Letter L The A to Z of TV Gardening

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

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

But first, we look at one of the true stars

of the flower kingdom. Gorgeous, elegant

and with a wonderful fragrance, it's no wonder gardeners find them so irresistible.

'Our first L is for lilies.'

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 eight o'clock in the morning,

five o'clock in the afternoon, 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 they really 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, 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.

-SHE LAUGHS

-But that's about as far as it goes.

-SHE LAUGHS

This lily is Conca d'Or.

It's an oriental trumpet. Very easy to grow.

Almost any good quality soil.

My favourite colour for a flower, yellow.

Looks you straight in the eye when you view it.

And I'm also attracted by the anthers, 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, I mean, as soon as one comes out, it's, "Come and have a look."

You can 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 dead-heading.

What I love about them

is the tremendous range of colour.

And they are very, very easy plants to grow.

No particular conditions.

And they propagate very easily.

Alstroemeria are quite easy to grow.

They originated 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, it is 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.

His garden is his passion. He loves his garden more than me.

SHE LAUGHS

'Now we're moving onto a real grower,

'because our next L is for leylandii,

'a plant that's been at the root of some serious hedge rage,

'as John Sargent's been finding out.'

This is a war story set in peaceful Britain.

It's a battle over hedges.

Small hedges are one thing.

But big hedges, really big hedges, can cause conflict.

And the bigger the hedge, the bigger the battle.

'The leylandii are the nuclear weapons of the hedge wars.

'They were first bred here in 1888

'at Leighton Hall in North Wales.

'John Naylor imported rare plants from all over the world.

'Cross-pollination took place

'and the very first leylandii were born here.'

-And that's from the original tree, isn't it?

-Yes.

So how old is it?

That's roughly 50 to 60 years old.

Now, tell me how it started, the leylandii, here.

They were put together by accident

in gardens such as this in large country houses,

-and so you had hybridisation, which would never have occurred in the wild.

-So what were the trees?

That's Monterey cypress from mid California

and then this is Nootka cypress, and that's from south Alaska down to north California.

But they don't get any nearer than 400 miles in nature.

They grew so fast with this hybrid vigour

that they had an obvious potential in terms of timber production.

-But then the garden centres got in on the act, didn't they?

-Well, yes,

because Mr and Mrs Smith come along to the garden centre and say,

"We want something that will give us a hedge in two or three years."

Prior to Leyland cypress, that wasn't possible.

And hey presto, the monster is born. HE LAUGHS

'Once they were accidentally invented, they couldn't be stopped.

'From a blessing to gardeners in need of a quick hedge,

'they soon became a curse to many.

'In the 1990s, legal action was taken

'and the first big case was won by Michael Jones,

'a retired school teacher living in Selly Oak.'

-Right, so this is the famous hedge.

-This is the famous hedge

which all the fuss was about.

Tell me how it started and where it got to.

When we came into the house, there was a fence and a beech,

tiny beech saplings.

And I didn't even notice my neighbour

had planted these ten leylandii.

-OK, so they started like that.

-Ooh, down here.

Right, they started like that. How many years was it before they were right up there?

That would be about nine years.

-And it's now about ten feet.

-Ten feet, yes.

And it was, at the time of the action,

up to 40 feet.

'The long, drawn-out legal battle cost tens of thousands of pounds.

'But Michael triumphed and won the right to cut his neighbour's hedge.

'He turned campaigner, creating Hedgeline,

'a support group for thousands of victims of hedge wars.

'Eventually, the government introduced a law to control high hedges.'

It must've been an amazing, long, drawn-out row, this.

Yes, it dominated our family for years,

you know, 20 years,

and the memory of it still rocks us when we think about it.

The trees themselves dominated our lives.

We tried so hard to come to some compromise.

When I cut the hedge, he took me to court.

-So we all have the right to complain.

-Yes.

But it still can be quite a business, can't it?

The position is now that if you suffer from nuisance,

you can complain to the council.

It's that right that gives the impetus

for the neighbour to take the trees down.

The most significant hedge battle of our time

was fought here and won.

But the battle with the leylandii is never completely over.

Unless you cut it back, it'll grow and grow and grow.