Best Of The A to Z of TV Gardening

Hello and welcome to the A To Z Of TV Gardening.

We've been looking at all your favourite garden programmes

and presenters, we've worked our way through the alphabet,

letter by letter, so now it's time to select our pick of the crop.

So sit back and enjoy some of the very best moments from

the A To Z Of TV Gardening.

Here's what's coming up.

-Jay Rayner satisfies his taste buds.

-In my book, flowers are for eating.

Dominic Littlewood goes naked gardening.

Once a month, people come along here to enjoy the scenery,

throw their clothes off...

..and not get told off for it.

And a close-up look at the wonderful world of worms.

Quite a selection, don't you think?

But let's start with a fantastic fruit tree that, thanks to some ingenious gardening techniques,

delivers a whole host of different tastes and flavours.

We're starting with A for apple trees.

And Alys Fowler is in awe of this incredible specimen.

I was amazed when I discovered that nurseryman Paul Barnett has

managed to grow over 250 varieties on just one tree.

I was eager to find out how he'd done it.

This tree is the stuff of dreams!

It's the most wonderful thing I have seen in a long time.

It's looking particularly good this year.

And what possesses you to bung 250 varieties onto a single tree?

The nursery I used to work for had about 80 or 90 different varieties

and they would be lined out in quite a large field, so not having

a large field, I needed to condense it down into something smaller.

So that's really why they were put on here.

-It's fantastic. So each branch is a different variety?

-Yes, it is.

You've got Royal Gala here, you've got Crown Gold up here.

And therefore, it can be possible to have a tree which had cookers

-and eaters?

-Yes, it is.

-It's very clever.

What I get quite excited about this is if you had a tree you

didn't like, you have the potential to have a tree that...

Just graft it over and put any varieties you like eating onto it.

-So you no longer have to get stuck with just kind of a cooker.

-Exactly.

-You can have the lot.

-It's amazing. I am completely in awe of it.

Paul has worked with apple trees for 25 years

and was happy to give me a lesson in apple budding.

The small orchard at the bottom of his garden was a perfect place to

have a go, but first I had to choose which varieties I wanted to grow.

This is a lovely looking apple. Which is this one?

This is a variety called Fiesta. It's a lovely apple.

Crisp, juicy and sweet.

-Can I try it?

-Yes, you can, yeah.

-Mm! Really crisp!

-Shows quite a good resistance to pest and disease.

-Quite an easy one for gardeners.

-Yeah. Lovely.

-Very fertile variety.

-Lovely looking apples as well.

-It is, yeah.

-Really pretty.

-What you expect from an apple.

-Well, can I have one of these, then?

-You can.

-This is great! It's like being in a supermarket!

I can see one of my all-time favourite apples here.

Good old Pitmaston Pineapple.

I have such fond memories of eating way too many of these.

-It's a lovely little heritage variety.

-It's beautiful.

-It's a very late one.

-It is. Never gets much bigger than this, either.

No.

It would be a good one for your tree.

Get the red of the Fiesta and the yellow of the Pitmaston Pineapple.

-It's a perfect kind of one-person quick eat.

-It is.

That's what I like about this. Mm, perfect!

Next, it was time to learn the magic of budding.

First Paul selected and cut off a healthy shoot

from one of my chosen varieties and stripped it of all its leaves.

So, we've got our material and this is my tree. Is it a good tree?

It's a good tree, yeah. You've got some nice young vigorous growth here. It's ideal.

You're looking for sort of two or three nice strong shoots, which we've got here.

-And sort of about this thickness.

-About this thickness, yeah.

-About the thickness of a pencil.

Next, he prepared the area on my tree where the bud would go.

After clearing the leaves and the shoots,

he made a 4cm-long cut with a clean, sharp knife,

deep enough to expose the cambium layer, the green bit below the bark.

Then, Paul cut a slither of the same length from the donor branch.

This contained the bud of the apple I wanted to grow on my tree.

The bud was then placed into position,

making sure it matched exactly.

To keep it in place, it was tightly wrapped, using budding tape.

But a clear plastic bag secured with tape would have done the job just as well.

Well, you made that look incredibly easy,

but I know that practice is how you get good at these things, and it's a long time, so...

It started well when I made the incision on the mother plant.

Cutting the bud was another matter however.

But in the end, it seemed to fit...well, almost perfectly.

It would be a nail-biting six weeks to see if my graft had taken.

Now for the moment of truth.

You're not looking...for any great...change at this point.

You just need to make sure that the bud is nice and fat and healthy.

And it looks like it's taken perfectly.

So let's see how the rest are doing.

Well, so far, so good. And only time will tell with these grafts,

but the joy about this tree is the fact that you have five varieties

on one tree, so even in a small space, I get plenty to eat.

Amazing!

Now, our next "best of" comes from a native flower that usually

comes out in April when the soil is warmer,

and when it arrives, it certainly knows how to put on a show.

We're looking at B for bluebells.

And Mike Dilger has found one of the finest displays in the country.

I'm with Fraser Bradbury from the Forestry Commission.

-Fraser, shall we show them?

-I think we should.

-Have a look at this.

This is West Woods, near Marlborough in Wiltshire,

reputedly one of THE very best bluebell bonanzas.

There are bluebells as far as the eye can see. Front, left, back, forward.

-It is 100% blue, Fraser. You must be very proud.

-I am very proud.

It's a sea of blue and it's here because we've managed these

-woodlands sympathetically for the bluebells.

-How many?

How many bluebells? I'm halfway through counting!

I would say probably more than millions, we might even be approaching billions here.

We've got maybe 300 hectares of bluebells here.

So it's quite a large site.

-It's over so fleetingly, isn't it?

-Well, West Woods,

the great thing is that you can get, at different times when you come in, different aspects.

So the bluebells will be out in one area and they won't be quite out in another,

so you can walk through this wood and see bluebells at the beginning of May, middle of May, end of May.

Some liken the spectacle to a cathedral with a wonderful

carpet of flowers below.

Although you shouldn't pick wild flowers,

I've been given special permission to pick one bluebell

by the landowner, to show you that amazing bulb.

If I have a look at it here and give it a good old squidge,

look how sticky it is!

And this substance has been used down the generations for helping

bind books, but they found this material also prevented

the books from actually being eaten by things like moths and silverfish

because of its toxic properties. Really amazing! Look at that!

Because it's poisonous,

most foraging woodland animals wisely leave the bluebells alone.

But there is one potentially serious threat - a foreign lookalike.

Don't these bluebells look gorgeous?

Well, they're not as lovely as they might seem

because they're imports from the Continent.

And the problem is, they like mixing it with our native bluebells.

I'm meeting Mark Spencer, who works for the Natural History Museum.

Isn't this the loveliest spot to sit?

Absolutely fabulous. I mean, where else...?

Indeed, in fact, nowhere else in the world can you really come and see this kind of spectacle.

Particularly when you get low, you get the most incredible vivid blue colour the whole way round.

It is stunning. It is a completely unique thing, the British landscape has really

got something to go, wahey, this is ours, it is British and we love it.

Is it likely to last? What is the problem with the Spanish invader?

Well, we need to find out - is there a problem?

There's been concerns raised by conservationists, gardeners

and parts of the British society that maybe

a threat from the so-called Spanish bluebell,

which is a plant which has been grown in British gardens for about 300 years.

But increasingly, there are signs that it's moving out of gardens,

partly as a throw-out, people throwing away excess bulbs.

Sometimes it may be because it's naturally seeding into the local environment.

And people are concerned that it's hybridising with the native plant

and this hybridisation may well affect

the ability of our native plants to survive into the future.

So, Mark, what is the difference between our native bluebells,

which I have here, and the Spanish conquistadors, which you have?

Ah, right. The British plant has classically got a rather Gothic arch just here.

-Yeah.

-This one's wilting a bit, but the flower spike on the Spanish tends to be more upright.

The native plant also, each individual flower is tubular,

straight sided, whereas the Spanish, they're much more wide

and opened out. Leaf width is also a really useful feature.

-You can see here straightaway that this leaf is much wider...

-Oh, yes.

..than the native plant.

And also it tends to be a much more vigorous plant.

Often, you'll find that these really are kind of quite large compared to these plants here.

But rest assured, here at West Woods, the British bluebell rules supreme.

So if you've got bluebells in your garden,

check if yours are the Spanish speciality or the best of British.

Still to come, naked gardening,

roses and the wonderful world of worms.

But now, it's all about eating

because we're skipping onto E for edible gardens.

And here is food writer Jay Rayner's take on them.

Just marvel at these beautiful nasturtiums,

and these violas are simply stunning at this time of year.

Yes, I'm a man who's not ashamed to admit how much he loves flowers,

but I am not bidding for a job on Gardeners' World.

In my book, flowers are for eating.

In today's top restaurants, meals with flowers are very trendy,

unlike my food hygiene hat.

Now major supermarkets are also offering new ranges of salads

with flowers. It may sound a tad surreal,

but there's a long culinary heritage behind cooking with flowers.

There are references to dandelions being eaten in the Old Testament

and the Victorians ate candied violets.

But what are today's flower foodies eating?

Normally, you grow salad leaves. When somebody came to you and said,

"I'd like you to grow flowers for food, what did you think?"

I thought they were mad.

But we were convinced when we started eating them.

We understood that there's some colour and flavour that we can get from those leaves, so why not?

Are there any particular differences between the kinds of flowers you're growing here?

The violas we've worked with our customer to make sure they actually get into the pack

and are looking good by the time the consumer gets them.

We are struggling with the nasturtiums.

They are a very delicate leaf with a lot of shape and structure.

And to wash those is quite hard at the moment.

But we are hoping that we will get there maybe later on this summer.

Flowers are all very pretty in their place

and there's no doubt that we eat with our eyes first, but do these

really amount to anything more than decoration on a plate?

Yorkshire-born chef Charlie Lakin is preparing me a real treat today.

There's mackerel salad with nasturtium and a creme brulee with gorse flower syrup.

So tell me, flowers and cookery, is it merely about what it looks like or does it have an important flavour?

No, I think first and foremost, it's about flavour, rather than the appearance.

It looks great on a plate, but you should always look to flavour first.

-How long have you been cooking with flowers?

-Pretty much all my life.

My mum used to use them a lot in salads and making wine and jams, things like that.

It's a really exciting time of year, as a chef.

Once your blossoms are coming in and your flowers, summer's going

to be here soon and you're going to be running round like an idiot.

'So time to find out if flower power really delivers on taste.'

Mm. Nasturtiums really are peppery, aren't they? Cuts through it.

And it's a bit floral, if I'm allowed to say that. I hope I am!

-I would say so, yeah.

-Creme brulee time.

Good crack.

It is sort of grassy, earthy taste, isn't it?

It's a bit like camomile leaves. There's a bit of bitterness right at the back as well.

You're left with the finish of gorse flowers and it just lingers, sort of thing.

Mm. I would never have thought of flavouring a creme brulee with gorse flowers.

Fantastic stuff. Thank you very much.

I'm not surprised that flowers can be delicious.

Their uses and flavours have been well documented in culinary history.

What surprises me is that they've taken a back seat in British cookery for so long.

Beware, British gardeners. The foodies are coming!

Mm! Lunch!

Edible flowers, brilliant!

Now we jump from E to H, for a look at some feathered friends

that more and more people are adding to their gardens.

This H is for hens

and here's a man who couldn't be happier with his ones.

# All day long, don't you know? Yeah, don't you know?

# I'm saying, boom-a chick-chick pluck-pluck-plucking

# All day long, don't you know?

# Yeah, don't you know?

# Now sometimes you give me loving and sometimes you give me dough. #

As far as chicken-keeping goes, with me,

I started as a hobby when I was ten years of age.

It became an occupation, I'm not going to say a great living,

when 14, 15 years ago, I took two heart attacks, cardiac arrest.

They actually gave me three months to live, at one stage.

And I just had to have something to do to keep me going.

And in honesty, the chickens have kept me going.

I have a great saying - you don't have to live in the country to follow a cottage economy.

You know, you can have a small garden, you can

grow your veggies and you can keep your poultry.

The food miles are nil, no matter what colour chicken you choose,

they're all green.

I'm old enough to remember when everybody had their vegetable garden

and a pen of hens in their garden, knowledge was passed over the hedges.

Everybody, I'm not saying they were experts, but they were knowledgeable

poultry keepers and consequently, it's a thing we're losing.

Whoa, Flash!

# Everybody's talking about chickens

# Chickens are a popular word

# Everywhere you go, you're bound to find

# Chicken ain't nothing but a bird. #

The only thing you really need to keep a chicken happy is,

I would say, water before food because if they are ranging,

they'll find a fair bit of food.

But it'd be water, food and a small amount of grit.

One of the things that people ask,

are they going to wreck my garden when I get them home?

Chickens will wreck your garden, if you don't use a bit of common sense.

I think when you've got small seedlings, yes,

they're going to be tasty, so protect those.

They clear up all the slugs in the garden, for one thing.

We also have the droppings, which we use as an accelerator on the compost.

I wish something had happened when I was 30 to kick me into touch

and make me do this. I've never been so happy in my life.

I'm so content here, and in the evening,

when everybody's gone home and I can get a pint of shandy

and just sit down here and listen to the birds

and look at the chickens, I am so delighted.

There's nobody happier on this Earth.

Oh, that's sweet! Thanks, Chris.

Now, get your safari suits ready because J is for jungle gardening.

Let's meet our guides, Rob and Dave, AKA the J Team.

MUSIC: Theme from 'The A Team'

We're at Desert Jungle HQ in Taunton, which is our little exotic plant

centre that Rob and I have created here over the last three years.

We live beside each other and we didn't really speak

to each other for the first four years after I moved in cos

I was a milkman and worked really unsocial hours

-and suddenly we started to notice our gardens were beginning to merge.

-I had bananas, he had bananas.

One night, there was a power cut and our neighbours invited us

-round cos they had an Aga and it was the only place anyone could eat.

-So we all met up over a stew.

And our lives have never been the same since.

-And our wives rue the day we ever met!

-Definitely.

You can have an exotic garden with totally hardy plants.

You can put down a membrane, you can bark over the top.

There's no weeding. Or you can use the really difficult stuff, which gives a different

dimension to your exotic garden, but does incorporate a bit more work.

You've got to be prepared to be sitting at work at five o'clock

on a December evening, the weather forecast comes out,

there's a frost, "I've got to get home fast, get the fleece out,

"cover up the banana or whatever."

No, mate. That's just you. Most normal people don't.

We grow a huge range of plants, far more than we ever thought we would.

We specialise in bamboos, tree ferns, palm trees,

we do a lot of cacti and succulents.

We've probably got the best part of a thousand different things, I suppose.

One of my loves is bamboo. I think they're just fabulous plants.

Evergreen and the colour range on them is just fabulous.

And you get this delicious sort of yellow colour on some of them.

There's a bamboo for every garden. Some of them can be quite thuggish.

This one here is beautiful, but it's big.

They work great in a jungle garden as a really good foil.

It just gives you that evergreen structure,

so in the winter, there's always interest in the garden. It's just the ultimate plant.

This is my tree fern house

and it's my favourite place on the entire nursery.

This is possibly the most special of all of them,

it's certainly my favourite one.

It's Cyathea medullaris from New Zealand, or it's called the mamaku.

It's immense. It'll grow 60ft tall.

What I think is incredible is you've got this little frond here that over

a period of a couple of weeks just grows and grows

until you get this huge frond at the end of it.

It's just an incredible marvel of engineering, how something,

this little fist of frond,

can turn into this great big thing above my head here.

If you can get hold of a small medullaris and love it,

look after it, it will be possibly the best plant in your garden.

Certainly the best plant in mine.

Well, if you want to take the plunge and have your own tree fern,

the first thing to do is to choose a really good plant.

First of all, just feel, put your hand in, have a good grope,

bit of a James Herriot moment. Put your hand in the centre of the trunk and see if you can find

the fronds in the centre and you can feel them all tightly curled up.

That's a good sign of a nice healthy tree fern.

The next one, let's have a look at the trunk, it should be heavy.

If it's really, really light, then don't buy it

because it hasn't been looked after. Then, when you get it home,

all you need to do is to sink it about an inch into the soil.

That's all you do. Put a nice stout stake behind it to hold it in place

and then just start flooding it with water and in the winter, a handful of

straw in the centre of the crown and that will get it through the winter.

Don't worry about wrapping it, it's not necessary.

And more often, it will cause the plant to dry out and you'll kill it.

We've won two silver gilts this year and we've been really close.

A lot of our plants, the tropical ones, don't really start growing until the end of May

and so by Hampton Court, it's almost the peak of the growing season.

-So we should be at our best.

-Yes. Gold for Hampton Court!

And in case you're wondering,

they won a silver gilt medal at Hampton Court that year.

Now, on the A To Z Of TV Gardening,

we dug up quite a few golden oldies and here's one of the best.

K is for kit.

And back in 1988, there was nothing more state-of-the-art than

Robert Symes' wandering water sprinkler.

It's a garden sprinkler that moves round the flower beds

in a pre-programmed path.

The water makes the head rotate and that rotary motion is made to

drive the wheels by means of these gears.

The bit of lateral thinking that I like is this guidance

wheel down here. It sits on the hosepipe.

So all you need to do is to lay the pipe along the bed you want watering.

And then the sprinkler will simply follow the hose back to the tap.

Well, job's nearly done.

Certainly beats wandering around with a hosepipe.

Ah! Roll on the summer!

And roll on our next subject.

It's a plant that could be considered the true

star of the flower kingdom.

Gorgeous, elegant and with a wonderful fragrance.

It's no wonder gardeners find them so irresistible.

This L is for lilies.

And for Harry Brickwood, once he started collecting them,

he just couldn't stop.

I've been growing lilies for approximately ten years

and I presently have approximately 2,000.

Ten years? Ten years, he's really loved lilies.

When you grow one, you see how beautiful they are

and you've got to have more and that's what he does.

I have got to the point where I'm really obsessive about lilies.

Harry in the garden?

Well, from about 8.00am, 5.00pm, with about 20 minutes for lunch.

That's how long.

Lilies are almost the perfect flower. Just what every flower should be.

Six petals, they just look at you and say - you've got to love me

because I'm so beautiful.

I can do all the hanging baskets, I can do all

the boxes on the house and I can go and clear up the mess he makes.

But I'm not allowed to plant.

There's no question about it, they have a tremendous wow factor.

Wonderful colours.

They grow very well, quite tall, sturdy, they don't flop about,

so they're just a wonderful flower to grow.

I can touch them, I can smell them!

But that's about as far as it goes!

This is a Conca d'Or, it's an Oriental trumpet. Very easy to grow.

Almost any good quality soil.

My favourite colour for a flower, the yellow. Looks you straight in the eye

when you view it.

And I'm also attracted by the way they bobble about

when the wind blows.

He just loves the beauty of them, that they are absolutely perfect.

And of course, they have this wonderful perfume as well, which

helps and as soon as one comes out, it's come, come and have a look!

He's going to spend all day doing that!

Running and having a look at another one!

At the peak of the Hemerocallis season,

I spend in excess of two hours every day deadheading.

What I love about them is the tremendous range of colour

and they're very easy plants to grow.

No particular conditions

and they propagate very easily.

Alstroemeria are quite easy to grow.

They emanated in South America,

I think, Peru.

They like free-draining soil, flower continuously from late May,

right the way through August, September.

When they've finished flowering, what you do with alstroemeria is

you actually pull the stem completely out of the ground.

This encourages further shoots from underground

and you will easily get second flushes.

If you're very new to growing lilies,

the one I would highly recommend is Yellow Star.

It's easy to grow, looks wonderful. Everything about it is lovely.

The other good thing about Yellow Star is it's very easy

to propagate from the bulbils, which form in the leaf axils.

And I have had plants in bloom within two years of sowing the bulbils.

Each year, I find that my appetite for gardening is getting greater

and greater.

I'm trying to pack more plants into smaller places, which means

eventually, of course, the lawn gets smaller, the beds get bigger.

I just like a garden full of colour and flowers.

This garden is his passion. Loves his garden more than me.

Now that's dedication!

But let's move on to our next subject and it's an unusual one

because we're jumping to N for naked gardening.

And here's Dominic Littlewood revealing it all.

Today is a day with a difference

because here in the heart of rural Wiltshire lies Abbey House Gardens

and they're stunningly picturesque.

This was a Benedictine monastery 1,300 years ago,

so it's fair to say it's a historical and holy place.

But nowadays, once a month, people come along here to enjoy

the scenery, the gardens, have a picnic, throw their clothes off...

..and not get told off for it!

It's a first for me!

Like me, you're probably asking yourself - why naked in the garden?

Let me tell you, it all started when naturists

Ian and Barbara Pollard bought Abbey House.

Being keen historians and gardeners,

they set about recreating this estate to reflect the history of the site.

Tell me about the gardens.

Well, we bought the place back in '94, so 13 years,

and when we came, there was nothing here.

The only bit of view, there was that funny face. Not a bad resemblance!

Yeah, thanks a lot(!) I can see where this is going!

I wanted to get the history of the place into the garden, so we've

just been walking along the side of what is my Celtic cross knot garden.

-This is an open day with a difference.

-We've become known as the naked gardeners.

We found that naturists were emailing and saying,

"If you garden naked, can we visit naked?"

And we decided that we would offer one day a month to allow

people that opportunity.

What's the difference between a normal naturist day and an open day?

A normal naturist event elsewhere would be in the majority that

everyone has to take their clothes off.

Here, it's entirely optional.

What could you do that would make me feel like getting my clothes off right now?

We're not here to persuade you to take your clothes off at all.

What we are doing is giving you the opportunity.

-So, really I'm sort of the odd one out with my clothes on.

-Afraid so.

Course, you don't have to stay clothed.

I can't help feeling a little bit awkward about letting people see me in my birthday suit.

Especially as it needs an iron!

# Keep on running... #

You know what they say, when in Rome, do what the Romans do.

Well, that's what I did. I got buck naked and I went out there and mingled with the naturists.

Oi, do you mind?

Now, I've got to be honest, I didn't enjoy it at all.

I felt very conscious of the fact that I was looking at people,

they were looking at me and whenever there was a pause, I just felt like covering myself up.

I can understand why Ian and Barbara do it, but what I can't understand at the moment is why

so many other people travel so far to come and do it here.

-Bill and Sharon, where are you from?

-Coventry.

Everybody seems to be enjoying themselves, except me.

-I never know quite where to look.

-You generally find that people don't look anywhere,

apart from eye contact most of the time.

It's just the feeling of freedom, you can enjoy nature as nature intended.

It's been a liberating experience,

but I'm not so sure I'll be rushing back to do it again soon.

One thing I have learned though is this is not the place for voyeurs.

In fact, voyeurs are actively discouraged.

So if you don't have any hang-ups and want to experience that

feeling of getting back to nature, well, this could be for you.

-Ladies, could I just interrupt? You haven't seen a pile of clothes, have you?

-No, sorry.

-No, sorry.

-Any chance of borrowing one of your towels?

-No, bring your own!

-Thanks a lot(!)

After all that enthusiasm, let's change gear for a moment.

We're joining Alan Titchmarsh for a lie-down. Not because he's lazy, oh, no.

it's all for a master class on our next letter and subject.

S is for sunlight.

The first thing you've got to do is to persuade your family that

you're doing research cos while you're out at work all day,

the sun is moving around your garden, so that some parts of it

are in sun all the day, some for just a small part of the day.

Just working out which.

Choose a nice sunny summer's day and sit back and see what happens.

It's important because different plants need different

amounts of light, depending on where they come from.

Those that are woodlanders like shade,

those that grow in open fields like full sun

and you remember the labels in the nursery, "grow in shade",

"grow in sun", put them in the wrong place

and they will eventually get sick. And even die.

Hostas, for example, love shade.

Out in the wild, they grow in damp, shady hollows, so find a similar spot

in your garden and it's the right plant in the right place.

It can't help but grow.

Sun-loving plants like these need to bask.

Put them in sun and they'll love you for ever.

So while I've been lying here, exhaustive research has shown me

that border over there gets sun for most of the day,

so it is a sunny border.

Plants that are described as liking full sun will love it.

That one over there gets sun for part of the day,

perhaps a quarter of the day.

So really, the plants that are described as liking partial shade will enjoy that one.

That one over there gets barely a glimmer from dawn till dusk,

so it certainly qualifies for full shade.

It was worth lying down here, wasn't it?

And just as sunlight is crucial for our plants, so is our next subject.

We're at W for worms.

And you may be surprised to learn just how important they are.

Let's meet Emma Sherlock.

Emma is Curator of Worms at the Natural History Museum in London.

Not only that, she's President of the Earthworm Society of Britain.

As Emma is about to reveal,

there's far more to the humble earthworm than first meets the eye.

Most people think we've only got one species of earthworm in the UK,

but that's really not true.

We actually have 27 different species.

We've got stumpy green ones and they're bright green,

stripy ones, these ones, when they stretch out,

you'll really see the stripes on them, we call them tiger worms

because of the stripes.

We've got pink ones, we've got grey ones, we've got

ones with black heads, we've got deep red ones.

Some are really large, sort of 30cm in length, right down

to some adults being just a few centimetres.

So massive diversity.

Surprisingly, scientists like Emma know very little

about the distribution of these different earthworm species.

Sampling the worms in your garden can help fill in these gaps.

The better way to sample earthworms really is just to dig

a hole in the ground, so I generally dig around a plot,

pull out the square I've dug and then just go through it

and try and see how many earthworms are in here.

And in a plot this size, potentially, it could be 50,

100, maybe even if it was a really rich patch,

maybe even up to 200 earthworms.

So in an area the size of a football field,

you could get maybe as many as two million earthworms.

All gardeners know that earthworms are really good for the soil.

But the reason that is is because they are burrowing

down into the soil, they're letting air in, letting carbon dioxide out.

Earthworms are the recyclers of the planet.

They are breaking down all the organic rubbish and releasing

all those nutrients back into the soil to be used again by the plants.

Without earthworms in our soils, life would pretty quickly dry up.

Earthworms aren't just good for the soil.

Their juicy, muscular bodies are perfect food for lots of other wildlife.

Birds just can't resist them.

Badgers gorge on them.

60% of their diet is made up of worms.

And moles? Well, they can eat 50 grams of worms a day.

It does seem they get rather picked on by other animals.

One neat little trick I'm going to share with you is something

to actually get the deep burrowing earthworms to the surface

without the heavy digging. And that's this.

What I've done here is mix mustard powder with water,

maybe around two tablespoons per litre and a half bottle.

And then pour on the ground.

What this technique does is it just irritates the worms slightly,

so they come up to the surface.

Earthworm behaviour is also fascinating,

not least the way they reproduce. I'll let Emma explain.

Earthworms are hermaphrodites, so that means they have male

and female parts, but they still sexually reproduce.

So they find another earthworm, kind of glue themselves together,

pass each other sperm, and then when they've broken off,

they then each produce a cocoon, which then sits in the soil

until the conditions are right and then the babies emerge.

I love earthworms because they're

so amazingly important for our soils,

they're such fascinating animals

and when you actually start to look at them, it's amazing the diversity

and variety, the sizes, the colours, the different jobs that they all do.

And yet, no-one's out there looking at them.

They're working so hard, under our feet.

I hope you see them in a different light now.

We sure will, Emma! And with those worms,

we've almost wriggled our way to the end of the show.

But not before we look at my personal favourite,

the nation's favourite.

We're ending on R for roses.

And John Adams is passionate about them.

About 15 years ago, I went to a famous local rose grower

to buy a couple of currently fashionable roses for my new garden.

Because I bought two, they gave me a little black pot,

this little thing, for nothing.

And I put it at the top of my garden.

And this is what it was. Paul's Himalayan Musk.

And since then, I've been loving and growing old roses.

Smell that smell.

Here's a fine example of why I love old roses.

This is an old French rose

called the Duc de Guiche.

It's covered in beautiful buds that are going to come into flower

over the next month or so.

And the flower itself has a typical old rose colour,

lots and lots of petals, a green button eye, a delicious scent.

It blends in very well with this geranium

and other plants that we've put around it

and that will go on giving me joy for the next five to six weeks with its flowers

and then still look very good in the garden once it's stopped flowering.

You really should find space to put a few ramblers.

This one is Auguste Gervais

and it's a Wichurana Rambler,

it's based on the Rosa Wichurana.

It means it's very, very flexible.

I've been able to wind it round this post

and wind it along the top of the post there and it flowers all along,

very happily, at this part of the year.

And it puts on old roses, with the colour and the scent

and the form of an old rose because no-one's managed to invent

a modern rambler that's anywhere near as good as the old ones.

Now, when my old roses, my summer flowering roses,

which are in brilliant bloom now, when they've finished in about a month's time,

I'll just take a hedge cutter and slice it through about halfway up.

None of this messing with pruning this and that, a quick slice.

It will then regenerate itself with beautiful green spring growth

and look beautiful throughout the year.

What a lovely rose you are and what good value!

People also worry about replant sickness, which is

the rule that you should never plant where another one has been.

I do it all the time because I get my colour matches wrong or

because I don't like it where it is, I dig it up,

I dig a nice big hole again, but I move all the soil

and put new soil in from some other part of the garden

and maybe a bit of Hoof and Horn to give it extra slow release nitrogen.

So you can move things around, you don't need to worry about that,

when you've changed your mind. Isn't she lovely? Look at this.

A lovely Moss called Madame Louis Leveque.

And she's got so many petals that she needs just a little bit of support.

So why do I love old roses so?

Well, it's partly beauty and it's partly romance.

The old roses, the beauty of the flower, the form,

has not been surpassed by anything

which has happened in the 20th century.

That's why we still grow them.

And when I look around, I think, some of these, Shakespeare knew.

When Herrick said, "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may," he meant these.

When Strauss wrote Der Rosenkavalier, this is what he had in mind.

When you marry, you give your girlfriend a rose and your wife a rose.

It's romance, it's beauty. I love roses.

What an amazing collection!

And with that, we've reached the end of the show.

I hope you've enjoyed the A To Z Of TV Gardening as much as I have,

but for now, goodbye.

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