Original subtitles

Hello, welcome to Gardeners' World.

I've added some compost to this part of the bed because I'm planting out

some Florence fennel.

Now, I've got some seedlings here that are on the small side.

I sowed these about a month ago and I probably should have done so

about six weeks or two months ago.

But it's not too late.

A mid-to-late-July sowing is fine to plant out

at the end of August, beginning of September

to harvest in October and even into November.

As always, when you're growing with a plug, if it holds together,

if you can hold it by the stem and none of the soil drops off,

it's ready to plant out.

I'm going to plant these about nine inches apart.

They need to be at least six inches apart

so the bulbs have a chance to develop.

And don't let them dry out.

They're one of those sort of contrary plants

that need good drainage, but plenty of moisture.

So keep watering if it doesn't rain,

add lots of compost and that will hold

the moisture and improve the drainage.

Home-grown Florence fennel have a really rich,

intense aniseed flavour.

And I know you either love them or you hate them.

Well, I love them.

Now, coming up on today's programme...

..we visit an inspirational garden, packed with luxurious summer colour.

All of this will flower until the frost,

so that's my main aim, really,

to keep summer going for as long as possible.

Come on, Domino.

We have an exclusive visit to Will Young's private garden.

It's a garden of discovery because there's a lot more

going on than first meets the eye.

And I shall be sowing seeds of hardy and half-hardy annuals now,

so that I get really good colour next spring.

A job that I always do at this time of year is to redistribute biennials

such as forget-me-nots that we have growing

here in the Cottage Garden -

honesty,

foxgloves -

these are all plants that flower, drop their seed,

then essentially die.

That seed germinates very quickly and develops into a small plant,

and then stops growing round about middle of October, November.

But as soon as the days warm up in spring, they grow,

develop their flower heads, flower gloriously for us gardeners,

develop seed, drop, die and the whole process goes on again.

And you can see here - forget-me-nots carpeting the beds,

but because they're so crowded, you won't get any better flowers.

So if you thin them by about a half,

you'll get a better display

cos you have fewer plants not competing for nutrients or water,

and that gives you hundreds of other plants to move elsewhere

in the garden.

Now, the secret of moving these is to do so in clumps.

There you are, just take a clump like that,

soil and all,

and put them in a trug or a barrow.

Now you'll find that the space you're creating will be filled

by the surrounding plant.

Now, I'm going to move these to the orchard bed.

But before I do that, we had an exclusive opportunity

to visit the private garden of Will Young at his home in London.

Hello. Welcome to my house.

Welcome to my front garden.

This is where I keep all my pots, but the real magic is in the back.

Come with me.

Come on, Domino.

So this is my garden. This is my back garden.

It's north-facing.

It's about six metres wide

by 13 metres long.

So it's quite a humble space.

And it was lawn when I got the house.

And what I wanted to do with the design of Piers Beeching

is create a really lush, verdant space, which had constant surprises,

constant variation, different textures.

So, you know, every plant that I look at has something

interesting, a leaf that's slightly different, you know,

embracing the colour green,

because there's so many different colours of green,

and I didn't realise that.

I wanted such a variation of plants

where every plant had a surprising leaf or a surprising flower.

Got the jasmine and white flowers popping through,

but really, it's more about the nutritious-looking,

green, splendid plants.

It's a garden of discovery.

At every turn, you see something different.

But come and have a look because there's a lot more going on

than first meets the eye.

I wanted to have a winding path cos I think a winding path

creates more of a sense of length and width to a garden.

People don't think that, and it really has done that.

And as the trees have grown up, like these two beech trees here,

they've given me such brilliant cover.

So when I come to the end of the garden,

I can sit here in this space, listen to the radio,

and...

..I'm not seen by anyone.

Sometimes I look out and it's almost like looking

at a sort of forest floor,

you know, but just with the kind of forest that I'd like.

But I really do feel I've crammed as much in as I can,

yet it still feels like it has space.

So I've got a lot of features

that I've found and brought with me from travels.

I've even got the old seed trays,

where I'm growing grass from my old garden that was on Bodmin Moor.

But also you can bring humour into a garden, you know,

seeing a toy metal plane, you know, nestling in the wisteria -

it always makes me smile.

My latest thing is I found some old fishing nets, which they were...

..the flotation for them were bits of cork.

And I thought the texture -

because it's so organic and natural, you know -

would look brilliant against my more kind of structural frames.

So I've hung them and you can just see them peeping

through and they're curious.

They make the mind think.

And I love looking around and seeing

all these different moments and memories.

Over there, there's Thailand,

over there is a market that I went to in Bermondsey

after I was on This Morning... HE CHUCKLES

..after I'd won Pop Idol, I remember it.

And I was being paparazzi'd as well.

I think they gave up cos I was very dull.

They were like, "Oh, a pop star that buys bric-a-brac.

"How boring."

But, you know, that's me.

Well, the newest experience is Domino,

the dog who I bought back during Covid times last year.

I rescued him from Los Angeles.

He has eaten some of the grass.

But I forgive him that.

Yes, I know.

And now he gets to enjoy the garden.

First thing he did when he got off the plane,

came to the back of the garden -

I'd just put this table and chairs in -

lay down and went to sleep.

It was like, "Daddy, I'm home."

I do like having punctuations of colour, so the cercis here,

the deep sort of purple that then is carried

into the pittosporum.

And this leaf is so beautiful, you know,

that sort of waxiness to it, that shininess to it, it's like lacquer.

Yeah. It's really... It looks really rich and lush.

And if you really look into the detail of plants,

you can see they all have their individual beauty.

And that's what I find so special about my garden.

So I'm very happy with my back garden and I'm very happy

with all my pots at the front, but I need a couple of pots

at the back and I really need some advice.

I know the man to help me.

Because of the space, I can't get a whole crew in here,

so I'm going to go and meet him and I'm dressed for the job.

Well, we will be joining Will later on the programme as he gets help

creating some really good and dynamic containers.

I'm going to plant out the forget-me-nots

that I gathered from the Cottage Garden.

Actually, I've also picked up a few foxgloves on my way

here into the orchard beds.

And I shall plant them just as I lifted them, really,

in clumps to create groups.

Make a hole and in you go.

These are a very shallow rooted, so you just can pop them in like that.

And that's it.

Yeah, I've got a foxglove here.

Foxgloves don't always flower as biennials the first year,

so don't worry if you move it and the plant seems to be fine,

but it's all foliage and no flower, it will come.

This is not a job that has to be done in one go.

But it does want to be done by the end of October.

Now, we've been sent a film from Leeds by Ben Chong,

who, like me with the orchard,

decided to dig up his garden and fill it with flowers.

Hello, welcome to my garden.

This is my back garden.

I used to have lawn in the middle

and border along the fence only.

However, this year, I decided to remove my lawn

and have used railway sleepers in the middle as a path

and establish new border.

I start to grow plants that are loved by bees and other pollinators,

such as lavender,

Jacob's ladder,

geraniums,

geum,

catmint

and many more.

I try to have successively flowering garden,

where one plant is flowering after another.

From late summer onwards, I have dahlias.

Just like the colourful orchids in my grandparents' garden,

they have bright colours and can be used as cut flowers.

There seem to be a lot of work in my garden,

but I enjoy doing all of it.

By simply digging the ground, deadheading the flowers,

weeding and watering, I can relax and recover from any stress

outside this garden.

For most nice evening like this,

I come out here with a cup of tea and enjoy the beauty of flowers.

I hope you also enjoy this video and have a chance

to have a garden like mine.

Thank you for watching and I'll see you later.

Well, I think that is a really good example -

dig up the lawn, fill it full of flowers.

Looks fantastic, Ben, thank you.

Now I've decided to dig up some grass, too.

A couple of weeks ago, I strimmed this bank of long grass,

filled with wild flowers,

and I planted a lavender hedge.

And while I was doing it and looking at it and thinking about it,

I suddenly realised,

it was one of those middle-of-the-night moments,

that it was the right thing, but absolutely in the wrong place.

It wasn't working because this very good idea

of having a wild-flower meadow on a bank

was at odds with the very good idea

of having a mound with a terrace and all these formal lines and brick

and paths reaching this focal point

of the new summerhouse in the middle.

And the juxtaposition, I don't think was working.

One of them had to go. Well, it wasn't going to be the mound,

but we could dig up the grass.

So I've taken off the turf, dug up the bulbs,

and I'm in the process of preparing new sloping flowerbeds

that will be part of the mound.

I've dug this over and got rid of compaction.

If it's compacted, then you can't get enough oxygen,

the roots can't spread properly,

the water can't drain properly.

So dig it.

Get rid of that compaction.

What I'm going to do now is just level this off.

In the process, I'm keeping my eye out for any weeds.

And I have a basic rule about planting -

if I can't plant with my hands, it's not prepared enough.

So I need to be able to get my hand

in to the wrist like that.

If I meet resistance, it needs more digging over.

Now is the time to add a little bit of compost.

Now, this is not going to happen overnight.

This certainly is not a makeover, but I think it would look

good next spring and very good in about two or three years' time.

And I like that pace.

It's exciting.

That's what gardening is full of - this anticipation and planning

and hope and a little bit of failure along the line.

Now, we went to Essex to visit the garden of Karen Mann.

Now, this is a garden that began ten years ago and is now looking

magnificent and packed with colour.

I've always loved gardening.

To grow things, I think is quite a lovely thing to do.

The more I grow, the more I want to grow and the smaller my lawn gets.

The way I like to garden is to think of the colours.

I quite like a lot of colour and then to fill that out

with the grasses and some texture to soften it, really.

What I particularly like about this area of the garden are the colours.

I love the black foliage, the reds, the oranges,

the very bright, vibrant colours.

This is a lovely black-leafed dahlia.

This is one of the Mystic series.

I think it works really well with their red flowers.

The verbena comes through, has black foliage in the spring,

and as the flowers come up, the foliage turns to green.

But that's a good foil for the black.

But they're broken up by the purple sugar cane.

and the eupatorium,

which I think, in amongst the black foliage and the darker colours,

it doesn't flower, but it just gives a lightness.

And it's quite a tactile plant.

You have to stroke it when you walk past.

The garden may seem a bit unusual

because I haven't got a lot of structure,

I haven't got a lot of shrubs.

I have got lots of flowers

because that's what I like to look at, really.

Every year, I think that I'm going to plant more shrubs,

less tender perennials,

because it's getting harder and harder to dig them up

and protect them during the winter.

I've never really got quite enough space.

But the problem is

that they're just the plants that I'm drawn to, really.

They're the ones that I like to grow, that I like to look after

and look at.

It does leave it a bit bare in the winter,

but I don't tend to garden very much in the winter.

We had the house built ten years ago,

and we had built it with our son in mind, who used a wheelchair.

Jake had muscular dystrophy.

So the area surrounding the house is completely flat and all the garden

had to be accessible, which it is.

Jake was looked after by a local hospice,

and his nurse used to come here and she'd look round the garden

and she'd always say, "Oh, you should open the garden for us."

And, like, you never really think your garden is good enough.

But in the end, you can't say no.

But since we lost Jake, I've carried on doing it

and it's been a really good thing to do because it gives me a focus.

It keeps me busy.

And it's really helped me a lot, probably much more than I help them.

This particular border, it's quite long and it's quite deep

and there's quite a big drop -

it's probably about eight foot from front to back.

It actually goes all the way around the house.

Because of the drop and change in levels,

I've got fabulous drainage here so I can overwinter the cannas.

I don't have to dig them out.

It's often... It's the wet that kills the plants, not the cold.

So that gives me quite an advantage here.

I'm very pleased with this Amicia zygomeris -

has insignificant flowers,

really, mostly grown for the bracts.

And I think they pick out the foliage of this

Canna Mystique rather nicely.

And then the gingers are just starting to come up.

This is Hedychium Tara. It has a fabulous smell in the evenings.

It's a lovely plant.

And then this is Canna Eric Neubert in the front

with some grasses that have self-sown here.

This panicum looks like little fireworks.

And another eupatorium which I've kind of got everywhere,

just again to break up the cannas and the dahlias.

Anything that is tender will be out by November

and in the spring, I take cuttings of everything in the greenhouse,

start sowing seeds in about January.

If it's a dahlia I particularly like, like this one,

I'll probably dig that up, divide it, make more.

And then, as soon as the last frost has been,

I start planting everything back out again.

So, yeah, never quite sure what I'm going to have.

You never know how many of your cuttings are going to take,

but hopefully I'll have enough to fill the garden.

So this is the only real shady area in the garden.

This Acer palmatum has been here for quite some time and as it's grown,

I've enlarged the border around it and that's given me more space.

So I've got the Japanese painted ferns,

busy Lizzies and the Strobilanthes there

which is a particular favourite.

And it's quite a different border to the rest of the garden,

quite subdued,

not quite as loud as some of the other parts of the garden,

which I think gives a nice contrast, really,

and different levels of interest.

This part of the border is actually my favourite.

This is the plants that I love with the colours that I love

and particularly like this Dahlia Chocolate Karma.

I love the darkness of the flower and the foliage.

And I think when the sun shines through, it's fabulous.

And it goes so nicely with the miscanthus with the gold tassels,

the nepalensis, which I've threaded through.

I'm also very pleased with the Iresine

in the ground cover, which I think's got lovely markings.

This catalpa is the main permanent planting in this border,

and due to the colouring, it's affected what I plant around it.

So every spring I pollard it,

I cut it down to about a foot -

that gives the big leaves, but you do lose the flowers.

The autilon is my favourite plant in the garden, the Red Tiger.

I think the markings on the little flowers are fabulous.

Almost don't look like flowers.

So I've got the Leonotis behind me, another tender perennial

that I take cuttings from every year.

I have the one stock plant

and then it makes that amount of growth in a year.

So that's a fabulous plant. It fills a big hole quite quickly

and flowers from now till the frost.

All of this will flower until the frost so that's my main aim, really,

to keep summer going for as long as possible.

For me, the garden's everything.

Gardening's a really good thing to do because it's made me come out

every day and do something,

and you're always looking forward when you're gardening.

I'm always thinking next year it's going to be really good,

thinking about what I'm going to plant, the cuttings,

the propagation I'm going to do.

Although you are living in the moment, you're also thinking

how it's going to be and how it's going to be better.

Well, I think your garden looks stunning, Karen,

and I share an awful lot of the same taste and the way of gardening,

of using annuals

and kind of really pushing for that dramatic, big summer display.

Well, I'm cutting back these squashes and pumpkins

because we've come to a critical point in the year.

These have been grown on the site of our old compost heaps

so the soil is really rich,

hence lots of growth,

sprawling great vines with huge leaves

and some squashes and pumpkins.

But great big growth because of the compost

doesn't necessarily mean good pumpkins.

So what I'm doing now is cutting back excess tendrils and leaves

so the sun can get at the fruits that I have and they can ripen.

Round here I've got some Blue Hubbard.

That would be perfectly acceptable at that size, but not that colour.

I would expect that to be a lovely grey-blue.

In the process, I will be removing flowers.

Any flower that is produced now is not going to produce viable fruit

this year, so get rid of it.

So I'm going to cut that there.

And there. And what we have under here, if you have a look, is...

..another one...

..which is looking pretty good.

There you go. How about that?

That's another really nice squash.

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

..Joe helps Will Young create some stunning containers

that will look great in his garden long into autumn.

I mean, you know what I'm going to do with these pots, don't you?

Because you've designed them...

Oh, yeah. ..I'm going to sell them on at a mark-up.

Really? Yeah, yeah, I've already got my stall at a Sunday market.

I mean, you got the hat right - you've got my hat.

Now we've got a first - and hopefully not a last -

because we're off to see one of your gardens in Germany.

Hello, I'm Emma, and this is my husband, Wayne,

and welcome to our German Schrebergarten allotment

in the Swabian Alp here in Germany.

We've had our Schrebergarten since March 2020.

And we'd like to show you around today.

We skipped the allotment waiting list by taking on an unwanted plot

that had been empty for 20 years,

and we enjoyed getting stuck in during our evenings and weekends.

The federal law for allotment sets out a rule of thirds

to guide gardeners.

Roughly one third of the space

should be dedicated to ornamental planting,

which can include lawns, borders and pots,

so we've tried to give everything a go.

A third of the garden should also be dedicated to fruit, veg and herbs.

The final third of the garden is for the hut and relaxation.

We've built a pergola using wood we harvested.

We've planted some sweet peas and some clematis,

and we also have our hammock here

so it's the perfect place just to enjoy some shade and a nice brew.

And possibly the coolest bit of our garden

is our natural underground fridge,

which keeps our drinks nice and cold.

So thanks a lot for watching our story and happy gardening. Prost!

I like the way that Emma and Wayne's allotment

is divided into three areas of beauty, productivity

and relaxation, and I also like the idea of the underground fridge

with beer in it. That's not a bad idea. I might adopt that one.

Here in the Paradise Garden,

there is a new flower

which I'd actually rather given up on.

I planted 24 of these lilies.

This is one called Black Beauty. Now, it's fairly late flowering.

Normally, you wouldn't expect this to flower before mid-July,

maybe even into August,

but here we are in September and it has just begun to flower.

In fact, it will grow much taller.

I want it to grow as tall as verbena and it will do that.

But lilies can be quite slow to get going,

so if you feel that you planted a lily this year

and it's underperforming, don't give up on it.

Now, we don't have any cut flowers here in the Paradise Garden.

And if you're going to cut flowers a lot from the garden,

it's not a bad idea to have a cutting patch of some kind.

But to have a whole cut flower garden

is quite a rare and special thing,

which is why we went along to Stokesay in Shropshire

to visit the cut flower nursery of Victoria and Barney Martin.

It just feels like the biggest treat to be allowed to come here every day

and not to have to do something that someone else tells us to do,

and to just get to play in the garden.

We're so in tune with the seasons.

In the spring, we have boundless energy and we just can't wait

to get to the garden and we just spend all our time working here.

And then in the winter we go like little sleeping,

hibernating creatures, and it's a lovely, natural way to live.

It feels right. It feels really nice.

So we grow cut flowers in our walled garden on a slope

which helps for drainage a lot,

and it also gives you great views out of the garden.

A lot of walled gardens, you don't have that.

And it's south-facing, which helps amazingly for sunshine

and we find that the flowers do really well here in this position.

A large part of the garden here and the backbone, probably,

of what we grow is annuals.

So earlier in the season, the hardy annuals,

but at this time of year, we have a lot of half-hardy annuals

like the helichrysum, which I'm picking here,

which is a lovely papery thing, a straw flower.

And this, ideally, you should pick in the sunshine

because it'll be all open and lovely and it'll last much longer.

And the cosmos,

which is another beautiful bouquet filler,

and if you going to start a small cutting patch at home,

I would recommend that you start with annuals

because you can grow a lot from seed and you can fit them

into a small space and they give you loads of flowers.

And one of the great things about annuals is the more you pick,

the more you get.

When you have chosen what flowers you want to grow in your garden

and you know what you like and you know it grows well

and you want to pick it, the really important thing is to pick it

at the right time of day -

so, early in the morning,

conditions like today, perfect.

It's overcast, it's damp, it's cold.

If you wait until the middle of the day and it's blazing hot sunshine

and you go out and grab something and leave it in a little basket

to sort of wilt for a few hours before you put it in water,

it's going to die and you're going to give garden flowers a bad name

and it's a shame. So pick straight into a bucket of water,

put them somewhere cool and dark for a couple of hours

and then arrange them. And then you should get a good first life

of at least five days and up to two weeks from almost every variety

that you could grow in your garden.

There's a bit of a feeling that cut flowers are only for the summer,

but we make sure that we choose very carefully

so that we can pick flowers all the way from the beginning of April

to the end of October, by using things like shrubs,

like this Hydrangea paniculata Limelight.

Using the half-hardy annuals like the coreopsis

and the rudbeckias and the snapdragons -

I could go on and on and on. There are millions,

and most of the half-hardy annuals would keep flowering all the way

up until the first frosts of the autumn.

As well as all the pretty blooms that we cut,

it's really great to have some fantastic foliages.

And this one, Panicum Frosted Explosion,

is a really great cut flower

and it just sets off all the flowers in an arrangement

and it's incredibly easy to pick.

We grow it from seed and it does well throughout the season.

So...just pick it. You might pull off the leaves, the lower leaves,

but you've got to be careful, sometimes it does damage the stem

and you're looking for a stem that has come out and is quite tall.

It also lasts really well and it dries well as well.

Tie it up, maybe hang it up in a cool, dry place.

This is where we dry flowers

so that we have more things to use in our autumn displays.

And also where we can experiment with things and see

what happens when we dry them,

so we have always loved the honesty, which is all shimmery and pretty.

And we also like experimenting with other things,

such as the Pink Pokers, this Statice Limonium,

which is gorgeous dried as well.

And I'm also mixing them in with some fresh flowers

like the hydrangea and snapdragon

and scented-leaf pelargoniums,

which is a brilliant foliage, especially later in the summer.

It's just quite nice to mix different things

and experiment, really.

The important thing with growing cut flowers is to just grow anything

you like, cos all flowers can be cut

and some last longer than others.

And if you just decide to choose the ones that you enjoy,

they're more likely to do better for you.

How sort of busy it is or how stressed we are about other things,

we come into the garden and we just love it, it's beautiful.

We've helped to make the beauty.

It feels a real privilege to work here.

And we do get almost drunk on it sometimes on the thrill

of the flowers and the sort of... that nurturing feeling,

that connection with nature, that...

..that feeling that we're part of it.

We're just dealing in joy. It's a real treat, it's a real honour.

I couldn't help feeling for Victoria and Barney because I know that

when you can see rain on your screen,

it's twice as heavy in real life,

and it must have been a very wet day.

But they absolutely got that celebratory nature

of growing joy, of growing bunches of beautiful flowers,

and that is a very satisfying thing.

And, of course, you can do that at home.

If you have a cut flower bed - doesn't have to be big,

it can just be a square metre or so -

but it means that you can grow your favourite plants

that you like to cut

to bring indoors without ravaging your borders.

Now, this has been a cut flower bed for the last few years.

And last year we just grew dahlias in here and they grew well.

And we made a decision,

for the first time in quarter of a century,

not to dig them up and bring them indoors over winter,

but we left them in the ground.

And you can see they're fine.

They've come through winter perfectly well.

We mulched it very heavily. I suppose, the mulch was about that,

whatever that is, about a foot thick, of compost, which both

will have protected the tubers and also enriched the soil.

They did grow back slower.

They flowered later.

But the plants are bigger and stronger and I suspect

they will flower for longer.

And it means that we can come out and we can just cut flowers

for the house freely.

Right, I'm just going to pop these indoors.

Now, I have here a selection of seeds,

because now is a really good time to start not just thinking about

your borders for next year, but actually doing something about it.

And seeds still remains the cheapest and best way to grow plants

in any kind of quantity at all.

And this is a really good time of year to sow hardy annuals -

and some half-hardy ones if you can store them indoors -

so that next spring you've got young plants ready to plant out.

So, I've got a selection here.

Starting with Ammi majus.

It's like a giant, long-lasting cow parsley,

a white umbellifer that looks wonderful

and is much better sown in September than March or April.

The second plant I've got here is cornflower. Now, I love cornflowers

because they look fantastic floating in and dotting around with grasses.

Now, slightly less refined are the marigolds, the calendula.

But what marigolds do is give that hit of orange

early in the season.

And, finally, Cerinthe. This is Cerinthe major Purpurascens.

Now, whatever you grow, there is the same technique.

You need a seed tray, and this is a coir-based compost.

Level it out. Now, I'm going to start sowing the Ammi.

And sow them thinly. Really thinly.

The whole purpose of this exercise

is to raise individual strong plants

that will flower for us next year.

I'm going to press them down

to ensure that each seed

is in direct contact with the compost.

Going to cover them lightly.

Again, gently, gently, gently.

Just pat that down.

Now, you can soak this in water

and it will absorb the water like blotting paper -

and that's quite a good thing to do if you have very fine seeds

because it means they don't get disturbed - or you can water them

from above using a rose so the water falls gently.

Keep them moist, but not absolutely saturated.

If you've got a greenhouse, that's great, or a windowsill or a porch.

But, actually, none of these seeds need to go indoors

in order to germinate, particularly at this time of year

while it's still quite warm. So if you sow seeds now,

we will prick them out probably in about three weeks' time

and then grow them on so they're ready to store over winter.

Now, we've got our last visit to one of your gardens where someone

has certainly sowed seeds,

but to an effect very different to any of these plants.

Hello, my name's Jo and welcome to our garden in East Suffolk.

My partner Hannah and I have been here for about nine years

and when we moved in, it was just a great big lawn

and one big peach tree. So we've created our garden from scratch.

My partner Hannah is a music teacher and I'm a paramedic

in a GP surgery, so the garden is a really good refuge for us

from the stresses of daily life.

And it's a garden of two halves.

So the top half is more formal planting, herbaceous borders,

the second half of the garden is a gravel garden,

seeing as we've got quite sandy, free-draining soil

and we're east-facing and it's very sunny here in the summer,

we thought that was a good bet.

And then it's cut in half

by our bottlebrush hedge,

which you can see behind me, which we grew from seed, planted it out,

and this year is definitely the best year it's had so far.

It's blooming fabulously.

The hedge is about 40 foot long.

After it's flowered, we give it a short back and sides,

which tidies it up for the rest of the year.

It's a good choice if you've got a very sunny garden

and quite sandy soil.

Thank you for joining us in our garden.

We hope we've inspired you to try something different.

Well, I think Jo and Hannah's bottlebrush hedge

is really spectacular.

I don't think it would like growing here at Longmeadow, though,

it's very much to do with the sunshine

and the lightness of soil they have.

Our heavy clay and our really soggy winters,

I think, might defeat it. But what we can grow here -

and they might struggle with a little bit more -

are really good hydrangeas.

Hydrangeas are wonderful. They're fantastic.

And I've got quite a few growing here in the garden.

This, for example, is Lanarth White.

And you can see it's got this fantastic white,

touched with blue in the centre.

And what hydrangeas like, and why they like here,

and I'm not sure they'll be happy

on the sort of bright, sunny, sandy soil,

is light woodland shade and moisture.

What they really hate is drying out.

Now, this is a cutting I took last autumn.

It's probably the best known hydrangea of the lot.

It's called Annabelle.

I've got it growing in the border here.

Great big flower heads that flower and flower for months

and it's grown fine. It's looking a bit yellow because

it's getting a bit constricted and I was going to plant it,

but a small cutting or a small seedling can struggle for light

in particular, but also for nutrients.

So what I'm going to do instead is pot it on, grow it on,

and I'll plant it out next year.

Now it's time to rejoin Will Young

as he sets off to make some really good and beautiful containers -

with help from a familiar face.

Well, hello. Hi, Will. How are you doing? I'm very well.

Fancy seeing you here. Yes!

I'm just looking at a video of your garden. It looks great.

I really am very pleased with it. And I'm really into the pots.

So I've got... I've done a lot more potting recently into containers.

OK. I need your help. OK.

Have you got a sun and shade or...? Well, both. OK. Yeah.

So can you stretch to two? Am I pushing it?

Well, hang on, we'll do one each. OK? Oh, yeah, yeah, OK.

That's a good idea. One each. One for sun and one for shade.

And look what I bought.

You want to be like me. It's the same hat. You want to be like me.

Come on, let's go. I know.

We've got your beautiful planters here. Thank you.

Sourced by my very hands in Cornwall.

I will travel far and wide for a pot. Oh, glad to hear it.

I've put some crocks in the bottom of both of them.

Now, the thinking is some do, some don't.

I'm a traditional container gardener, so I always like

a drainage layer at the bottom so that it doesn't actually...

If it gets waterlogged, it doesn't clog up.

And that's the worst thing for plants is getting waterlogged.

And why do some people not use crocks?

Well, the last few years there's been some tests and apparently

it hasn't made that much difference.

So, actually, water will always drain through.

Well, I'm a traditionalist. Well, there you go. Look at our hats!

Well, yes.

And this is a peat-free multipurpose compost, that's all it is,

with some added grit. Just, again, to open it up

and you'll see that they aren't fully filled, either.

A lot of people will fill up a container and then start

scooping stuff out to get plants in. That's me. OK.

Well, that's lesson number one. Yeah, this is a good lesson.

So you've got a load of sun-loving plants, zingy, spicy plants, and...

Yeah, you've got some beautiful colours there.

Not that I'm jealous or anything.

And I've got, you know, ferns and cooler colours.

So the contrast between them is going to be really nice.

And then what you do,

do you just sort of almost like flower arranging at this part?

Do you just lay them out to see...? Yeah.

It's flower arranging with live plants, basically.

It's a little bit like when you're singing to the cameras, Will,

I guess, I mean, have you got a best side?

Because you've got to think about the containers.

Are they going to be viewed from this side or this side or are they

going to be walked around and they sort of tier up in the middle?

So, actually, how you would plant up a bed -

like a mini version of a bed. Exactly. Yeah.

And are there certain plants that work better in pots than others?

Well, these are all perennial plants.

And the way I look at it is it's sort of one hit for the season,

so it's going to look really good,

and then, you know, next spring you might want to lift some plants out,

plant them into the border, divide them or put them

into some more pots and you'll end up with a nice collection of pots

but using this palette of plants.

I mean, you know what I'm going to do with these pots, don't you?

Because you've designed them... Oh, yeah.

..I'm going to sell them on for a mark-up. Really? Yeah, yeah,

I've already got my stall at a Sunday market. Oh, nice. Yeah.

Have you got...? Joe's pots for sale. Joe's pots for sale.

Just need you to sign them, if that's all right?

Yeah, yeah, we can sort something out.

I mean, you got the hat right - you've got my hat.

You're infringing... I'm morphing into you is what I'm doing.

Morphing into me. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what...

You are my idol. ..just let me sing. Let me sing or even better,

I just want to play a bit of bass on your next album.

What do you think? I think you could bunch right to the front of the pot.

Yeah. And I think... I mean, I don't know, you might not want it,

might be too strong a yellow for you.

The achillea on the other side, I mean, I would use the flower,

all those flowers. That's an amazing colour,

it's like vibrant mustard, isn't it?

But you've always loved your gardening.

I've learnt from my family.

You know, I've learnt from my dad the wisdom that he's accrued.

I've learnt from my mum. My sister's a gardener.

So it's just in my bones. Your garden looks great, though.

It's quite exotic, isn't it? Yeah. It's got sort of an urban jungle

feel about it. Yeah. It becomes your own haven.

And I spend a lot of time, you know, just sitting in the garden

enjoying the plants. I think because I love creating stuff,

that's why the garden has been an amazing project for me.

And it's ongoing.

Right, the next thing to do is take it out the pot. Yeah.

Turn it upside down.

You know, if it's a little bit pot-bound,

I just give it a little bit of a tease.

See this lovely carex? Yeah. You see, gorgeous, isn't it? Yeah.

I mean, there's some carex that look dead before you put 'em in.

They're, like, bronzy. Yeah.

But this has got really lovely sort of coppery tones.

Now that, you know, next year you could split that into two or three,

create some more containers or put it into your planted beds.

So, you know, nothing is lost. Yeah.

And I will take that tip and then put it on my social media

and pretend that it's my tip.

You can do that. You can do that. I'm stealing all your wisdom.

Well, you know... You are my guru.

I'm going to ask you about songwriting later, so...

I don't know anything about that.

It's all on track nowadays.

So what you putting in there, then? Well, I want to know what this is.

What is it? Well, have a sniff of the leaves. It's an edible.

And a great border plant and a brilliant pollinator as well.

I mean, it's one of the top pollinators. Oregano! Oh, is it?

Yeah. Oregano. Or marjoram. So it's great for bees,

I can use it in my cooking and it's going to look gorgeous in this pot.

Now look at this. This is lovely, isn't it? What's that?

This is a Lysimachia Snow Candle it's called. Yeah.

Now, these are tough as old boots, these things.

And they're quite, you know, quite aggressive plants. Yeah.

So I would, you know, next spring, I'd look to maybe take this out

and split it and put it around the border and put another little clump.

You can see it's got lots of little growth at the bottom -

it's really quite vigorous.

Do you have to give them a feed every once in a while,

more than another...? Yeah, a feed is good.

Yeah, just a liquid seaweed or liquid tomato feed,

a weak feed every couple of weeks. Yeah? I mean, and that's about it.

There's plenty of goodness already in this compost that will probably

take them through sort of the next month or two.

And what is this beautiful flower? Beautiful plant.

That's Helenium Moerheim Beauty,

which is an absolute classic and it's got those huge cones,

you know, it's a little bit like an echinacea.

It's got a big cone right in the centre of the petals on the flower.

Amazing colour, hot and spicy.

And then it's a case of... Yes, making sure that there's no air gaps

cos if there's air gaps with roots, the roots will dry out

so the roots have to be in contact with soil. OK.

And we just go around, you know, just dibbing it in. Dibbing?

Is that the technical term? Well, it is now.

Dib, dib, dib. Yeah, dib, dib, dib.

Yours is gorgeous, I think. I mean, it's like summer...

..the whole of summer in a pot. Yeah. It's got a classic quality,

you know, it's like it's like the Rolling Stones or something.

It is. It is. It's very vibrant and almost, like, daring.

I mean, like yours, there's a landscape to it, isn't there?

There is, there is, cos there's height and there's texture

and there's colour and... It's more chilled.

I think you're like Velvet Underground. Oh, OK.

Stones and Velvet Underground. Stones and Velvet Underground.

Yeah. I mean, they done all right.

Could do worse, couldn't you?

I think if we water them here,

they're going to be so heavy to move, you know, so we'll get them

in place and then water them in situ.

And watering-wise, I would just, you know, don't drown them.

Don't cut them back as well, cos they'll look gorgeous

into the autumn and even right into winter.

Just let them, you know, fade away and reflect the seasons.

Thank you so much.

I've got a few more jobs that need doing. Oh, really?

So, you know, don't stray too far from the phone, is what I'm saying.

You've got my number, Will.

I think those are two very nice containers.

I think they're lovely. And Joe's point about letting them fade,

not cutting them back, but just letting them fade away,

is a really good one.

Now is the right moment to prune

summer fruiting raspberries.

There are summer fruiting raspberries

and autumn fruiting raspberries.

And the big difference between them is that summer fruiting raspberries

produce their fruit on canes that grew the previous year,

whereas autumn fruiting raspberries produce their fruit on new growth.

Now, this row,

which is a variety called Glen Moy,

are summer fruiting raspberries.

You can see, look, we've got lots of vigorous new growth

and this will carry next year's fruit.

So we want to keep the new growth.

Whereas the old growth,

which you can see regularly tied into the support,

has fruited and now that's over.

So the first thing to do when you're pruning summer fruiting raspberries

is to remove all the old canes.

We're left now with a slightly chaotic splay of new growth.

So remove any really weak growth.

Ideally, all the remaining shoots would be strong, vigorous and tall.

You want growth that reaches the top of whatever support you've got

and that will give us the most fruit.

I'm going to start tying in to the second highest wire

on the basis that anything that doesn't reach this height,

I don't want to keep.

Now, you can either do as I do, you use long threads and weave them in

or you can tie them all in individually.

Now, there are two ways of viewing this.

You can either see it as a fiddly chore

or you can see it as something that is repetitive but meditative.

And it gets you into close contact with the raspberry

and how it's growing...

..and it's satisfying in its own way.

And raspberries, by the way,

are happiest in cool, dampish conditions.

Well, I've got quite a lot more to do here, but to keep you busy,

here are some jobs for this weekend.

When your agapanthus have finished flowering,

cut back the seedheads and the flowering stems

right down to their base and try not to damage the leaves in the process,

and then all the goodness can go from the foliage down into the bulbs

for next year's display.

Continue watering and feeding weekly

for the next five or six weeks

before they are put away for winter.

Strawberries are now putting out runners,

and these are the best source of new plants.

Choose a plantlet nearest to the parent.

Cut off the rest of the runner

and pin it down either to the soil or to a pot filled with compost.

And I use home-made staples made from wire.

It will form roots in two or three weeks' time, at which point

it can be planted out wherever you want.

Sweet peas have, by and large, finished flowering now,

and certainly when there is more brown than green,

it's time to cut your losses and pull them all up.

However, if you do have a number of seedpods, leave those,

let them ripen until they're brown and crispy and then collect the seed

and you can either sow them in October or spring

for next year's display.

I love teasels. They're a bit spiky and a bit sharp,

but they're very beautiful.

And we leave the seedheads all winter

because not only do they look beautiful,

but they are wonderful for birds, particularly goldfinches,

which you will see landing on here,

and with their special beaks they will get in and extract the seeds.

And as autumn and winter progresses, they will stand tall

and make really good sculptural skeletons for winter.

So as well as planning what to grow next year, what to cut back,

it's also worth planning what to keep, what to look after,

not just for wildlife, but for you, too.

Well, that's it for this week.

We are back a little earlier next week at 8.30.

So join me here at Longmeadow at 8.30 next Friday.

Till then, bye-bye.