Letter K The A to Z of TV Gardening

Hello and welcome to The A to Z of TV Gardening,

where we sift through your favourite garden programmes

and dig up a bumper crop of tips and advice

from the best experts in the business.

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

And this time we're learning the best way to plant an interesting

variety of K, for kale.

Knightshayes Court supervisor Lorraine Colgroup

is giving Carole Klein the low-down on how best to plant it.

So, this is a local kale, called Taunton Dean,

and the locals would have had these in their gardens

and it would give them kale all year round.

It's very interesting. It has no viable seed.

Right. Not a flower in sight. How old are these?

These are four years old, and I've never seen any flowers on them.

If there's no flower, there's no seeds. How do you propagate it?

Well, you have to take a piece from it.

Here's a suitable piece. Let's pull it down. Here we go.

You pull a piece off. You've got a bit of a heel there.

Yeah, you've got a tree! A cabbage tree!

A big piece. For growing, you don't want it to have so many leaves.

Just snick them off like that.

All you want is the growing leaf.

I'm very careful up round here. I'll take that one off.

So when you put it in the ground,

you put it in at least halfway up.

Up to about there, I would think, on this one.

Denude it!

And there you go.

It'll concentrate on making root

and will all these side shoots produce...

You can actually see the new leaves beginning to come out from there.

That will be your nice bushy new plant.

-Yes, they really are architecturally beautiful.

-Yes. Lovely plants.

How long would a piece like this take to root?

It does take a while. Probably two or three months.

I live in a cottage, too, so I can have my own Cottager's Kale!

Now, after that unusual vegetable,

it's time to get our hands dirty with a flower

with a very suggestive name!

Our next K is for Knautia,

It's easy to grow and Alice Fowler can't recommend it highly enough.

Now, this garden's looking a bit bare

and I need to find a plant that will flower its socks off

continuously all summer long

in a complementary palate

to these sweet peas which are the Geoff Hamilton, Percy Thrower,

Alan Titchmarsh and Monty Don

which are all in a pink to dark pink palate.

So what I've done is got hold of some Knautia Macedonica.

This looks very similar to a scabious

and it comes from the Balkans.

It is just a fantastic plant. If you buy one thing in the summer, buy this,

because whatever the weather,

it will flower its socks off continuously all summer long.

It's really value for money.

It's a lovely deep, dark, pinky purple

so it will be very complementary.

So I'm just going to dot it around.

And to bulk up supplies, I have a friend who has

a pastel pink version in his garden,

and it's self-seeded itself all over the place

so I've managed to get a few off him.

Knautia likes to grow in full sun to partial shade

and it's particularly drought-tolerant,

so it's good if you've got a little baked back garden.

They're such healthy, strong-growing happy plants

that you really just shove them in the ground and give them a water

and I guarantee they'll be off.

I also guarantee they will self-seed themselves all over your garden,

so you'll have plenty of these to come.

It's no bad thing, cos you can give them away to friends.

And one good tip.

Never dead-head Knautias,

as you'll remove the flower's ability to self-seed.

Now we stay with flowers

as our next K is for Kniphofia.

Monty Don explains what it is and how best to plant it.

The last plant I'm going to put in

is a Kniphofia.

Kniphofia Gladness.

And I want these to link the jewel garden

with these beds.

Because if you've got two separate pieces of garden,

or just two separate borders,

it's no good having a dramatic change from one to the other.

There's got to be some continuity

so that the eye can easily make that transition

and also so they can mingle.

It's not a separate garden, just a separate idea.

These Kniphofias work perfectly for both.

They come from South and Central Africa

and are named after a Dr Hieronymus Kniphof

and really we should call them Kniphofias.

They're beautiful. You don't just get red hot pokers.

You can get them in every shade of yellow and orange

that will take you right through the summer into autumn.

You can see here that I've got little offshoots coming.

So next year or the year after, I can divide that

and I'll get two free plants.

That gives us an instant flare of colour.

That'll be picked up by the coneflowers and the daisies

and carried right through into autumn.

You don't need a big garden to do this.

Just a small patch of ground, you can get the idea of that and translate it

and it all works. It'll work really well on any scale.

Thanks, Monty.

Now, we're at K for knot gardens.

and we're joining David Dimbleby as he visits

a typical Elizabethan garden.

Across the Peak District

and up into Cheshire,

is a house and garden whose design is intricately woven together.

Here at Little Moreton Hall

is a very rare and perfect example

of an Elizabethan knot garden.

These geometric shapes made from tightly clipped box.

In the middle of it, this four-leafed clover pattern...

..which is clever because it exactly copies the pattern on the house.

Knot gardens are made to look like a knotted piece of string

with the hedge woven under and over itself.

Hello.

What's the idea behind a knot garden?

The concept was to try and bring some of the house

out into the garden.

So as you can see in here,

the walls are yew hedging

and you can look down into this room from the upstairs there.

-Why the gravel in the middle?

-To set out the pattern.

-Would they have had gravel?

-Yes. It was purely ornamental.

Sometimes they used coloured gravels if it was available.

It's interesting. It's the exact opposite of what we think of as little gardens today.

With flowers, and informal beds and this and that.

This is very, very...

..very formal. Do you think it satisfied them?

-I think so, yes.

-Did they walk around in them?

Just take gentle walks round on the grass.

-Oh, they walked on the grass?

-Oh, yes.

-You don't walk inside the knot.

-No.

Oh. So I'm in the wrong place, really.

-Really, yes.

-Oh.

If it was anybody else, I'd be telling you off now!

Do you get bored, just doing the same thing, year after year?

-No, it's quite therapeutic.

-Is it?

-I think so, anyway.

Don't you want to go mad and change the shape?

Ooh, no. No, heaven forbid!

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd