Original subtitles

BIRDS TWEET

Hello. Welcome to Gardeners' World.

It has been such a strange spring and early summer.

I was looking at pictures of Longmeadow last year

and I reckon we're fully two weeks behind,

and it means that we've got tulips still flowering well into June,

but whenever they flower,

you still need to deal with them once they're over in the same way.

And the important thing is to break off the seed heads

and any spent petals

so that all the energy can go down into the bulb.

And if you leave the seed heads on,

it diverts energy from that and they put energy into seeds.

Then the bigger the bulb, the better the chance of flowering

and the bigger the flowers will be,

so leave them to die back completely naturally,

and then you can store them.

With any luck, you'll get decent flowering next year too.

On today's programme,

Joe visits a garden created by an award-winning landscape designer

where contemporary and traditional meet in perfect harmony.

This is a garden with simplicity at its core,

which showcases how to design with restraint.

Last year, three extraordinary sisters sent us a film

from their garden in Dorset.

We caught up with them again

to find out about their latest gardening project.

Our head gardener painted them to match the sheds

and we started planting them up,

with one for veg and one for flowers to attract the butterflies.

What's this one, Kirsty? This is called a verbena. Verbena.

And I shall be planting some spectacular foliage plants

in the jewel garden.

I'm going to refresh the colour in the four big pots

at the centre of the jewel garden.

Now, these are the central point of the whole garden.

Everything really revolves around this.

So they've got to be grand.

They've got to be dramatic,

and obviously fit in with the colour scheme of the jewel garden.

My central plant this year in all four

is going to be hedychium, the ginger.

This is one called Assam Orange, wonderful upright stems

with these superb orange flowers

and the bottlebrushes at the top of them.

They grow well in pots, but they do need lots of goodness.

These are tropical plants.

So I've made a compost mix specially for them,

which is one third a coir-based compost,

one third leaf mould and one third garden compost.

I know from experience

that the gingers will be really happy in that mix.

I'm going to add a layer of neat garden compost to the bottom.

And this is like an insurance policy, really.

It just means that when the roots do get down to the bottom of the pot,

they will find moisture, because that's the key to it.

So we'll just put some in there like that.

That'll be enough.

OK, let's hope this comes out of the pot.

Out you come. There we go.

There we are.

Now, you notice I haven't put it

so it's flush with the top of the pot.

These are plants that will need quite a lot of water

when it's very dry.

So the best way to ensure that

is to leave at least a couple of inches free from the top of the pot

so you can fill it.

It just retains more water, whereas when the soil gets dry,

if it's filled to the top, it bounces off.

Now, that's the centrepiece,

but by no means the whole performance.

This is Bidens Hawaiian Orange Drop,

lovely, marmaladey, caramelly orange,

which will go very well with the ginger.

And that looks a pretty insubstantial plant,

but they grow strongly.

So I reckon we can have four of these in each of the pots.

So we'll put one here.

Bidens need full sun to perform well.

And gingers will take a little bit of shade,

but will do best in full sun.

Now, this is a nasturtium,

Alaska Deep Orange,

with variegated leaves,

which I think will pick up

on the leaves of the ginger, which are not variegated,

but they do have slightly different shades of green.

We've got extra-rich compost, which is ideal for the ginger,

and the Bidens will be fine.

But nasturtiums flower best in very poor soil.

If you put them in rich soil,

you will have more foliage than flowers.

But in fact, I rather like the idea

of this foliage hanging down over the edge of the pot.

And because the soil is rich,

it will grow longer, and it will flower.

It just won't flower so much.

So I'm only going to put in three,

because I know they're going to grow with extra vigour.

So we'll put one there like that,

right on the edge.

And they do like sunshine,

so make sure these have full sun.

Now I've got a cosmos.

This is Cosmos Dazzler,

and this has a rich magenta colour

which will offset the caramel

and the orange of the rest

and just give that little injection of energy.

I think that can go in there.

Right. Well, that's a beginning.

I've got three more to do.

Now, last September, Joe went to Winchester in Hampshire

to meet a garden designer

who had been commissioned to solve quite a tricky problem,

which was to integrate a very modern building

into a very old setting.

When designing a garden, one of the biggest challenges is,

where do you start?

Well, there are lots of ways you can go,

but there are thousands of plants to choose from

and an infinite number of layouts.

Here in this beautiful Hampshire garden,

designer Helen Elks-Smith has used

blocks of warm, dusky perennials and grasses

alongside a calm palette of natural materials to create a garden

that really blends in with its built environment.

This is a garden with simplicity at its core

which showcases how to design with restraint.

Helen, a beautiful garden, incredibly stylish and contemporary,

and it goes with the contemporary house,

but you've also got this, you know, old Victorian brick wall

that surrounds the whole property.

So how did you approach the design and blend those aspects together?

This is an old kitchen garden, and there's something very lovely

and magical about every kitchen garden,

and that's absolutely true of this one as well.

The wall has the most beautiful colours in it, absolutely lovely.

And the house, obviously, has got some really sort of strong colours.

It's got sort of black glass and black framing,

and then there's obviously the timbers.

And actually, the job of the planting

was to bring these two things that are very different together.

One of the things for me was a decision to use green,

to use green, which is not just one colour, it's lots of colours,

to play with texture and to have a really limited colour palette.

I think a lot of people who have their own garden might think,

"Well, that's going to be a bit boring, isn't it?

You know, "I've got this wall, I should put roses on it

"and jasmines and all these different climbers."

And I think roses and climbers are, you know, beautiful, lovely things.

But because we've got this very old wall

and then we've got the very contemporary building,

if you put a traditional garden into this,

it would be beautiful with the wall,

but it's not going to work with the house.

And if I make this too contemporary,

it's going to work with the house but not with the wall.

With the range of plants available,

how do you go about narrowing it down

to find the exact plant that's going to do the job?

So here, where we've got a lot of really hard horizontal elements,

the roof, the windows, the doors, the cladding,

everything is completely horizontal

and then we've got these horizontal lines

that run all the way around by the wall itself.

What I was looking at was those lovely mounding forms

and the arching forms, just to create that soft contrast.

And the landscaping materials, again, it's all pared back, really.

You know, we've got stone, we've got gravel and we've got decking

and they all work really nicely together.

When you look at this border, which has a lovely flow about it,

those sort of soft mounded shapes all melded together

to get a really fantastic sort of outline against the building,

you actually pick out each shrub

and you realise that these are really quite bog-standard shrubs

that we've seen in many gardens for many years,

and you'll buy them down the local garden centre.

But it's the way they're used and put together

that makes them a success.

So we've got things like the Choisya ternata over there,

still flowering its socks off, white flowers all summer long.

Then we've got a Euphorbia mellifera. There's three of those

which will flower, the Honey spurge.

It's got a beautiful scent to it

and then these two, you know,

which really are standard evergreen shrubs.

Hebe, I think this is Sutherlandii,

with its tightly clipped, glaucous foliage.

And then this is Pittosporum Tom Thumb.

Now, I have to say,

I have to admit this has never been one of my favourite plants.

But Helen shows that it's all about the right plant to do a job.

It's got that sort of light green new growth and underneath,

plummy, purpley, almost black foliage beneath

and it adds drama and contrasts beautifully texturally

with the rest of these plants

and looks absolutely stunning against the cladding of the house.

So, you know, it's not about the plants

and getting snobby about what they are.

It's about using them and making them look great together,

like this border does.

A common scenario is to put some paving in outside your patio doors

or in this case, bedroom doors or deck like this

and have the plantings beyond.

It feel as if the garden's miles away and there's a disconnect

between the interior and the nature of plants.

But here, Helen has brought the plants right up to the wall here

and on the other side there.

So when you come out onto here,

you feel surrounded by plants immediately.

You feel as if you're in a garden.

And then you might put some furniture out here

and it looks a little bit cluttered,

but Helen's designed in this fantastic seat into the deck.

It ties in beautifully with the second step there,

so it almost disappears, apart from when you're sitting on it.

And when you're sitting on it,

you get a great view of the planting tiering up towards the back

and then the old Victorian wall in the background.

It's just a great composition

and this seat right here is just making me look at it.

When I studied garden design in 1990,

ornamental grasses were just hitting the scene.

Everyone was really into them,

but they were thought to be a bit of a flash in the pan.

But they've really lasted the course,

and Helen shows in this garden just how versatile they are.

She's used loads of them.

This Stipa gigantea makes a wonderful division

between these two spaces.

It's a hedge, really, but it's not too blocky.

I can see through, I can see beyond,

and it's light and frothy

and these seed heads are at eye level, absolutely perfect.

And she's used others as ground covers under trees,

edgings for paths, some tall, some short and some floppy ones.

And over there, we've got Calamagrostis Karl Foerster,

a very similar colour to the stipa,

but it's got a different form.

It's narrower, it's more upright, and it works beautifully

just to break up the old Victorian wall over there.

And this is Miscanthus Starlight, what a stunning plant.

Its silky tassels are just incredible

and it holds the light beautifully.

But is this just ornamental?

No, of course not.

It's doing a job. This is blocking

the car parking area from behind.

I can't see anything behind there at all.

This is a proper screening plant,

and it's been repeated all the way through

and then it links into more grasses behind me.

It adds a lovely flow and naturalism to the entire garden as a whole.

From the interior to the exterior,

from the modern house to that lovely Victorian wall,

tying things together is what this garden's all about.

The fact that it's been done so subtly and so sympathetically

is what makes it really stand out as a design.

I love it when you get that combination

of the very modern and the old working together,

and I think what that shows more than anything else

is that you don't need rare and unusual plants

to make a beautiful garden.

It's not what you use,

it's how you use it that really counts.

Well, I hope what I've used here

proves to be as good as I think it will be.

But just give it a few weeks, and this will fill out.

And by the end of this month, this will start to flower.

But it is really important with containers

that you do water them adequately.

And the key thing is to water and go on watering

until the water runs out of the bottom.

It's far better to give it a soak once a week

than a sprinkle every day.

Now it's time to visit the first of your gardens this week.

And this is a first for us, too,

because we're going off to visit one of our viewers in East Africa.

My name is Alice.

I come from Nairobi, Kenya.

My passion is gardening.

Come, let me show you around.

I have a loquat tree, which is a fruit tree that grows in Africa.

And when my daughter was young, what we used to do

was just sit here and just collect those loquat fruits

and just gobble them up.

After she left home, the trees started growing really tall

and I couldn't reach it, so what I did,

I grew this morning glory tree with all its glory

in between the loquat tree

because I wanted to see some drama.

Cascades of white, almost like a chandelier.

During lockdown last year, I got a bit stranded

and I decided, for my own mental health,

"Let me create a happy place", so I created it.

Now, the entrance has my Hibiscus mutabilis,

which is the most amazing hibiscus.

This one has just flowered.

What I love is the salvia plant.

The salvias are so easy to propagate.

They're so easy to maintain.

And look at these beautiful flowers, and you get bees,

you get butterflies.

I grew so many salvias in different colours.

And just as I sit there in the morning with my yoga mat,

I can breathe in the fresh air and all I see is colour.

So, Gardeners' World, thank you so much

for giving us this opportunity to be part of your programme.

We're all very, very excited.

And as we say in Kenya, karibu - welcome.

Well, thank you, Alice, for sharing your garden with us.

It looks fantastic.

Now, it's time to plant out tomatoes outside.

The key thing is to wait for the nights to get warmer.

Tomatoes do not respond well

to big variations and fluctuations in temperature.

And ideally, you wait till the night-time temperature

is reliably around about ten degrees or above.

And I've chosen, for planting outside, Gardener's Delight.

It's a cherry. It's quite a large cherry, but small nevertheless.

Tastes really good eaten raw.

It's really good cooked as a sauce,

and it's pretty healthy and grows strongly.

So I've prepared the ground.

It's good, rich soil with reasonable drainage

and I'm going to plant these in a couple of rows

so I can get in between them.

There we go.

When you're planting tomatoes,

you really don't need to space them more than about two feet apart.

And the other aspect of spacing you want to think about

is ventilation. Ventilation is the best defence against blight.

And when it comes to planting,

you need to plant them deep, right up to the first leaf.

And that will do two things.

One, it will help them steady in the soil

because you're going to get big plants.

And two, you do get roots growing off the stem.

So if you bury the stem, new roots will form

that will stabilise it and provide an extra source of nutrition.

OK, nice and deep in there.

Firm it in well.

The big advantage of growing them in soil is that as long as

there's a reasonable amount of organic matter in the soil,

most of the nutrition you could possibly need is here in the ground.

In other words, you don't need to feed them.

Cordon tomatoes must have support, otherwise they just fall over.

Now, I've got these canes, which are rather long, actually,

but I'm loath to cut them.

But you do need a cane that is firmly in the ground

and at least five foot tall,

so a minimum of a six-foot cane.

Push that in good and firm.

The indoor tomatoes, I support on strings and wind them round.

Obviously, when you have a cane like this, they have to be tied in.

If it's been raining, and there's been a reasonable amount of rain,

that's fine, I leave them, but in a normal summer

I will water these once a week.

We're now off to Staffordshire, because we've got another chance

to visit a national collection of angel's fishing rods, or dierama.

The dierama is called the wand flower, or the harebell of Africa.

People are very surprised when they see a dierama flower

because they think that maybe it's a grass,

but they can't understand why

at the end, they've got the most beautiful hanging bell.

My name's Ruth Plant, and I live here at Yewtree Cottage

with my husband, Clive.

We have a cottage garden which has vegetables at one end

and a flower garden at the other end.

Our name is Plant, and we are both really plantaholics.

Dieramas are part of the iris family, but they're a corm.

They're closely allied to crocosmia.

The dierama season here starts towards the end of May.

They all do have their flowering times

and you can almost set your clock by them, so they have an order

so I know when each one is going to flower.

The individual flowers don't last very long,

especially when the bees get at them.

The bees do love to pollinate them.

They can go over the individual little bells just in a day,

but because they come out in a spray,

you might have a plant that might be in flower for a week,

maybe two weeks, depends on the heat.

After the dieramas have flowered,

they're still actually very beautiful.

They have these lovely little bracts

which are like little pieces of paper.

They blow around in the merest hint of wind,

arching, nodding little heads.

It gives a real feeling of movement in the garden.

They are so lovely as they dance around in the breeze.

People think because they come from Africa,

that they like to be dry.

And actually, that's not the case.

They grow in areas where there is summer rainfall.

They quite often grow in marshy meadows.

What they do in the wild is,

they put their roots down long and deep, right down beneath rocks

so they get a good water supply.

So they like plenty of water,

but they like to have it drained away

so they don't sit with wet feet.

But if they're in too dry an area, they won't flower.

And if you put them in a mixed border,

there's too much competition from other plants.

So the reason that I grow our dierama in gravel beds

is that the gravel stops the competition.

It aids the good drainage, helps keep them moist at the roots.

But underneath that gravel is good, retentive soil,

and that's when they'll grow well.

In terms of numbers, we have around about 100 species

and maybe 23 cultivars.

Life would be very dull without the excitement of growing the plants.

And when they flower, it's the pinnacle of achievement

and I've got the most beautiful result.

This is Dierama Sarastro, and isn't she beautiful?

She's one of my favourites

and as you might be able to see,

one of the favourites of the bees as well today.

She's got the most beautiful burgundy plum flowers

that hang down so gracefully.

As you can see, she's quite tall.

She's as tall as I am, so you can look her right in the eye.

She's also got very nice, papery brown bracts,

which you can see just above the flower there.

And they really add, I think, to the contrast and the gracefulness

of this beautiful dierama.

This is Dierama argyreum,

so this is one of the national collection reference plants.

This is white, with a lime sort of green blush

that's showing through the base of the flower.

And inside, it's got little tiny eyes

right at the centre of the plant.

Doesn't flower for very long,

but it's an unusual colour break and you won't see it very often.

This dierama only grows to about two foot.

So it's a smaller dierama,

and that's the height it would reach in the wild.

Everybody should have a dierama in the garden.

They are the most fantastic plant.

There's nothing like the joy

when you can see that finally, your dierama has come into flower.

Such a pleasure.

If you want to visit Ruth and her collection,

you can do so in the first two weeks of July,

when she's planning to open.

If you can get along, you're pretty much certain

to see dieramas at their very best.

Now, you wouldn't get that if you came to Longmeadow

because I don't grow dieramas,

because our conditions are just not right for them.

We have this heavy, rather wet soil.

Everything is crowded.

They wouldn't get the light

and the drainage and the air that they need.

But there are compensations,

because what we can grow are the lupins.

The lupins here in the cottage garden are fantastic.

And I can say that without taking any personal credit at all.

I just bung them in the ground.

But they've really come into their own this year.

They've been here for about three years

and it's taken a little while to establish.

They seem to have loved the weather.

Of course, whereas dieramas come from South Africa,

these are an American plant growing in the fields,

very different conditions.

But aren't they fantastic?

They are really, really superb.

Now, still to come on today's programme...

We pay a visit to Dorset to meet three sisters

whose recently gained passion for gardening knows no bounds.

This is some pumpkins, ready for Halloween!

And there's another chance to enjoy a jungle oasis in Runcorn,

where a garden of limited space is bursting with tropical plants.

But first, we're off to visit a viewer's garden in Northern Ireland.

Hiya, this is Colin. I'm Charlene.

And this is our little garden

in Edenderry village, just on the outskirts of Belfast.

We've got about five metres square

and it's all south-facing,

the sun rising over here and then setting over on this side,

so we constantly have sunshine in the garden.

In amongst all of our garden, we've got lupin,

got a little cherry tree

and some pansies poking through,

and the last of the tulips still coming up.

The main thing I wanted to show you in the garden...

..was our two espaliered apple trees.

The one on this side is Spartan.

And the one on this side is Egremont Russet.

So to get the espalier, every year, whenever it's grown,

you just easily fold down the branch carefully and tie it off.

And then as it grows throughout the summer,

once you have a good six or so inches of growth,

then you can continue to tie it down.

The other thing I like to do at this time of year

is just to check any of the previous ties

to make sure they're not too tight

and starting to mark the branches.

If it does, you just loosen them off

and then tie them back on, as the branches will keep widening.

THEY LAUGH

I think Colin makes the case for espaliers perfectly.

They are brilliant for growing fruit in small spaces.

Anybody can do it however big your garden is,

and they combine the gardener's craft

and that lovely fresh fruit in season

which tastes so much better than anything you can buy.

Now, I don't have any lemons on this tree yet,

but my lemons don't do too badly.

However, they've been slightly neglected

and it's time that I did give them a little bit of TLC.

Ideally, you repot or pot on lemons and oranges every three years.

Well, I haven't done any of mine for at least four or five years,

so it's no wonder that they're looking a little bit tired

and exhausted and they need freshening up.

Now, when you pot on a lemon,

as with anything that grows permanently in a pot,

the secret is to do it into the next size up.

Don't go from a small pot to a big one,

because that just creates a sump to hold water.

Just go into a pot a little bit bigger,

an inch or two in radius bigger. That's fine.

I don't have a pot like that, and yet I want to refresh it.

So what I'm going to do is take it out of this pot,

clean it up and put it back in again.

Right. Let's see if this will come out.

There we go.

So what I'm going to do

is just break off as much of the old compost as I can.

So all the nutrition from this compost would long ago have gone.

I've lost some root,

but I'm actually going to trim the roots a little.

It will then grow a flush of new, more fibrous roots

which are better adapted to feeding.

Basic rule of thumb is, the thicker a root, the less the role it has

in gaining food or moisture in a plant.

What you want are lots of nice, small roots.

So these thicker ones can be cut back a little bit,

trim that back, and that, and that.

OK, that is ready for replanting.

And remember, put a crock over the drainage hole.

It's not necessarily to improve drainage,

but to stop the hole blocking up with soil.

So we'll just put that over there like that, and that's plenty.

Put some fresh soil in the bottom.

This is very gritty,

and the mixture is bought-in coir compost,

sieved garden compost,

some leaf mould, grit and some garden soil.

They do like a bit of nutrition.

Work the compost in around the roots like that.

Clearly, this is a trauma for any plant, and it may well respond

by losing some leaves or not flowering.

But don't worry too much about that.

It should settle down relatively quickly.

There you go.

There are just two more things I need to do.

The first is to put it onto chocks.

Any citrus, any type of orange or lemon

need to be raised up off the ground

because if they're flat on the ground,

however good the drainage is in the pot,

the water will come out and sit on the hard surface around the pot

and effectively, it's sitting in a puddle.

So we put that like that, and lift it up.

Yep.

Put that on there, like that.

There we go, nice and steady, and raised up.

Right, the last thing to do is to give it a nice water and a feed.

So...

Now, last year, we received a film

from three sisters living in Poole in Dorset

who delighted us with the sheer joy that they took from their garden

and were able to share with us.

So we decided it was high time that we went back down to Dorset

and paid them another visit.

Hi, my name is Mandy.

My name is Kirsty. I'm head gardener.

My name's Rebecca. I love Michael Jackson like this.

And we live in Poole in Dorset.

Welcome to our garden.

ALL: Ta-da!

I love Gardeners' World.

You might remember us from last year, when we started gardening.

What are you doing?

I'm planting runner beans for Gardeners' World.

Oh, perfect.

Kirsty took to it instantly.

Keep them warm.

Like that.

And she soon became head gardener, with sister Rebecca as assistant.

We soon flew past just growing lettuce for our tortoises

with chillies, tomatoes, sunflowers and much more.

This year, Kirsty was keen to get back out in the garden,

and she started early.

Shake it out like that.

These are pots for flowers.

It's Mother's Day on Sunday.

Yay.

We've been trying out with new veg.

Been making sweetcorn. And pumpkin.

Though not all choices have been popular.

These are gourd snake seeds.

Ugh! They're what?

Gourd snakes. What do you think of them, then, Becs?

Oh, that is gross.

She thinks they're real snakes.

It's not. It is to me.

The next job was working out where to put our new veg.

Our garden is mostly paved as our mum is in a wheelchair.

And the narrow borders are full of her beloved trees,

with lots of shallow roots making it difficult to grow much.

And this year, there's been another change.

Guess what? What? There are no vegetables.

No vegetable patch? Patch. Why not?

For the tortoises to eat.

Our tortoises live in the shed with an outdoor run.

But they keep growing, so we needed to extend their run over winter.

The new area is perfect, but crucially,

last year, this was Kirsty's veg patch.

It's changed.

I was growing tomatoes and sunflowers.

But what can we do now?

Put them into pots. Yeah, we'll still grow them,

but we'll find some pots.

Yeah.

Looking around, we realised we had quite a few options

including a plant on our dad's memorial bench,

so we started there.

I'm replacing Dad's bench of our daddy, I miss him so much.

This is the new colour for it.

It's a bluebell colour.

It worked so well, we decided to go big,

painting the old sheds too.

We've got annuals in small and big containers.

And we've made hanging baskets

and started planting out the growing seeds.

This is, um... pumpkins, ready for Halloween!

This is sweetcorn on the cob, for a barbecue.

Add butter and melt.

Are you dreaming of a barbecue already?

Yeah! We like barbecues, don't we?

Yeah, I love 'em.

Kirsty was right in there, planting them up.

But Becky isn't a great fan of getting her hands dirty.

Oh, boy.

All right, Rebecca? Yeah, fine. How's the gardening going?

Brilliant. Brilliant.

We still needed more space for veg, so we asked our friend Paul

to turn some old benches into raised planters.

It went down very well.

Come and see what Paul's done!

What do you think?

This is fantastic, Paul.

Yay!

Oh, this is great. Thank you!

I love it. Amazing.

Our head gardener painted them to match the sheds,

and we started planting them up with one for veg,

and one for flowers to attract the butterflies.

What's this one, Kirsty?

This is called a verbena. Verbena.

There's herbs, too, like lavender, trailing rosemary and camomile.

Camomile for my tea. You like tea, don't you?

Can you smell it? Yeah.

Mmm.

Then it was on to the second one, with lots of strawberries.

If we get enough, we could make some strawberry jam, couldn't we?

Oh, yeah. For toast, for my breakfast.

Oh, nice.

It also has rows of bedding plants,

with spaces in between to plant salad leaves and beetroot,

one of Becky's favourites.

We're so pleased with the result,

looking forward to watching them grow,

and after all the hard work, Kirsty has decided she has a new title.

I love gardening.

My name - Monty Don Junior.

Well, Mandy, Becky and Kirsty,

it's lovely to see you and your garden again, and Kirsty,

I'm honoured that you should be joining the Monty Don team,

and I look forward to seeing your garden again before too long.

Now, the orchard is slowly being converted to a meadow.

And the secret of a meadow is not to let the grass dominate,

to have enough flowering plants that they are predominant

because otherwise, grass will always take over.

Now, something I've only started to do recently

is to add the bulbs that I grew in pots into the meadow.

So I've got some tulips here.

These were growing in the jewel garden.

They looked fantastic until a week or so ago.

Now they're finished.

But if I plant it directly out into the meadow,

it'll die back in the meadow.

That will feed the bulbs and there is a chance

that it will flower next year.

Now, I have to stress, only a chance. It's not guaranteed.

If you want guaranteed tulip performance,

you have to buy new bulbs.

And as for planting,

just cut a bit of the turf out

as deep as you can.

The deeper, the better.

And just pop your potload of tulips in.

This is a variety called Fly Away,

and I don't try and colour-combine it.

They go in randomly and the effect, if you put them all over,

is a really dramatic tapestry of colour, points of colour.

There we are.

OK, now it's time to pay our final visit

to one of your gardens this week,

and it takes us to Wolverhampton

and covers one of my favourite topics.

Hi, my name's Ed.

Welcome to my garden.

It's been here 25 years.

Garden's had a few guises over the years.

It's been a football pitch, a rugby pitch,

even a wrestling ring a couple of times.

I'm going to show you a bit that hasn't got a lot of colour

that's very important.

Compost corner, folks.

Every garden should have one.

Modern estate gardens aren't very big,

but I've got room here for a little compost corner.

Every year when the plants stop flowering, dying off,

I chop them up, pull them out

and they go in these two bins.

Every few months,

I get them out, chop them up again, turn them over.

Fantastic workout for an old fellow like me.

So, moment of truth, what have we got?

Lovely stuff.

Look at that.

You can't buy compost like this, people.

Just can't.

And when you think it's come totally from waste,

just shows how worthwhile it is.

No matter how little room you've got,

you must have room for an old bin.

Give it a try, folks.

It's well worth it.

I could not agree with you more, Ed.

To my mind, good compost is always the foundation of a good garden.

Now, I use compost for two things here in the garden.

One is as part of anything edible,

our vegetable garden and herb garden and fruit.

And the other half, we sieve and use as part of our potting mix

on the basis that gives every plant a good start,

and I'm about to pot these on and use that potting mix.

Now, this is sweetcorn which I sowed just a couple of weeks ago,

and you can see that it's grown really well, and quickly.

And I probably could plant this out today from a plug,

but I don't have room for it.

I'm not ready to plant it out for at least another two weeks,

and probably another three or four.

And this is where potting on buys you time.

You pot on to a bigger container.

The roots can grow out into it

and as a rule, it buys you at least four weeks.

Right. So we just put a little bit in the bottom.

Take one out, like that.

Pop it in.

And there we are.

I've always felt that the single most important part

of any gardener's education

is to visit as many gardens as you possibly can.

And I don't think I've ever visited a garden

anywhere in the world where I haven't learned something,

even if it's what not to do or what I don't like.

It all goes into the mix, and you learn from it.

And it seems to me this is a good moment

to revisit the garden of Derek Ferguson in Runcorn,

because he had a nice garden that he liked, his friends liked,

and it looked good, until one day

he went to visit a garden on the other side of the country,

and that changed everything.

When people tend to come around the garden,

hopefully the first thing they say is, "Wow."

And then they say, "Oh, it's so jungly."

And that is such a compliment, because that's the design.

That's the style I go for.

And considering it's such a small space,

it's quite difficult to achieve that.

It works really well, I think.

Big, exotic plants look good in a small space.

A few years ago, we went on holiday to Norfolk

and I'd heard about a garden in Norwich city centre

and it was just breathtaking.

The size, the scale,

plants you just wouldn't dream would grow in our British climate.

Could I possibly do this type of style in my garden?

That gave me the impetus to at least give it a go.

Initially, it was a cottage garden,

and so I needed to remove the more cottagey plants

and to introduce more tropical plants.

Friends were very grateful, because a lot of the plants

which wouldn't have fitted into the style,

things like delphiniums and lupins, my friends got.

I want things to look natural.

That might sound contradictory,

sitting in Runcorn in a tropical garden.

One of my favourite plants is the tetrapanax.

It's the most tropical-looking plant.

The nickname is T-Rex, and rightly so.

The leaves are palmate, and can be a metre in diameter.

When you stand under it, it envelops you.

It's totally hardy.

It is deciduous.

You'll lose all the leaves in the autumn.

I tend to hang things from it.

I've even been known to put tinsel around it at Christmas.

I've got a habit of buying palms.

I've got 44.

My favourite genus of palm is trachycarpus.

I've not got them all but I'm working on it,

so I might have to thin them out eventually.

Again, friends and family will benefit from that.

The tender bananas I grow are Ensete.

There's a purple one called Maurelii.

You can buy it as a plug

and in just a short space of time,

it will grow sort of six, eight feet, but it's totally tender.

It won't take a temperature lower than three.

But if you dry it off in October, you cut all the leaves off,

it's a large pseudostem, so it's packed with water.

If you tip it upside down,

put it in a shed or an outbuilding for a few weeks,

all the water drains out

and then you can put it in your loft.

Wrap it in a bit of hessian and just leave it for six months.

In late March, put it in some compost,

give it a bit of water, and away you go again.

One plant I bought recently

is a plant called Senecio Angel Wings.

It's a very touchy-feely plant.

It's purely decorative, but it's a very sensual plant as well.

The heliopsis is a survivor from my cottage garden.

In fact, it's one of the oldest plants in the garden.

I don't plant much yellow, but I think the zestiness

and the vibrancy of the yellow just helps it stand out.

In the last few years, I've started growing dahlias.

I wouldn't have touched dahlias five years ago,

but now I can't believe I ever lived without them.

The water is a major feature in the garden.

On the top tier, I used to have a large fatsia japonica.

When I removed it,

the crater it created just cried out to be used.

So I got a liner and filled it with water and I created a pond.

You imagine in a jungle effect,

there's always a stream running through it

with the big plants around it.

It's just a nice, calming effect.

The garden builds to a colour crescendo.

I love tithonia. It starts to flower in July.

Just pumps out hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of flowers.

Provided you don't get a heavy frost,

it can be flowering at Christmas, but that doesn't often happen.

But you can still get a good array of colours.

It's been a challenge, but I love creating the space.

It's nice. It wraps around you, you know, like a blanket of colour

and foliage and texture.

And when I come here at the end of a busy day in work,

I sit on the large settee in the conservatory.

It's almost like a chaise longue.

I relax out and I put my arm over, and I glance out into my paradise.

I just find it very peaceful.

Derek is absolutely right

to say that big plants look good in small spaces.

Having seen Derek's garden, I'm now persuaded

that what we lack here is a little bit more foliage,

particularly in the shape of a tetrapanax,

so I've got one here

that I'm going to plant over in the corner of this bed.

This is Tetrapanax Rex, and the reason why it's called Rex

is because the leaves are more finely cut than the species,

although they too will grow enormous.

The leaves can be three foot across

and they will look like an enormous claw,

like a Tyrannosaurus rex, hence the name.

Now, tetrapanax will grow really substantially,

as we saw in Derek's garden.

This is small, but this can put on four foot this year

and given a chance, it will reach five or six metres tall.

And that's what I want in this corner.

I want a backdrop to the garden.

It does like a sunny position, but it'll take some shade.

And what's really important is that it's sheltered

from the worst of the wind.

It will cope with most winter weather,

but what it does need is good drainage.

There's lots of organic matter in here,

which means the drainage won't be too bad and it can fend for itself.

There we go.

Well, that's a nice, healthy plant.

Now, that's part one of adding drama and foliage to the jewel garden.

If the tetrapanax is big,

this is a plant that is potentially much, much bigger.

This is a Paulownia tomentosa, the foxglove tree,

which will flower with wonderful

lavender, purple flowers

reminiscent of a foxglove, hence its name.

However, it's not the flowers that I'm interested in

because I have no intention of letting it grow into a large tree.

The great virtue of paulownia

is that it coppices and pollards very well.

When you cut it back, it will respond

by throwing up a flush of new shoots,

and these shoots will bear leaves that are substantially bigger

than if they're being left uncut.

They can be truly enormous.

It comes from China, and it's pretty adaptable.

It likes full sun if you can get it, but will take a little bit of shade.

It's hardy, effectively fully hardy down to about minus 20,

although when it's young in the first year or two,

if it's very cold, you might want to protect it

just to let it get established.

It doesn't need as much drainage as the tetrapanax does,

but it will respond well to good soil.

Right. I will go and refill my watering can

and give that a good drink,

and then when I've done that and let the water settle,

I will put a short stake in there,

just until the roots get established.

OK, I've got one or two things to do.

Here are one or two things for you to do this weekend.

Chelsea chop is so-called

because it is best done around the time of Chelsea Flower Show

at the end of May or beginning of June,

and its purpose is to extend the flowering display

of late flowering perennials like phlox,

helenium, or rudbeckia.

Reduce the plant by about a third.

This will encourage side shoots that will flower a little later,

but last a lot longer.

Although garlic and elephant garlic won't be ready to harvest

for another few weeks, many plants like mine

will be trying to develop flower heads, or scapes,

and these will divert energy away from the bulbs.

So break these scapes off, and they just snap easily.

That will buy you another few weeks to maximise your bulb harvest.

By the way, don't throw these scapes away,

because they're very good to eat.

Pot marigolds are the perfect plant

to give your borders a late season boost.

Sow them now either direct where they're to grow, or into plugs.

Cover them, water them well, and they will germinate quickly

and become big enough to plant out

in about four weeks' time,

and then they will flower gloriously

from mid-August right through to autumn.

The glory of the damp garden at this time of year

is this Viburnum plicatum Mariesii.

It is an absolute joy with its horizontal tiers of white flower.

Not difficult to grow,

and not only does it have fabulous late spring,

early summer flowering,

but it's one of the best autumn coloured plants that you can grow.

It's absolutely fantastic and I love it.

Well, everyone's feeling rather sleepy here.

Certainly, Patty's found herself a nice nest.

Nellie keeps flopping in the shade.

I think that's it for this week.

Next week, we are back to the earlier time of eight o'clock,

so I'll see you then. Bye-bye.