Letter V The A to Z of TV Gardening

Hello and welcome to The A To Z Of TV Gardening

where we sift through all your favourite garden programmes

and dig up a bumper crop of tips and advice from the best experts in the business.

Flowers, trees, fruit and veg,

letter by letter, they are all coming up a treat on The A To Z Of TV Gardening.

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

Here's what's coming up...

Joe Swift looks up at a vertical garden in Paris.

No-one just walks straight past here.

Everyone look up at it, stops, takes photos, cars almost crash into each other out here,

it's a really major talking point of the city.

Kate Humble is on the spice trail for vanilla.

Oh, my goodness!

I just had no idea it was going to look like that.

It looks like a mad, primeval vine.

And Alys Fowler meets the queen of vegetable growing.

If you have a patch of red lettuce and then a patch of green lettuce, you get that quilted effect,

I love it, I'm just a sucker for making a vegetable garden look pretty.

Just some of the treats we have in store,

but first we look at a flower that drove the Victorians wild.

They would pin them to coats and dresses, make perfume

and even cook with them.

Our first V is of course for Violets.

Devon's famed for its rolling moorland,

its romantic fishing villages

and of course its cream teas.

And gardeners have long flocked here to take advantage of the mild climate

in the lush, wooded valleys.

And if there's one plant that's particularly associated with Devon

it must surely be the humble violet.

It's hard to believe that at the turn of the 1900s

there was a train that travelled daily from the Southwest

up to the fashionable markets of London,

carrying its valuable cargo of violets.

At the Devon Violet Nursery, Joan Yardley tends the National Collection of Viola odorata.

Tell me about how the collection got started.

Well, we came down here about seven years ago.

With a name like Devon Violet Nursery,

I kept saying, "Well, where are all the violets?"

And there was quite a bit of arm-waving going on,

sort of down the garden, down the field,

and we never did find them.

But one Sunday morning, I was clearing out behind the greenhouse

and found about half a dozen quite old-looking, wizened plants,

and I thought, "I bet these are the violets!"

But they didn't have any perfume at all.

And I thought, "Well, I want violets that smell like violets!"

You've got a wide range of violets here. How many different cultivars do you have?

About...130...something.

-You're not quite sure?

-Not quite sure, no.

-Expanding all the time?

No, no, they...I've just brought about 12 back from Italy,

so, I mean, you're collecting the whole time. It's amazing where you find them.

Which ones would you particularly recommend as being very floriferous and very fragrant?

Well, mainly the odoratas are fragrant.

Pamela Zambra is a very good grower.

This was named after the daughter of the Zambra family

who used to have the violet nursery over at Windward at Holcombe.

But, you know, violets do possess this substance called ionine

which anaesthetises your ability to smell,

it somehow affects your power to smell them,

so you can smell them once and then the perfume will disappear,

only to come back and you smell them again.

And, of course, it isn't the violet that changes, it's your nose that loses the ability to smell them.

Well, of course, the violet heyday was really in the sort of 1920s, 1930s,

when it was popular with the Queen, for instance,

Queen Mary, Queen Victoria, both of those Queens it was said to be their favourite flower.

And they were present at the funerals, at the weddings,

they were a very important flower in those days.

They were associated with death, they were associated with romance, all sorts of things.

The old ladies send me letters saying, "I can remember when I was a young bride in the war,

"the war years, and I only had two nights with my husband before he went off to war," sort of thing,

and I have a bunch of violets that I have preserved all this time.

There have always been violets in our history,

whether it's our country, whether it's in Europe,

whether... It's just such an important flower.

And so it's very, very sad that it's sort of had its heyday

and really not come through again, so we're hoping to alter that.

Which form in particular do you think is going to start the violet revolution?

Oh, gosh! That's a difficult question, isn't it, with over 100 to choose from!

I guess I'd come back to the sort of Devon violet, you know, the purple violet.

Of all the orders that I get in, you can bet your bottom dollar,

it's always got an odorata, just the sweet violet, as we call it, the sweet violet.

People that used to come down here on holiday always used to go home with a little scent bottle

smelling of Devon violets and their little purple plants.

I mean, that is Devon violets, isn't it?

Violets belong to the family of flowers called Viola, along with fellow family member the pansy.

They are both easy to plant and propagate as Toby Buckland explains.

By a country mile the best bedding plants

for this time of year are violas and pansies.

You can tell the difference because the violas have small flowers, and the pansies large,

but, in truth, so many species have gone into breeding these new varieties

that the genetics is a real old hotchpotch.

At this time of year, you can pick up a pack of these for about £2.50,

which is, I think, a reasonable price for six plants.

But you can propagate from them too.

You might think, "Why would I want to propagate these?"

Well, for starters, propagating plants at home is a good habit to have,

because you never know when you might need an extra plant or two.

And with winter-flowering pansies and violas

that could be because one of them fails in a pot,

but also because the garden centres tend to buy them in different ranges,

so you can go in there one week, pick up one type,

then go in the next, and they're no longer there!

And having a back-up plan is always a good thing.

When it comes to taking cuttings of violas, look for non-flowering shoots.

That's easier said than done on a plant as floriferous as this,

so what I'm going to do is snip out the shoot from near the base,

just below a bud...

..and then pinch off the flowers to give me a non-flowering shoot.

And you want your cuttings to be two to three inches long.

So we move all the leaves up from the stem,

and then any little tassely bits that stick out from the side...

because these attract rots.

Then, using a pencil dibber, make a hole in some cuttings compost

and just pop the cutting in

so its leaves sit proud of the surface.

The edge is always the best place to pop a cutting, because it's more free-draining, there's more air.

And it's not just moisture and compost that the cuttings need to root, air is essential.

Once they're in the pot, water them in...

Just a quick drink to make the compost nice and moist.

Then what I do is put in a stick and that keeps the sides of my mini polytunnel,

or plastic bag, off the foliage.

Put this under your potting bench or somewhere warm and shady

and the leaves will start to grow away.

At which point you can pot them on and they'll be ready for planting out early in the new year.

We haven't always used bedding plants in our gardens.

It was a fashion started in an era we've already mentioned today.

Our next V is for Victorian gardens.

So many of our gardening practices were started then.

Here's Alan Titchmarsh showing just how much our ancestors liked to put on a show.

The Victorians were masters of display.

And what they wanted in their conservatories was impact.

They wanted you to walk in,

escape the worries of the world and be faced with a display

that would quite simple in Victorian terms "knock your socks off".

You know, we're quite staid nowadays in what we do.

We have staging in our greenhouses like this,

and we arrange our plants on them, generally tallest at the back, shortest at the front,

and, although it's pretty, it's a mere shadow of what the Victorians did.

And the way they did it was incredibly simple but hugely effective.

I just think in a modern home, when there's precious little foliage,

how nice it is to have a bank of colour to look at.

It is ridiculously simple.

Flowerpots upended, supporting these boards.

But suddenly, from being quite flat, this will lift the display and give it much more impact.

Geraniums, or pelargoniums as they're properly known,

were absolute stalwarts of the Victorian conservatory.

Both the zonal kind and these regals here.

And they loved their colourful foliage.

This is irisene with its bloodstained leaves.

And a lot of these would have been temporary,

a dailier in the pot that could go in while it was doing well

and before it got too big.

Fuchsias, they absolutely adored.

What they hadn't got were lovely things like the Cape figwort, Phygelius,

which has got much more popular in a much greater variety recently.

Along the front, things like Begonia rex

enjoying the shadows down the front.

The trick of this kind of staging

is to make sure that each row masks the pots of the row behind it,

and that way, in this day and age, it doesn't matter if you've got plastic pots,

even if they're black because they sink into the shadows,

as long as the ones along the front here that you do see are terracotta.

And that really rather flat display that was has suddenly become...

a bank of colour!

And if your guests when they walk round the corner and see that, don't go, "Wow!"...

I'm a Dutchman.

On to our next pick now, and we're dealing with displays that defy gravity.

This V is for Vertical gardens.

Let's join Joe Swift in Paris.

All over Paris, strange botanical growths have been climbing up

concrete surfaces, turning architecture green

in the most unlikely places.

These stunning spectacles

are "mur vegetal",

created by Europe's extraordinary pioneer in vertical gardening, Patrick Blanc,

who may be getting as close as anyone to a modern-day hanging garden of Babylon!

Patrick Blanc is leading the fashion in greening architecture,

creating what he calls mur vegetal or living walls.

I'm here at the Musee du Quai Branly on the banks of the River Seine in central Paris.

It's in sight of Paris's most famous landmark,

and, in fact, it's becoming quite a famous landmark itself, and quite rightly so!

Patrick Blanc was commissioned to create this vertical garden on the street side of the museum

in 2004.

So it's really pretty established now and what strikes me immediately

is it's taken on a life of its own. It dangles right out over your head

as if you really are in a tropical rainforest or something.

With the irrigation system dripping down on you, it feels more like that.

It's a natural habitat now, and I've seen birds nesting in there, you know,

bringing in little twigs to make a nest with.

But no-one seems to mind, it's great... Look, there's one just going in there now!

It's wonderful, there are buddleias, valerians, you've got heuchera,

and then you get these windows, cut around these windows, so you get this nice clean bit of architecture,

and also the reaction of everybody that walks past. No-one just walks straight pass here.

Everyone look up at it, stops, takes photos, cars almost crash into each other out here,

it's a really major talking point of the city.

Patrick Blanc's first inspiration was the large tropical aquarium he saw in his doctor's surgery

when he was just a little boy.

And so my bedroom was invaded by aquariums

and later by plants outside.

First it was like a aquarium, but there were only plants inside,

and later more and more plants, even at the ceiling,

I had ferns coming from the ceiling,

and also very quickly I had, when I was maybe 15, something like that, some lizards

living inside the plants,

and after there were also some frogs, living, hidden in the leaves of the plants,

so, you see, it was a kind of little jungle very quickly.

This is Patrick's latest work.

I'm at the Euro Alsace which is a mixed tenure development,

there's businesses here and there's apartments here too,

and it's all set within the old railway HQ

at the Gare de L'Este.

Now, the clever thing is that this was out in six months ago.

The building site's still going on, as you can see, it's not finished at all,

but the green wall is.

So when the residents finally move in, the green wall will already be beautifully mature.

Euro Alsace is a very, very interesting project.

First, it is the biggest I have done up to now in the world.

It's very interesting, why? Because it's in the heart of old Paris,

between the two railway stations, east and north railway stations.

So it's totally urban, you have no gardens, you have nothing,

and it's a very small, very narrow street,

and I cover all the walls along this small street that's shaded...

it's not a suitable place, but I try to prove that, no, for the plant it's OK,

and they will thrive here.

For me Euro Alsace is the most symbolic work you can do in the heart of old towns

where you think it's impossible, impossible to have any piece of nature.

This isn't just any old sort of bit of gardening, this is quite a serious construction here

and engineering. This is a whole metal frame all along the wall,

segments of frames that are separated away from the wall on these metal rods that are set into it

to let air circulate behind it so that the wall itself doesn't get damp,

and then on top of the frame are two layers of felt,

and each individual plant is planted by hand into a little planting pocket,

so you cut a split, put a plant in, and it just holds itself there,

until it establishes its root system and clings on by itself.

Thanks, Joe!

And he'll be showing us how to create our own vertical garden later in the show.

We also meet a vegetable-growing master and discover the birthplace of vanilla.

But before all that, a flower that according to old folklore could turn your hair blond

and whose seeds could get fish drunk, making them easier for poachers to catch.

This V is for verbascums

and here we're visiting Vic Johnstone and Claire Wilson who are on a quest to grow the very best.

We first got involved when we saw wild hybrids

growing in Kent,

and we thought that it would be quite interesting to do some of our own hybridisation.

It got us wondering,

if you could get wonderful hybrids like that from the few British species that we've got,

what could you do if you collected all the foreign ones together

that might very well never meet in nature?

The most important thing is to ensure that the plant is perennial.

If it isn't perennial, we drop it,

because the general public wants a plant

that's going to survive longer than one year.

And then we're obviously always looking for new and exciting colour breaks,

because I think the standard hybrid verbascum until now

has often been just perhaps slightly dreary.

We are very interested in breeding more and more of the red terracotta, orangey tones,

because this simply has not been done before.

Almost all of the wild verbascums are yellow flowered,

but the idea of having red in a verbascum was intriguing.

Although we'd produced lots and lots of hybrids,

they were mainly up until recently pastel colours.

We tried an awful lot of different parents,

and then quite by accident one day we spotted one coming into flower

that was blood-red.

We've called it Firedance,

and we're propagating large numbers of them here now.

It's not on the market yet, but we hope that it will be.

Merlin is one of our favourites,

and it's got these lovely large

pale purple flowers.

It is also very, very tough.

We leave it out all winter and it survives pretty well.

By far the most important pest of verbascums is the mullein moth.

The moth comes along and lays its eggs in April,

and the caterpillars hatch in May,

and you have to catch them when they're very small,

because if you let them get big they will defoliate a plant overnight.

We spend an awful lot of time picking caterpillars off the plants.

It certainly began as a hobby,

but it quickly outgrew the back garden and we had to find a piece of land.

Now we've got about as many plants

as we can possibly look after at one time.

Now a spice that is so common these days that most of us have forgotten where it comes from,

and even what it looks like in the wild.

Our next V is for Vanilla,

and we're going abroad again,

joining Kate Humble in Mexico as she enfolds the story

of the very first vanilla growers.

The Totanac farmed and cured vanilla

as a medicine and a perfume for their temples.

And Totanac cities like this were spread along the coast of Veracruz.

One of the biggest was here in the very heart of the vanilla-growing area.

This city El Tajin was once a major Totanac centre

where vanilla would have been used as a currency.

It had enormous value even back then

largely because the Totanac believed it was sacred, and here's why...

there once lived a princess called Morning Star,

and she was so beautiful and pure of spirit,

it was decreed that she should never be possessed by a mortal man.

Now, unfortunately, a young man named Running Deer ignored that decree,

fell madly in love with her, and she clearly did with him, because they ran away together.

The high priests were furious.

They set off in hot pursuit and when they found them, they put them to death immediately.

And on the spot where their blood was spilled, a plant grew up...

you guessed it! A vanilla vine.

And when the beans ripened, the scent was deemed to be so exquisite

it could only be the embodiment of the pure spirit of the princess.

Don't forget that next time you're having a bowl of ice cream.

Just a few miles outside Papantla lie the lush tropical forests

where vanilla still grows today.

THEY SPEAK SPANISH

Jose Luiz Hernandez has been growing vanilla all his life,

and he's an enthusiast for the original Totanac ways of cultivating the spice.

Oh, my goodness!

I just had no idea it was going to look like that.

It looks like a mad, primeval vine.

It's amazing!

These are the beans?

HE ANSWERS IN SPANISH

And this is what it looks like...

For hundreds of years, up until the 19th century,

vanilla could only grow in this region, and here's the reason...

one tiny little insect, unique to this part of the world.

It's called the Melipona bee and it's the sole pollinator of the vanilla flower.

So when the flower comes out,

the little bee pollinates the flower and then the flower dies

and the fruit begins to grow.

HE ANSWERS IN SPANISH Wow!

Vanilla takes a very long time to grow.

From the appearance of the first flower,

to the harvest of the vanilla pod takes nine months.

I've arrived after the flowering season,

so I'm not expecting to be able to see a vanilla flower.

Is that a flower about to come?

HE ANSWERS IN SPANISH

But this is completely out of season.

You Mexicans! You're so jolly!

HE ANSWERS IN SPANISH

And you think it could flower tomorrow?

HE ANSWERS IN SPANISH Will you call me?

HE ANSWERS IN SPANISH Perfect, perfect!

We might see a vanilla orchid! That would be amazing!

I feel like I've had a morning of complete revelation.

Who'd have guessed that it has to be pollinated by one particular tiny species of bee

and only then can those beans grow?

What is without doubt

is that vanilla is definitely Mexican.

In fact, it's definitely Totanac.

It comes from this region,

it is absolutely rooted here,

and I feel that I have actually come to the very birthplace of vanilla.

Jose Luiz?

THEY SPEAK SPANISH

THEY SPEAK SPANISH

It happened?

This is so exciting!

HE SPEAKS SPANISH

Oh, it's beautiful!

It's just such an astonishing colour.

HE ANSWERS IN SPANISH It's like fresh!

HE ANSWERS IN SPANISH

It's an extraordinary piece of luck to see a vanilla orchid bloom out of season.

But if the secret to the success of growing vanilla lies with the little Melipona bee that only exists here,

how did vanilla ever grow outside Mexico?

Well, this chap is the reason.

His name was Edmund Albius,

and in 1841 he was a 12-year-old slave boy, living on an estate in Reunion,

then a French colony in the Indian Ocean just off the coast of Madagascar.

Now at that time, his master, like so many others,

was desperately trying to cultivate vanilla.

The vines would grow beautifully in hot tropical climates like that,

but what they couldn't get to happen was for them to flower on any regular basis.

Well, one day Edmund was wandering around his master's estate

when he happened across a vanilla flower,

and he discovered somehow that if he fiddled with it in a certain way, he could pollinate it.

And it worked, it produced a bean.

He managed to work out how to pollinate it.

And this is how he did it.

So are you going to pollinate this now? HE ANSWERS IN SPANISH

Jose Luiz uses a sliver of wood, just as Edmund Albius did

to move a membrane aside before pollinating the plant.

Jose Luis brushes the pollen on the tip of the stick

across the stigma to fertilise the flower.

So what Jose has done is basically the work of the bee,

and brought the male and female parts of the plant together,

so it's now fertilised.

I can't believe how lucky we've been.

What a day!

You're amazing!

HE ANSWERS IN SPANISH

Discovering how to hand-pollinate vanilla was a major breakthrough,

but it was the beginning of the end for Mexico's monopoly on the world supply of the spice.

And we leap back to a slightly colder Britain,

going from exotic vanilla to things that are still edible,

but slightly more familiar and home-grown.

Because V is for vegetables.

Here's a star-struck Alys Fowler meeting her gardening heroine, Joy Larkcom.

Meeting Joy Larkcom is the pinnacle of my career to date,

because she is the best vegetable grower,

and the idea that she's going to come and have a look at our vegetables

and give us a master class on how to grow some of the things that she's introduced

is just really very exciting.

It's like being given a present, because this is one of the people

that you most want to be able to say, "Why do you think this is happening?"

and, "Do you think that's too close?" and "Have you ever done this?" and "What do you think of that?"

and "Is this your best variety or do you think there's a better one?"

So I get a whole day to pick her brain! It seems like heaven!

I suppose one of my burning questions is how did you get into vegetables?

Where does it start? Where does this lifelong, 40-year passion start?

Well, I was a wartime baby,

and I suppose it started with my dad coming back on leave during the war,

and digging up the garden, as everybody did, digging for victory,

and he used to give me the wireworms to take to the hens.

I suppose that was my introduction.

I have always grown things and I did horticulture at university,

and really it wasn't until I got married and settled in the country and we had kids,

that I really started growing again in earnest.

One thing I really love about your books is that they're filled with this wonderful really good detail,

but they really buck the trend. They seem to constantly say

you don't have to do this unless, you know...kind of question things,

and they seem so different from that very old-fashioned idea of straight rows and things like that,

and I wondered was it easy to come in and do that

or was there a lot of people going, "This isn't how you grow veg!"

I think it was the ten-year gap that really helped,

because, you know, you're indoctrinated at college and it was a very scientific course that I did,

and you were just taught that you grow things in rows with a big space in between,

and when you start growing, you think, why? You do start challenging things.

I mean, there are cases for growing in straight lines, mainly onions and leeks, I think,

-but I do love the idea of something just looser and more informal.

-Yeah, I completely feel the same way.

If you have a patch of red lettuce and then a patch of green lettuce, you get that quilted effect,

I love it, I'm just a sucker for making a vegetable garden look pretty.

And something like pumpkins which are one of those notoriously big things,

I mean, is there any sort of way to kind of keep them in together?

I've always trained my round and round in a tight circle,

because so many people want to grow pumpkins, but of course it is a big, sprawly vegetable.

Well, I tried it last year, but I don't think I did it enough,

and they all sort of spiralled off.

You kind of always have to be doing it...nip out every morning...

Right, I think that was maybe my...

People think of pumpkin as being a huge wild sprawling thing, which it can be,

but you can actually make them go into a very small circle.

-Do you think we can rescue this one?

-Yeah, I'm sure we can, yeah.

-I mean, they could even go round the sweetcorn.

-Yes, around the corn.

Yeah. I mean, I would...

So just take a tent peg

-and just push it really right just over the stem like that.

-OK.

And it's always worth putting a stick in the middle,

so that if it comes to watering, you actually know where the middle is.

-That's my problem with my melons. I just can't find it...

-You can't find the middle?

-Chasing through it.

-Good tip.

-But the great thing about this also, if you get secondary roots coming out from the stem...

-Oh, OK.

-..Taking more moisture and nutrition.

-How tight can you go? Can you just sort of...? Within reason?

-I do it as tight as I can.

-Right.

I must admit the only one I grow now is the Crown Prince.

Do you know that one, with the grey skin? It's not a huge one,

-but it's...

-Is it a good flavour?

-Fantastic. It's so solid

-and we roast them and make puddings and everything, but it keeps right through till June.

-Right.

Yeah, I've just got Baby Bear here.

Well, that's lovely, because it's a neat little one, you just put it in the oven and roast it quickly.

-So June is a really good time, so you finish one and then practically start the next.

-Exactly.

-It's fantastic.

-Good. I might try that, then.

It's a good combination, isn't it?

It's a fantastic combination, pumpkins and sweetcorn, it works so well.

-So we need to pick some stuff for lunch.

-OK.

-But I also wanted to pick your brains about crop rotation.

-Right.

Because I suppose I feel...

like...

that... I don't know... I feel really frustrated about crop rotation,

because I feel like I get myself tied up in knots,

and I was wondering, I guess, how relevant you feel crop rotation is.

I think it's one of those things that, if you can, it makes a lot of sense,

because you do get a build-up of pests in the soil,

so if you can avoid growing the same thing in the same place, it does make good sense.

On the other hand, in a small garden, it's so impractical,

because, you know, most pests will move from one bed to the next,

so maybe mixing things up is a better way around it,

-because then you don't get a build-up and so on.

-Little bits here, there and everywhere.

-I think, do it if you can, but don't be a slave to it, is what I would say.

-Right.

Great advice from a true gardening legend.

And as we reach the end of today's programme we come back to vertical gardens.

They're becoming more familiar sights in our towns and cities,

and if you fancy building your own, just watch Joe Swift and Mark Gregory

as they help Ben Mason make the most of his balcony.

This is actually a communal space

and each floor has its own communal sun deck like this.

-So anybody from this floor...?

-Anybody from this floor has a key, comes out here...

on days unlike this, enjoys the sunshine...

yeah, it's lovely.

So it's very important to everybody?

Yeah, I mean, it's really important for these blocks,

right in the middle of town,

there's no real outside space, you know, apart from this,

-so it gets used a lot.

-And you've got quite a lot of edibles here.

-You've got herbs and your tomatoes...

-This is where it all started for me, really.

I kind of got into gardening through food.

Where do you go from here? What's the next stage?

Well, that's quite a difficult one. Who knows?

-So what about using some of this vertical space a bit more cleverly?

-I think that would be a great idea.

-Yeah?

-Great.

-When you can't go out any more, you go up!

-Indeed! Good plan.

So to challenge Ben to think vertically,

I'm introducing him to a friend of mine who won a coveted RHS gold medal

at this year's Chelsea Flower Show

for demonstrating how the vertical approach

can even relate to a small family garden.

-Happiest Yorkshireman around.

-Yeah?

It's going to be a good day today.

In fact, vertical gardening was generally all the rage at this year's show.

This is Mark Gregory's vision

on behalf of the Children's Society and it's incredibly practical,

and, as you'd expect, environmentally tactful.

There's somewhere to keep the bicycles and also, of course, somewhere to put the recycling bin.

But it's that that catches my eye.

It's a real theme this year, why simply grow along the ground when you can plant up the wall as well?

So I thought he'd be the ideal gardener to come with a way of creating a vertical garden

on a budget.

-I'll give you hand.

-It's great. It's a beautiful object in its own right, I think.

-Yeah, it's lovely.

And it isn't even planted yet. To explain how it works, run us through it.

Well, my bookshelf system,

basically I just wanted to do something

that people can emulate and it's a kind of DIY...

planting wall.

Really, what I've used, I've just used this softwood deck boards,

just standard deck boards you can get anywhere,

-and we stained them just to make it last longer.

-Yeah.

It's got a ply back,

and really it's just a series of compartments.

And in fact they're louvered to hold the compost in,

-so when it goes upright it won't all just fall out.

-Exactly.

Well, I'll leave you lot to it!

So before we can plant up or even fill up with compost,

Mark has to drill holes for the irrigation pipes to pass through.

He's chosen a simple drip-line system that can be found in any good garden centre.

Well, Mark, we've got an interesting intestinal system here.

This is your irrigation. It's a bit Heath Robinson, isn't it? But will it work?

The thing is with this kind of system, it does need water, it needs irrigation.

And really what we've used is just this standard drip line,

and the idea is that every pocket gets water.

Basically, underneath that comes out,

-push your hosepipe on there...

-And that fills it up from the bottom?

It fills it up through this main pipe, and even the main pipe has got drippers.

Basically the water kind of comes through and trickles down each section.

But if you don't plug it into the hosepipe,

you can use a watering can as well. A trickle-down effect, I think they call it in America.

This is a belt-and-braces job, this. It's got everything.

-This has got a hopper at the top where you can water it and put your feed in as well.

-Of course.

You've really got to treat it like a hanging basket.

If you don't water your hanging basket daily, it'll just dry out.

-So it's ready to go, yeah?

-Ready to go.

-We're going to put the compost in and plant it up.

-Yeah. Great.

Oh, don't faff about doing that! This is the way to do it.

I've played my joker definitely on this one.

And like a hanging basket, we're using a good quality, moisture-retaining compost.

So what's next, then, Mark?

We're going to cover it with a geotextile which is this material.

It seems a shame to cover it up, it's so beautiful!

This basically will keep everything in and allow the water to come through it,

but it won't allow the separation of the soil,

so if you leave the water on, it's not going to collapse on you.

-Straight forward to my finger.

-Yeah.

Right, now we get creative with it, OK?

-So I'm just going to draw a band through here...

-Yeah.

'Well, we did film a section where I revealed my fantastic Patrick Blanc inspired planting plan to the team,

'but since I'd brought along a black pen to sketch it out on a piece of black geotextile...'

-Are you going to give us a key to what goes where?

-Yeah.

'And since no-one paid any attention anyway, let's just move on to the bit where we start planting.'

If it's tight, I can make a little cross in it.

-That it?

-Yeah, that's good, because all the roots are going to just knit together.

And another one in there while you're at it.

In essence, the secret of vertical gardening is to put your most drought-resistant, sun-loving plants

up near the top,

and your damply shade-tolerant lovers near the bottom where more of the water will collect.

-Are you happy with the overall oomph?

-I think the creative swathes are excellent.

-You're a good director.

-Excellent.

We've got, like, the mints up here together,

-and the strawberries coming through the middle.

-Yeah.

-It's looking good.

-So are we going to put it in its final position?

-I think we ought to.

-What do you think, Mark?

-Absolutely. Yeah, let's go for it.

Let's have a little bit of a tidy-up and then we'll put it in.

Patrick Blanc, eat your heart out, eh!

We've included a variegated oregano, purple basil and thyme,

to name just a few of the herbs.

Oh, and as I'm sure you all know,

you can eat nasturtium leaves and the flowers.

-OK, straight up.

-Standing that up.

Oh, trapped Joe behind!

Put it down and then I'll get out and we'll walk it back.

To me, to you, to me.

How many gardeners does it take to make a herb garden?

-Well, let's just take a look at it.

-That's cool.

Right, stand back, have a look. Pat ourselves on the back.

That's really cool, isn't it?

-What do you think?

-It's fantastic, isn't it?

-Just amazing.

-Look at that! It's beautiful.

-It's cool.

It is really, really cool.

It's going to knit together really well. In the next two or three weeks, it's going to look fantastic.

It just fits so well with all the stuff I had already,

-you know, it's kind of like a carpet going up into a wall.

-Yeah. I want one!

Stay away from this one!

But there's like 15, roughly, different varieties of herbs and stuff in there,

without using any ground space at all. It's pretty clever.

It's amazing, and so much for the residents here of the whole floor who can come out and enjoy it.

-I think it's fantastic.

-Yeah. Well done, Mark.

-Good use of space.

-It's worked.

-It has worked.

And with that bit of DIY, it's time to bring things to a close.

Do join us for more planting tips on the next A To Z Of TV Gardening, but until then, goodbye.

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