Great British Gardens with Carol Klein | Arundel Castle Gardens

I'm Carol Klein and this is my home, Leed Cottage. When I'm not presenting or writing about gardening, this is where I spend most of my time and where I've been honing my horticultural skills for 40 years. Whether you've got a spacious plot, a tiny patio or a few window boxes, there's nothing more exciting and satisfying than creating your own garden. From basic to more advanced techniques, I believe anyone can learn how to do it. Whether you're a complete novice or an experienced gardener, I want to help you develop the skills to make your garden grow. I'm ready. Are you? Welcome to my garden. There's such a feeling of excitement. I hope you'll be able to feel it too. Anticipation. It's getting ready for the year ahead. You can almost hear everything beginning to grow. All those shoots pushing through the ground. All those flowers opening to the sun and we've got a beautiful sunny day too. It's magical. The garden's just saying it's spring. It's beautiful. Come on, let's get going. One of the great things about this time of the year is that you can really appreciate the bones of the garden. There are no leaves on most of the trees and you can really see their structure and you can see right out into the wider countryside too. You can even see a few deer if you're lucky. In the brick garden there are euphorbia showing this bright lime green and alongside them camassias just glimmering with a first hint of blue. And in all my pots where I plant my tulips, everything's beginning to happen. The veg garden is looking neat. It's just standing by for action though. I can't wait to get stuck in sowing seeds and putting out little plants. And down in the pond, beyond the potting shed, lots of things are starting to happen. There's loads of leaves clogging it up and I need to give it a spring clean. I want to make sure it's truly wildlife friendly. I really love this time of year and then there's one part of my garden that is already at very very best. There's never a better time to see it. It's the woodland garden. A large part of my garden is in shade, or at least it will be, when the canopy comes out overhead. All the leaves fill in and this becomes a very green and shady place. But before that happens there are a whole load of plants that actually exploit the fact that the light is streaming in. The soil's just beginning to warm up. I've got my own name for these sorts of plants that just exploit this brief period. I call them Cinderella plants because they have to get absolutely everything done before that canopy fills in overhead. So they've got to flower, they've got to get pollinated, they've got to set seed, disperse it and then go to sleep all the way through the summer, the autumn, the winter, but then in the spring up they'll come again to grace the garden with utter beauty. Any bit of shade is the perfect place to grow some of these springtime beauties. Anemone namarosa, the wood anemone, is all over the garden but it's just coming into flower, but I thought it might be rather nice to add a different kind of anemone. Now this one is not your usual wood anemone, it's got these pretty pretty lemony yellow flowers which I think are just perfect in this setting. Lovely with the primroses, lovely with the yellow trumpets of the daffodils. So I'm going to do a bit of excavating first and this soil is riddled with roots, lots and lots of them. Anyway, let's get on with the main business which is lowering this into its hole. I'm not adding any kind of compost or anything at all to this because these plants prefer this kind of soil. It's leafy, it's lovely, it's quite light compared to a lot of my soil. You can even put some together in a pot and make a spring shady planting. One favourite flower of mine epitomises spring. I haven't yet met a snowdrop I don't like but S. Arnott is probably one of my all-time favourites. You should have been here a few weeks ago because the ground everywhere was covered in this carpet of white. I've got snowdrops here, there and everywhere but I want even more. So what I'm going to do is lift some of these, divide them, replant them and increase them. Every year we do this. Although snowdrops will spread themselves in a garden, they tend to get very congested and it's a really good idea to dig them up. They're really quite deep and even in a tiny clump like this you can see I've got several bulbs. As well as increasing your stock of snowdrops by doing this, you also make sure that these clumps maintain their vigour because if they're left in one place then eventually they're going to push themselves up out of the ground and that means the flowers will be smaller, they won't be nearly as good. Now if you have no snowdrops and you're going to buy some then you order them in the green and this little bundle will come with these strange green shoots and little bulbs attached but you'll have exactly what I've got here. Isn't it lovely? You can hear the birds singing and I can't think of a nicer job to be doing so I've got a nice bare patch of earth which is very unusual in my garden and I'm going to put these snowdrops in here and I've got them it's a cabbage trail really so it's narrow and it's very deep because I want to make a lot of separate holes and make them nice and deep without killing any worms. So that's going in and don't be scared to plant them as deep as you possibly can so all that's going to happen when I move this soil across is you'll see a bit of the leaves sticking up at the top so they're just at the right depth and I want a whole load of them just a few inches apart. If you plant them individually they're just going to do so much better. It's painstaking, it takes much longer than just shoving a clump in but I'm going to water that little clump in first before I move on somewhere else. And then it's a waiting game. I love making more from the plants I've got. Dividing snowdrops is such good fun but it's also a wonderful time to appreciate what's coming into flower right now both in the garden and in the countryside. I've always been interested in nature and wildflowers in particular. Well now I live amongst them. I think one of the most wonderful things about this is it allows me to see how these plants actually grow in the wild and whenever you're thinking about what a plant would like if you can find out about where it comes from and the sort of conditions this enjoys then it enables you to give it exactly what it needs. The primrose has to be my very favourite, don't tell the others. Nobody gardens it, nobody moves it around. It seeds itself down these little banks willy-nilly all over the show. It's a festival of spring. But you can bring the magic of primroses into your own garden by buying plants or growing them from seed. Gradually I've introduced them. I try and place them where they look au natural, right up by the hedges and you know in these little corners. Sometimes they seed themselves all over the show in the most unlikely places. But sometimes even these carefree beauties come under threat. Look at this, look what the pheasants have done. They've hacked all the flowers off this first clump and they were beautiful. I've been longing to show you these. I love having birds in the garden but when I hear that pheasant I just know I've got to watch out for the primroses. So how do you increase it? You just divide the plants and that's what we did way back when the flowers were on the wane last show. Pulled it apart, replanted it and then they find their final home here. But wait until you've enjoyed that flower because this is their moment. I love to revel in these signs of spring but the end of the winter brings a lot of graft and now's the time to check on an experiment I started way back in the autumn. These two big raised beds up here are where I grow most of the vegetables. Under the surface of this lovely thick mulch are loads and loads of daily tubers. Now normally my daily tubers live in pots but I did a bit of an experiment and I planted them all out here. The mulch is really really thick so I thought that would help them survive the winter because if those tubers freeze then they just go squelchy. I want this land now of this this big chunk here to grow my crop of potatoes but first I've got to lift all the daily tubers out. There's one. Look at that! So dailies grow from tubers. Just the same with potatoes too. They're tubers. All the tuber is is a way of storing all this starch and sugar so that the next year when the sun starts to beat down and the soil gets warm they can send up lots of shoots. It's a bit like bulbs in a way you know keeping all that energy stored inside until it's time to come up and grow. It's coming through here and I bet it's going to come and have another go at these primroses but it's going to get a surprise in a minute. It's gone but it didn't squawk. Whether you lifted and stored your dailies over winter or kept them under a thick compost duvet in the garden like I did it's time to wake up these sleeping beauties and get them growing again for their flowering in late summer and autumn. It's a beautiful day just a perfect day for potting up your dailies. Well I've lifted all those tubers from over there and this is a great idea if you haven't got a garden. Just inspect your tubers whether they're from a packet or from the garden. There's a rotten one there so I'm just going to take that out completely. Just check and make sure they're still firm and succulent because you want all that energy to make your plants grow later. I've got a lovely terracotta pot here an old one and it's got crocks in the bottom because they love good drainage and then the other thing they want is really good compost. So put a goodly layer in the in the bottom here. What am I doing? And then just nestle your tubers down into the top of the pot like that and then make it central if you can and then just start adding compost. Now at this stage I'm going to cover the tubers completely but I want the top of the crown where the stems are going to come out to be just below the surface of the compost. I want to be able to see these little shoots protruding there. So that's last year's stems and that's where the new shoots will come through. So I think we'll put a bit of grit over this anyway because it makes a nice noise from everything else and this will make sure that when I water these, even if I over water them a bit, the water will drain through and the crown won't rot because that's what you must ensure against. So grit on the top and I'm going to give it a thorough watering and then when these dailies start to grow I'll give them a bit of liquid feed organic and it will give them just that extra energy to boost the size of those flowers and deadhead frequently that's a trick and that way you'll ensure that your dailies go on giving you all that bloom for ages and ages. And now it's time for me to tackle some different tubers. I'm ready for my spuds now. Now there are all sorts of technical terms in gardening that can be a bit confusing and one of them is chitting. The whole idea is you put your seed potatoes into something like this very fancy piece of equipment otherwise known as an egg crate and you just leave them in a nice bright place with the shoots upwards. Well there'll be eyes at the first stage which are potential new shoots tend to be clustered together and you leave them like that for a few weeks until you see these shoots beginning to come up. So chitted potatoes off we go. Raring to go. I'm using a good old favourite it's King Edward they make particularly good chips if you like chips and they make lovely roast potatoes. There are loads of classifications of potatoes but basically they fall into two categories earlies and main crop. All that earlies means is new potatoes those ones that taste so delicious which you dig and harvest quite early on. Main crop on the other hand are ones that you harvest and you use from late summer onwards and many of them you can store right into the winter. Whichever you're growing the method is exactly the same and also you put them in at the same sort of time. Now all I'm going to do is dig a little trench across here and I'm going to make this trench oh maybe a foot or so deep and you just work yourself across like this. Nice energetic process this really. Loads of worms in here I don't think I've chopped any in half but that's always a good sign it shows your soil's really fertile chuck you down there. Potatoes love organic matter in the soil now it's um from our half made compost heap so it's not thoroughly rotted but it's all good organic material and I'm just going to add a layer of this because as these tubers grow as your spuds grow they'll send out these long roots and it's along those roots that the new potatoes are actually born. The spuds will be gathering all this nutrient from this lovely stuff it's ideal. So having done that it's time to plant your spuds and I'm going to space my spuds out with about a foot in between that way they'll have plenty of room to spread the roots out so all you do so I'm just going to nestle that in try and get the eyes facing upwards but it's not crucial it doesn't really matter even if they fall over they'll still grow so I'm going to just pull that soil back on top of them and then as they begin to grow and sprout I'll earth them up and all that means is you bring some of the soil from in between the rows and you just mound it up around the new shoots that's the first row if you want to try this out remember to dig deep space out your spuds and add plenty of organic matter to your soil you don't have to have a garden to be able to grow potatoes it's really good fun to grow them just in a pot I've filled this with well I've half filled it with old compost it's ideal and I'm going to plant three potatoes in here so these are they so in they go right into there and I'm going to just push the compost over that's a good size for a seed potato you don't really want them too huge and then just tuck them all in so you can't see them anymore as those shoots start to emerge then you bring more compost put it in right up to the top of the shoots and then they'll come up further and further and further and in the end this will be brim full of compost and your shoots will be up here somewhere but these you'll harvest about three months or so from the initial planting you took the whole lot out and that will be your treasure all these beautiful beautiful new potatoes it's almost as though it's happened already but I've got a vivid imagination the potatoes are planted next I can engage in my favorite activity sowing seed I love it when you come out on the morning like this and it's all still I don't think people realize very often just how important the light is in your garden you get this wonderful back light and it's the camassias and the fraubias the magnolias are just starting to open the buds it's been closed all night it's in these sort of quiet moments that you realize just how lucky you are and the only sound you can hear is the birds tweetering and twittering all over the place perhaps it's because they know the leaves of one of my favorite trees will soon unfurl bringing them a spring treat it's prunus padus colorata it's a bird cherry and it's called colorata because the leaves have this lovely sort of pinky purple tinge but this is the bit we're really interested in right now can you see these tiny little spires of close-packed buds well in a couple of weeks they'll have burst out the whole tree will be covered in tiny dainty pink flowers it's the most popular tree in the garden with the birds and i think it's because you get aphids on these new leaves the birds move in and they feast and feast and you can hear sometimes the whole tree is a twitter growing stuff from seed is one of the delights of gardening and this is a particularly sort of concentrated time especially when it comes to food crops already i've started sowing stuff here i've got some some cut and come again salad mainly brassicas rocket and mustard and stuff like that and i'm going to sow in here some other different salad leaves the salad that's going to grow from these is nothing like that stuff you get in bags from the supermarket it's totally different it's fresh it's gorgeous and the great thing about it is you can take just what you need at any one time so nothing's ever wasted so these are mixed salad leaves they're often in these foil packets that keeps the seed really fresh and i'm going to tip it out onto my hand first so i can see what i've got in that just that little pinch here i've probably got a hundred seeds and each one of those will make a separate little plant but the whole idea with cut and come again these will never be planted out we will constantly crop this but we'll sow successionally so one after the other we'll get fresh fresh leaves so what i always do is just go around the edge first with my hand a couple of inches above the surface of the tray and then fill in the the center of it backwards and forwards backwards and forwards and that's it couldn't be any easier could it i seldom use compost over the top of my seeds this is what i use so imagine you know seed in the wild basically it's on the surface of the soil so if you just replicate that by using grit now light can penetrate that in between each of these little bits of grit because that's what those seeds need to germinate they need light they need warmth and they need water and i'm going to press these down with my good old presser board which is now i think reached antique status i should label it first so just some vague indication of the date then you know which ones you sowed first and you don't even need a garden you can grow them on the kitchen windowsill as long as it's light and bright and you remember to give it an occasional water right now i'm going to go and water these alongside our salad every year i like to grow a good range of herbs we're going to sow parsley sparsely so we want not too many seeds at all and you can actually if you sniff this you can smell the parsley it's lovely so the reason i'm sowing my parsley sparsely is because eventually i'll be actually lifting each individual plant out and putting it into a separate compartment and if they're sown too thickly then i'll disturb the roots too much when i do separate them so that's ample more grit right over the top of their labelling once i've watered the parsley in the usual way i pour some just boiled water into my watering can and then i sprinkle the top of the trays with it it might seem an odd practice but it speeds up germination wonderfully well i don't just buy seeds i love collecting my own come on thief sometimes i'm wandering around the garden i see these beautiful flowers and i'm already thinking about what seed they're going to produce well i've got loads of seed here just examples of the stuff that i collected last year you do it right the way through the season but the thing i really want to sow straight away is army majors i'd already sowed some early on and those are the plants right in the front of this this tray the only ones that survived the ravages of mice who got into the greenhouse they chewed almost everything and so i'm going to sow some more so these are the old seed heads and already a lot of this seed has actually fallen from them into the envelope but can you hear it oh oh yes absolutely and then i want a clean paper bag which i should have here and all i'm going to do is funnel this lot into here and that's it and then i can get sewing so i'm trying to sprinkle it so there's plenty of space between each seed how satisfying it is to actually sow seed that you've collected yourself and it gives that continuity to the garden too you sow the seed you grow the plants you put them out they make more seed you collect it and you've got the next generation oh it's so lovely here and this shady side of the garden really comes into its own in fact it's just about at its peak at the moment it's true hellibore heaven i love the way that they all hold their heads down like this and you have to turn it right over to see its true beauty despite the fact that i've got so many i'm greedy i can't resist trying to make some more and i'm always interested in trying to help them hybridize and produce brand new plants i'll show you how it's really simple it's straightforward you need a pencil and a notebook a bit of some sort of twine and a pen with a black lid to move pollen from one flower to another so the whole idea is that each of these flowers has both male and female parts and with hellibores you can see that the male bits which are the anthers bear lots and lots of pollen and that gets ripe that gets ready long before the stigma which is the female bit in the is ready to receive that pollen it's just a way of ensuring in nature that you get lots of diversity you know none of these flowers will be inbred because the bees will have moved the pollen from one flower to another from one plant to another but in this case i'm going to move it and this is the best thing you just rub it on your knee and you turn your flower up and inside this flower you can see all this pollen and with a bit of luck should be enough static there to just yeah to just collect that pollen it's very visible it's pale for a start and you've got a dark pen lid and that's enough so i'm going to find my next plant well i haven't just chosen these two plants the mother and the father plant if you like at random when you're doing this it's really worth trying to find parents whose qualities you really appreciate so i love that plant that i've taken the pollen from for its big claret colored flowers but i love the habit of this plant it's got real vigor and it's a beautiful shape so i've got one nice bud here you just pull the petals back slightly now this flower has no pollen yet and i'm going to move this pollen and just gently wipe it on that stigma go away bee you can't come in here come find another flower that's it and then i'll close those petals again very very gently i'll just tie a little bit of raffia just beyond the flower onto that flower stem very very gently that's like that and then i'll do the other one in a minute and that just marks that flower but then you make a note of it i'll know then when i come to collect the seed exactly what that cross was it'll take a month a couple of months before that seed is actually set and ripe and you know it's ripe when these seed pods just start to open then you've got to move in rapidly because if you don't you'll find all these seeds just underneath your plant and you will have no idea which is the one that you pollinated so collect the whole seed pod the seeds will drop down inside your envelope and then sow them as soon as you possibly can i think part of any kind of hybridizing anytime when you're trying to produce your own plants is selection too it's knowing what's you know going to make a beautiful plant but you won't know that until the second year when they actually start to flower go on why not give it a try yourself carefully collect some pollen from the flower on the first plant and transfer that to a flower on the second plant mark the flower you've pollinated really clearly and later on you can come back and collect the seed before you know it you'll be able to sow your seed straight away and start your brand new strain of hellebores next a real treat planting some brand new hellebores i love the hellebores in here they're right the way through but i want to plant some more i'm going to plant new hellebores and i'm going to plant some pulmonarias as well this soil is pretty good but as i'm planting these i'm going to incorporate a bit of this lovely stuff this is straight off our compost heap you can almost feel how strong it is and how it's going to help these plants grow brilliantly well so i mean even in a little garden it's so good to use all your waste material and keep it going and it helps regenerate the soil just working this in a little bit here that'll do and now can dig a hole i want to plant this one and if i turn it out you can see it's got absolutely masses of roots so i'll just loosen a few of them at the bottom and the whole idea when you're putting in plant is improve your soil make sure that those roots are going to be able to move outwards because that's what you want it to do so here goes now i want to plant it so it's at the same level as the rest of the soil and then i'm going to firm it in and when i've finished planting all these things i'm going to mulch the whole thing again with the same compost which will retain moisture and it'll really help the plant get off to a good start and with a bit of luck it'll suppress the weeds right that'll do for that one this is pulmonary blue ensign now pulmonary belong to this big family of borage but pulmonary are probably the very first of the family to flower right the way through from january right until the end of may or so but all these flowers are rich in pollen and nectar so visiting bees are just going to enjoy it so much there are lots and lots of different varieties of pulmonary but i think this is my favourite of the lot it has particularly big flowers it's just gorgeous there you look quite happy i'll give everything a really good water when i've finished this planting here in this big copper tub full of good compost it's a total self-indulgence really we change the contents of this throughout the year last summer i planted it up with luscious exotics all rich vibrant colors and shiny jungly leaves but now it's time to update it for the new season it's the spring and i think i'd love it to just be absolutely full bursting with sunshine i've chosen three halibos yellow ones this time really lovely gold because that shows up so brilliantly well at this time of year and then i'm going to combine it with some perennial wall flowers this is one called ricky copper the color changes gradually deeper in the center and then as they open up lots of oranges and yellows and this glorious scent there's nothing like the smell of wallflowers it's just completely unique before i actually plant them i want to improve this soil a little bit so i'm going to tip them a load of this from our compost heap that's probably enough so i'll just dig this in a bit make sure it's incorporated right so let's have a go it's quite nice to use three of the same i suppose they are a sort of centerpiece really but that gives it some nice kind of substance and structure this is only going to be here for about two months something like that and then all these plants will go out into the garden i want the depth of my soil to be you know really quite close to the top of the pot so i'll firm them in a little bit around each one i think this is lovely and then these euphorbia over there and i fill in in between those roots are just going to grow right out i love this little viola isn't it pretty it's called copper field and it's just the right kind of color to tone with this but yeah it's just just right that's just nestled in looks perfectly at home with all its bigger friends so we'll have one in there and one in there i think because we want them just at the edge there you are you're right so water well well lots of gardening isn't about instant gratification at all it's about putting things in being patient seeing them grow but when you're planting in a container a pot like this it's a bit like painting a picture except this picture is going to grow and change all the time i think that'll do for now what an incredibly busy week we've had there's something about the color and the scent and the whole feeling of this time of year that's just so magical well although the weather's been beautiful it can change as the moments notice but that's one of the excitements about spring looking forward and not knowing what's coming next time i'll be showing you how to make your garden more fruitful with raspberries gooseberries and rhubarb on the menu and if a beautiful floral display is more your thing then how about starting a cutting garden you