Letter R 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 R.

Here's what's coming up.

The dark art of growing super-sweet rhubarb.

It definitely feels like summer - it's lovely and balmy -

but why is it dark?

It's dark basically because we're tricking the plant into growth.

And rhododendrons, a scent to die for.

It really is very intoxicating.

And you get pollen all over your nose while you're doing it as well.

Just some of the treats we have in store.

But, first, Britain's favourite flower.

And judging by what we have right here,

you've probably guessed it - R is for roses.

And we're visiting John Adams,

whose enthusiasm for old roses is bound to sweep your way.

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, in a little black pot,

this little thing for nothing.

And I put it at the top of the garden.

And this is what it was...

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 is covered in buds, 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 we 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 has stopped flowering.

In order to help the plant every now and again,

I shall say, "You're looking a bit tired."

And I will give it a lovely piece of deadheading.

Here is a very old rose, probably 14th, 15th century.

It is called Rosa mundi. It is another gallica.

Rosa mundi - rose of the world.

And they think it's named after The Fair Rosamund,

who was the mistress of Henry II.

And it shows that an old rose doesn't need to be dull.

Look at those beautiful colours, look at all of that bright,

vibrant colour coming at you.

They've been like this for many years.

We pass through her to something that is much more modern.

This is Madame De La Roche-Lambert. And is an example of a moss rose.

The Victorians loved these.

You can see the sort of mossy growth up the stem.

And if you rub your fingers over the buds,

you get a delicious scent of pine,

of rosin, which adds yet another sort of texture to what you're doing.

And over here, we have a great favourite.

This is Tuscany Superb -

perfectly aptly named, a superb rose, delicious colour.

Again, full of health,

but one of the top ten roses of all time.

This lovely thing here I can only see in July.

This is a great favourite of Constance Spry, the great cookery

writer, flower arranger, and a woman who kept the old roses alive by

insisting that you could not replace them with the modern hybrid tea.

This is Nuits de Young, isn't he beautiful?

You really should find space

to put a few ramblers. This one is Auguste Gervais.

And it is a Wichurana rambler, it's based on

the Rose of Wichurana.

It means it is very, very flexible, so 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,

the scent and the form of an old rose,

because no-one has really managed to invent a modern rambler that is

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 finish in about a month's time,

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

None of this messing with pruning this and pruning 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 a rose where another one has been.

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

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, 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 is why we still grow them.

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

When Herrick said, "Gather thee rosebuds while ye may,"

he meant these. When Strauss wrote Der Rosenkavalier,

this is what he had in mind.

And when you marry, you give your girlfriend or your wife a rose.

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

Now, as a weather expert, I find this next piece fascinating.

It is an example of a plant that is completely tricked

into thinking it is summertime

when really it is it all.

This R is for rhubarb.

And as Julia Bradbury finds out, growing it in bulk

can be more complicated than you think.

I'm in Yorkshire, in the shadow of the great mountain range.

And as anyone living here knows, thanks to the Pennines,

the weather is bitter and cold, with plenty of heavy rain.

And it is precisely this climate which allows us

to enjoy one of our most curious vegetables at this time of year -

rhubarb.

Rhubarb loves the cold.

It thrives in the frost pocket east of the Pennines,

traditionally known as the Rhubarb Triangle.

These days, the hub of production is concentrated just east, in Carlton.

Aside from frost and water, there is

one more thing that rhubarb needs to flourish.

It may not look like much, but this bag of dirty sheep wool is

key to the success of rhubarb grown in this area.

It is a bit grim.

Waste not, want not around here.

Shoddy, as it is known,

is a convenient by-product of the textile industry.

It is the unwashed, greasy wool and the dangly bits from the

backend of the sheep that fall out of fleece as it is combed, scrubbed

soaked and blow-dried on its way to the weavers.

So, how does it help?

Lindsay Hulme is doing a spot of weightlifting with these huge

rhubarb roots.

The plant has to sit in the frozen soil, growing slowly,

for three years before it can be harvested.

-Hi, Lindsay.

-Hi.

-They are big roots, aren't they!?

-Certainly are.

I didn't expect them to be so large. What does that weigh?

-Roughly about 25 kg, and a bit more.

-So that is hard work for you.

Not half.

So, what magic properties does shoddy have to help these roots grow?

The magic thing about shoddy is that it is natural and it

breaks down slowly over three years, releasing nitrogen slowly,

the exact amount of time that the rhubarb is in the ground.

And how does the frost help? How does this cold Pennine air help?

-Yorkshire is renown for its cold.

-Of course, yes, yes.

The frost itself, each plant needs a winter or a shutdown period,

in which the plant goes into sort of hibernation mode.

When we actually lift the plants out of the ground, we take them

into the shed and then the heat source there, it initiates summer.

The balmy conditions inside the forcing shed shock

the roots into life.

The popping is the sound of rhubarb growing.

The shoots sprout so fast,

sometimes up to an inch a day, that they break their skins

with a snapping noise.

After five weeks in the humidity of these vast sheds,

they're ready to be picked.

Lindsay's mother, Janet, has got the knack.

Well,

the harvesting, basically,

-we have to get the whole of the stick.

-Right.

-So it's the finger.

-Yep.

And you slide down the stick

right into the root, you'll feel the root,

and you pull and twist backwards.

OK, so you've got to get the whole root out, is that the trick?

You need the whole bud so we don't have it rot, basically.

-OK.

-Pull and twist back.

-How's that?

-Brilliant, brilliant.

Oh, there we go. Good, all right.

Now, Lindsay told me that it's meant to be summer in here,

and it definitely feels like summer, it's lovely and balmy,

why is it dark?

It's dark basically cos we're tricking the plant into growth.

We've built up that energy in the root

and we're making it now grow from it.

Forcing the plant to draw its energy from its own glucose stores rather

than from the sun gives this indoor rhubarb a sweeter, more tender taste.

Why the candles?

We do keep it pitch black, but we need to see in here,

so it's purely for harvesting.

Rhubarb has long been a prized produce.

In the 17th century,

it was said to be worth three times the price of opium.

Rhubarb was a medicine in ancient times, but they used the root.

And they're looking at today making drugs,

some of which are cancer-fighting drugs.

-Can I keep what I pick?

-Yeah.

Right, let's pick some more then.

Now we're returning to flowers,

one that left the Victorians intoxicated

with its beauty and scent.

Our next R is for rhododendrons, and here's Chris Beardshaw.

It is hard to imagine the effect

that these plants had on Victorian gardens.

Up until the mid-19th century,

the majority of gardens were composed of very modest blooms and forms.

But then came the rhododendrons.

With their extraordinary blooms and intoxicating fragrance,

it's the equivalent of introducing a harlot to a tea party.

And by the way, they don't only come in white.

# Keep us from temptation

# Lead us not into temptation. #

These are dangerous plants.

Not only did they shock the very foundations of Victorian

horticulture sensibility, but in order to get a good collection,

you had to be willing to risk a family fortune

and the lives of the plant hunters who were sent out

to inhospitable places to bring them back.

This flowering shrubbery may look, well, a little overgrown by many

people's standards, but there is a very good reason.

This Rhododendron arboretum is said to date back almost 150 years

and be grown from the original seed brought into this country

by the plant hunters who were exploring in the Himalayas.

And at the time of planting,

no-one actually knew how big the plants were going to grow.

The plant hunters hacked through groves just like this,

not only risking life and limb, but also having to contend

with hostile natives and contagious diseases. The reason?

To give the English aristocrats a great woodland garden.

But it's the garden's collection of deciduous rhododendrons

that I'm after. However, asking head gardener, Andrew, for one

by name isn't going to get me anywhere.

A lot of them were planted and obviously recorded at the time,

but the names have since been lost,

so we don't have the names for a lot of them.

We just have a name for a few and we just propagate them

by numbers when we need new plants.

-We just select the best colours.

-So they really are plants with no name.

-Yeah.

-At the moment, anyway.

-At the moment, yeah.

And the fragrance as well, where is the fragrance coming from?

The scent is particularly coming from this yellow one, which is

not so dramatic in flower,

but more than makes up for it with the scent.

Rhododendron pontica luteum.

It really is very intoxicating.

And you get pollen all over your nose while you're doing it as well.

If you have that in the garden and a seat very close by, it would

just be intoxicating.

It would. You'd go and sit on it every day just to take in the scent.

It's lovely.

And the season of interest is not just about bud and flower,

the leaves that you can see coming through under the flowering

-canopy here give you really good autumn colour, too.

-They do, yes.

We get three or four months of them in flower

and then we get the autumn colours, which are just absolutely

stunning - all the colours that you can think of,

from the palest colours right through the fiery oranges

and reds, the scent...

It's just everything about the plant makes you really want to think,

-"I must have one in my garden."

-If you had a garden,

-would you plant one?

-I certainly would.

I'd definitely have one in the garden.

Beautiful blooms, no wonder the Victorians were mad for them.

And if that's not a nice way to end our look at the letter R,

I don't know what is.

Do join us next time on The A To Z Of TV Gardening,

but, for now, goodbye.