it?

Yeah, if you take a close look at each one, you can

see that right at the very top, you have a little bonnet, like a head

and below that, two arms and two legs just like a little stick person.

-How rare is this orchid?

-This is an extremely rare orchid.

It's really restricted to the Southeast.

Wow, why has declined so much?

-Is it was always quite uncommon, but now it's rare, isn't it?

-Yes, it is.

It needs chalk. We've had so much loss of chalk downlands.

And since the Second World War,

-they think up to 90% has been lost.

-Really?

Added to that, it doesn't just like normal chalk downland,

it likes a little bit of scrub.

You can see all the long grass that we're in here,

just to keep it a little bit damper than most.

So it has really specific needs.

The thing I love most of all is,

you look it up, and they're like men here.

But you look right at the top, they're like little boys

coming out. This should be called "man and boy orchid."

Next stop is Park Gate Down, a diminutive reserve

south of Canterbury that's jam-packed with orchids.

Ian Rickards, reserve warden of this site, I have never seen so many orchids.

The Kent Wildlife Trust must be very proud.

It's one of our real key sites, it's absolutely fantastic.

We've got tens of thousands of orchids on here.

I reckon I'm within three or four metres of about 200 orchid spikes.

Flipping sensational.

The density is wonderful, isn't it? And also the variety,

the number of different orchid species is just stunning.

Why is the site so good?

It's a combination of lots of different things. One,

it's an ancient, unimproved grass. It's never been farmed intensively.

The only farming that's gone on here is grazing

and that's happened for hundreds and hundreds of years.

-It's never been ploughed, has never been fertilised?

-No.

On most orchid sites, grazing is crucial. When do you do it and what do you use?

We do it generally from as soon as the flowers have all finished,

which is kind of September/October,

then we bring on our livestock grazers,

which are Konik ponies or Highland cattle, these old, really tough breeds,

which can come in and graze this site hard for three or four months.

And that's it, that's the management done for the year.

It's pretty straightforward.

It's a botanical ticker's paradise.

Let's wander off and see what we can see.

Check out this beautiful show-off.

This is the Greater Butterfly orchid.

Now, this usually smells...

but only in the evening. It has a lovely smell.

And that's because this is pollinated by moths,

so that's why it smells strongly in the evening.

So I think the Greater Butterfly or Lesser Butterfly

is a bit of rubbish name, really.

This should be called the "greater moth orchid."

'Now here's the real star that I've come to see.

'Once again, close up, the individual flowers have a quirky

'resemblance to something else.'

This is the creme de la creme of orchids.

It's a Monkey orchid and it's incredibly rare, isn't it, Ian?

It's a real spectacle, cos there's only three sites where it exists.

But if you look at the individual flowers themselves,

that's where they get the name "monkey" from, isn't it?

Yeah, they've got arms, legs, they've even got a little tail.

A little hooded head. They're perfectly named, really. Absolutely perfect.

Just wonderful. When you look at orchids, you really have to go down in your hands

and knees. Obviously, in this field, there are orchids everywhere.

We've had to lie down incredibly carefully

so we don't squash any of these orchids around us.

It's not just this wonderful Monkey orchid, there's

an orchid in front of you, there, as well, Ian.

We have the Common Spotted here.

There's a Tway Blade here,

there's a patch of Fragrant orchids right by our arms, which we're being very careful with.

It's just a massive diversity of orchids in this field,

it's wonderful.

-I have to say these are all surrounding the star attraction.

-Yes, yes. Definitely.

I'm at the Royal St George's golf course on the East Kent coast,

near Sandwich and this is one of the most difficult and well-known

golf courses in the whole of the world but I'm not here to practice

my swing or my putting, I'm here for the last part of my orchid quest.

'So far, I've seen 11 different orchids in just two locations

'and now I'm leaving the fairway and greens for the rough.

'To track down an orchid that loves golf courses

'in southern England, the Lizard.'

What a beautiful orchid to end on!

I'm with Pete Forrest, again from Kent Wildlife Trust,

they get everywhere. Why are they so common on golf courses, Pete?

Well, the Lizard orchid is at the edge of its range

here in Britain. It's really down to climate, and this sandy soil here,

which you often get on golf courses, is hotter and helps them out.

Well, it's called a Lizard orchid for a very obvious reason.

Yeah, if you look carefully, you have the tail

and the two hind legs of a lizard sort of disappearing into the flower.

Well, that's the theory anyway.

Well, there we go - my 12th and final orchid.

What a day I've had! And what a beauty to end on!

If you're a golfer in Kent and a rubbish one like me,

and bash the ball into the rough,

have a look for one of these as well as your golf ball.

This is much better, what a gem.

I couldn't agree more.

A real gem there. Well, that's all from us for today.

Hope you join us next time on The A-Z of TV Gardening. Goodbye.

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