Gardeners World 2020 S53E32

Hello, welcome to Gardener's World. Well, as the garden is elegantly fading all around me, it's time to protect these agapanthus. Agapanthus come from South Africa, and although they're quite hardy if it's really dry, they do not like our winter here at Longmeadow, where it is reliably wet and cold at the same time. There are two types of agapanthus. You have the evergreen types, which I've got here, and also deciduous. And you can see these are already dying back pretty rapidly. And the deciduous agapanthus are more hardy than the evergreen. So if you've got them planted in your garden and you have very free-draining soil, they should be fine. You might perhaps mulch them or protect them if it gets really cold. Now, the evergreen ones are best stored in a greenhouse if you've got it, because they need to be frost-free and have some light. If you haven't got a greenhouse, then a porch or a conservatory is ideal. The deciduous ones will die back and they don't need light. I tend to put them in a cold frame. But if you haven't got a cold frame or a greenhouse, you could put those into a shed or a garage and they'll be fine. And then once they start to grow next spring, you can bring them out again. Now, coming up on today's programme. We meet someone who expertly choreographs his collection of dahlias every year to create a magnificent floral display. Every year, I make a plan to try to make sure that all my flowers are in bloom at the same time. Eric visits Great Dixter to discover how their famous borders have become a refuge for wildlife. We're not planting a plant because it attracts pollinators. We want to create an ornamental garden. So we've just gone ahead and done that. But secondary to that has been all the wildlife that's come along. And I should be planting raspberries, including some in a pot. Come on, Pat. Now, as well as protecting agapanthus and other tender plants, I've got a herb growing in these cold frames that has been wonderful all summer but hates the cold. And this is basil. First sign of cold, basil leaves get thicker, you lose the taste. And if there is the slightest touch of frost, they just blacken and die. So I will pull the plants up. I'm pulling them up because I want to plant a successional crop for winter. And that is parsley. Now, I've got a bucket of sieved garden compost. And I'm going to add this just to refresh the soil. You don't need to add too much, just the equivalent of an inch at most mixed in there. I don't need to dig it in so much as just to make sure that it's spread evenly. And of course, you could do this in a container, a window box. Whatever you've got is exactly the same principle. This is a flat leaf parsley that I've grown from seed. And what we have are nice, strong individual plants. So if I take out a plug, there you can see that's a nice healthy plant with roots showing on the outside of the plug, which means that it's ready to be moved on. And it's a member of the carrot family. So it will form a deep tap root. So I'll just plant these out at about a six inch spacing. Parsley is a vigorous plant that will grow 18 inches tall. And if you give them room to grow, you'll get much more in the way of harvest than if you have masses in a small space. That will ensure that we have a really generous supply of parsley all winter long. Now, last month, Joe went to Romford in Essex to visit longhouse plants. And what he found there was more than just a fascinating nursery. Grasses, the mainstay of the late summer garden. And I've come to a place where the planting shows them off to their very best. This is a gorgeous border. It's got everything. It's got these lovely miscanthus grasses that are so tactile and they capture the light beautifully. And then behind, we've got the asters just poking their heads over the top. And then it tears up towards the helianthus at the back of the border. And there's a lovely flow and movement, especially when the wind catches these grasses. The creative mind here belongs to a nurseryman and plant collector, Tim Carter, whose passion for grasses led him to design a garden on a grand scale to showcase them. It gives me a place to experiment with plant combinations and assess the qualities of the plots. When you grow plants in pots, you can't always see their true nature. So when we plant them out, it's a way of evaluating how they sit on the landscape, how to use them. You've obviously got a great design as I when it comes to combinations of planting. But how do you approach a design? Most people design a space and then when they have the garden, they decide where to put the seat in as an afterthought. I always start any design with a chair and I use my imagination to imagine what I'm going to look at. So what have you created here as far as the composition? I try and place the grasses on an east-west axis so that the sun moves around them to show the grasses off during different times of day. So we're looking down the line of an Argentinian feather grass, and then we're looking across to the Persicaria at this time of year. Yeah, beautiful, isn't it? Oh, it sways, it moves around. The Aster's beautiful popping up there. It's a lovely look. That particular Aster you're pointing out, Aster fricatii, and that's Aster fricatii munch. It sits well with the smaller grasses, with the what we used to call sedums. I still call them sedums. I can't remember, Joe. Can you remember the new name? Thank you very much. Whatever, it's the look of it I like. It's mostly for me. I'm just playing. This is a really lovely wide composition here. I know form's important to you, but colour is as well, but it's quite a subtle colouring here. Deliberately so. I'm trying to relate everything to the background, to the fields and the hedge line beyond, but I'm always very, very careful with colour, specifically yellow. There's a thread of yellow that I link across the landscape. All that's done deliberately, not only forwards to backwards, but also from side to side. So I'm linking the colour of leaves of the shrub at the cornice over there. I'm linking that to the background helianthus that are in flower at this time of year. Generally with yellows, I try and use them from a third to two thirds the length of the garden. Because your eyes are always taken to a yellow and if I put it right at the very, very back, it would shorten the background. So if I use it between a third and two thirds and sparingly, it increases the sense of space. Now Tim creates lovely broad brush strokes of planting and that has impact and makes it feel like a garden rather than just a collection of plants. We've got this wonderful grass here. This is setaria macrostachia and it's just an annual and it's just self-seeded itself all around. He leaves it in where he wants it, pulls it out where he doesn't. And then it leads on to this very different type of grass. This is animanthole lisoniana golden hue. It's got a different form. It's much looser, but this side is just a straight animanthole lisoniana but it feels as if it's just cascading right across the path. An amazing texture. And this path is leading you all the way to this, which is at the end of the vista. This lovely blue agapanthus. It's flowers are at eye level. It's absolute perfection. And he's even brought a bit of the landscape. The yew from next door is not in this garden, but again, it leads the eye up beautifully. So quantities of the same plant, not just lots of little plants dotted in will create impact in your garden. As well as being an artful designer, Tim's a plantsman at heart and something of an avid collector. If I called you an obsessive, would that upset you? Not at all. I admit to being a bit of an anorak. I love plants, but if it wasn't plants, it will be beer mats or it will be bottle caps or it would be motorcycle parts. I just have that collectory gene. I just, I'm really passionate and I really enjoy plants. So Tim, this is one of your collections, Hesperantha. You've got three different varieties here that are all red. They all look very similar to me, but they're not. The one by you is coxinha major. That's sort of the industry standard. That's one you get in every garden centre. It's a good red, nothing wrong with it. Starts in flower early, going all the way through. But as a collector or as a designer, you might want to just have something a little bit better. A scarlet is a good flower. It's a little bit better than that to my eye in tone. This one here is my particular favourite. This is one called Cindy Tao. It's just the best red that I grow to date. It's slightly more star shaped, but it is what I want for Hesperantha. It is red. So Tim, there's a lot going on in this garden. It's all a reflection of you, really. There's the botany, the science side of things. There's the collector in you, but there's also the designer, the artist in you as well. Would you say that's about right? It's all encapsulated in this space. I think that sort of sums it up. Joy, pleasure, just puts a smile on my face. And it's a real privilege to be able to get to share it with people. It's just magical. Yeah, well, you've created a haven, no doubt about it. I do think that having a garden as part of a nursery is such a good thing. I know that a lot of growers do have a garden, but wouldn't it be wonderful if every nursery had one? I've made some changes here in the soft fruit garden, and I've managed to get hold of some bare root plants of autumn fruiting raspberries. Bare root plants are grown in the ground and only lifted in the dormant season. And once they're lifted, they are sent straight to you by post and you have to plant them almost immediately. This is the window of bare root planting from now through till next February. And when you get them, they will look just a bundle of bare sticks with roots attached. And the really important thing is that these bare roots never dry out for an instant. So the first thing you should do, if you possibly can, is give them a drink. Unwrap them and put them in a bucket of water. Now, I've prepared the ground already and you can see that it's a strip. There are no supports of any kind because autumn fruiting raspberries produce their fruits on new growth. So they're cut back down to the ground after they finish fruiting about Christmas every year. And I've added quite a lot of old compost from last year's tulip pots, which had masses of grit in them, because raspberries need really good drainage. So lots of grit, well dug and it's almost like a raised bed. You do not want to plant them in a sunken trench where the water can gather in and sit all winter. And I've lost raspberry plants when I planted them like that. There are also a plant that is happiest with the soil being slightly ericaceous. So each plant is just a stick with some roots and I will put them in a row about two foot apart and I will plant them down the middle of the bed because eventually they'll be multi-stemmed and they will spread out and fill the whole of this area. Don't plant them too deep because they have very shallow roots and do make sure that the ground you're planting them in is weed free because they're quite hard to weed. Now this is autumn bliss. I have plenty of fruit. They're rather prickly, but you know you're going to get good raspberries from them. If you can't plant them for more than 24 hours then you need to heal them in. So just make a scrape somewhere in the garden anywhere where there's a bit of bare soil or even in a pot if you've got some potting compost and cover the roots in soil and you can plant them at any time between now and March. A great advantage of bare root plants is that they are significantly cheaper and there is a much better choice of varieties and most trees, shrubs, fruit of all kinds are available as bare root and I strongly recommend investigating them. This I am trying for the first time. It's a variety called polka. Compared to autumn bliss it starts cropping earlier in the season with larger sweeter berries. I will water these in and then mulch them thickly and leave them and then when I start to see the very first signs of growth which will be about next March I will cut them back to just a bud and the new growth will carry some fruit and these should go on fruiting for years and years to come. Now we have been sent a film from someone who has recorded their very first year of growing vegetables. Hi my name is Susan I'm from Telford, Shropshire and this is my wedge garden. I'm a first time wedge grower so this year has been all about experimenting for me. Initially it was just a few seeds shared among friends. I pretty much follow just one rule just I like to cook what I grow here and I only grow what I like to eat. As you know most of us use crocks to provide better drainage at the bottom of the pot but a friend of mine suggested using coconut shells and I cook a lot of Indian cooking so I have lots of coconut shells left over. I collect them all and when I'm ready to pot I put one at the bottom of the pot and then I use compost as normal. So this has two advantages for me one is that I don't have a lot of crocks lying around and the other one is the coconuts it's much more biodegradable and it's a better way of using them. So hopefully that's a tip for you guys and thank you. For a first timer that vegetable patch is very impressive Susan and I like the coconut idea mind you I don't generate that many coconuts in the kitchen but still I will bear it in mind. Now I've got another raspberry to plant but this one is different from the ones that I've just done in two respects. The first is that this is a dwarf raspberry it doesn't get much bigger than this. It's called Ruby Beauty and it's the first truly dwarf raspberry plant ever bred. It's been around for a few years now and has proven itself to be hugely successful not only as a raspberry that you can grow in a pot on a patio but also as one that is really productive. It is also summer fruiting so we'll produce that fruit in June and July. Now you buy it like this in a pot you won't get bare root plants of this but it will need a fresh pot because this pot is not big enough to give it the nourishment it needs. It should be planted in a pot that is at least 20 litres big and this is a 20 litre plastic pot and this by the way has got good drainage holes so don't forget whatever you use make sure there's plenty of drainage because raspberries hate getting too wet. And I have prepared some compost that is specifically designed to make a raspberry happy. I've added some leaf mould and some composted bracken because that gives it an ericaceous edge. Now I've also added in some vermiculite for drainage. But any peat-free bark-based compost will do the job perfectly well. Just check and see how that is for height. Well that's about right. Don't sink it too deep in the pot because again you want it so that the roots can drain. And of course you don't have to grow this in a container but there's no reason why you can't plant it out into the soil if you want to. Right I'll put that round there. Now if I just shake it the compost will work around it. Now that will be good for quite a few years in that pot but in order for it to fruit at all I do need to understand and practice the pruning regime for summer fruiting raspberries which is quite different to autumn fruiting. Summer fruiting raspberries produce their fruit on canes that were grown the previous year. So all this growth that we have here now will bear fruit next summer. So what you do is prune out all the old growth i.e. the ones that bore fruit this year. Now there aren't many on this it's been pruned back. You can see there you have the cut back stubs of the canes that produce this year's fruit and I've got one there so that can come back and that can be cut back so you take off the old growth leave the new and that will guarantee you fruit next year. And in terms of looking after it these are tough plants so they'll take any amount of cold as long as it's got good drainage this can go in a sheltered place you don't have to grow it in full sunshine and I'm really interested to see what the fruit is like and how much there is next June. Of course this is deciduous so it will lose its leaves don't worry if they all fall off because they will all grow back next spring. And this is the time of year when leaves are dominating the colour in our gardens but nothing can match the intensity of colour that you get from maples particularly the Japanese maples and this is the perfect moment to pay another visit to Ray and Michelle Blundell's garden in Burton-on-Trent which is packed with glorious maples of every hue. I first met Michelle in about 1984 we decided to buy this piece of ground and we decided to build a green oak frame house so we sussed out the frame I got a price for things and said that sounds expensive I think I could do that myself. And I got all the grotty jobs didn't I? The garden was always in the back of our minds so we asked the digger guy to level all the soil off and at the same time he dug out a pond for us and that was the start of the garden. When I was 13 I worked with my uncle who was a landscape gardener and he really was a big influence on my gardening life. The garden is about a third of an acre so it gave us a lot of ideas to speculate with. Michelle wanted to see particular trees and things from the house and so we sat down with a piece of paper sorted out the plants that we wanted and Japanese maples figured largely in that because they were such wonderful things with colour in the spring, through the summer, into the autumn and then the coloured stems all the way through the winter. The tree behind me is the first Asian that I bought. I bought it about 15 years ago. It's called Eddisbury. It is a magnificent tree. It's fantastic for its autumn colour but it also has red stems and to complement that we have another striking tree which is called Ozakazuki. This is, I think, one of the brightest reds that you get. The one at the back of it is called Western Birch Orange also fantastic and the combination of the trees in this group in the autumn is magnificent. This section of the garden was from an idea that Michelle saw at Trentum Gardens a wonderful combination of verbena and steepa gigantica. The wind whistles through it. It's so ephemeral and it's a wonderful combination and lasts for a long time from August through to the autumn. This is where I overwinter my young aces. It's airy, it's light but it doesn't have the rain falling onto the aces which is what you need to protect against during the winter. They don't mind the cold. They're okay down to, I think, minus 18 but it does serve as a sort of a nursery over the winter and stop them getting too wet. This bed here I created to show what you can do with dwarf aces. This tree here, which is beautiful at this time of year is called Skeeter's Broom. It's about as tall as it will get, about two metres and this time of year it's absolutely fantastic. If we move through here, this is a variety called Kirohimi. By contrast, a smaller, also dwarf variety won't get more than about a metre high Planted this about three years ago but the plants themselves, the trees were looked after for three years, probably before that from small pots, gradually growing them into larger pots protected from the elements because they need time to accustom to the conditions of the microclimate and I find that if you put them in in the autumn they sit in the ground and they sulk. They don't like those conditions over winter whereas if you plant them in the spring give them a few months through the summer to establish themselves then you get all the beauty of the new leaves and you find out if it likes it there and in the autumn this is what you get. The issue with collecting aces is that there are many thousands. You go further and further afield to find the obscure and the unusual and this passion has taken me all around the country and into Europe. I've now got about 120 different varieties of those thousands and you have become quite obsessed about it. Yes, I think it's a great thing to do. I wish I could grow decent maples here at Longmiller. Last May I planted a Zakozuki, the Acer palmatum and it seemed to be doing okay but it's suffered badly this summer and it's defoliated and it's not looking at all happy and I think it was the wet of last winter. So maybe sometimes you just have to pass and move on but I'm not going to move on from trying to grow really good Heleniums because I love Heleniums. That incredible range of caramels and burnt oranges and deep lovely burgundy colours and sometimes bright yellows which go from July through to November and they are perfect for the jewel garden and I have grown them a lot and they go fine but I can't keep them. They don't last through our winters so I'm doing a little experiment. I've got one here which is Helenium Chipperfield Orange but I put three in and I intend to treat each one differently. One I'm going to dig up now that I will put in a cold frame and water maybe every two or three weeks. Another I'm going to cut back so its energy goes into the roots and the third I will leave as it is which is what I normally do with Heleniums and then we'll see which one grows better next year and that will give me the clue of how best to deal with them in this garden and that's the key to good gardening. Right let's dig this one up and you can see it hasn't been in long enough to have a really good root system but lots of nice vigorous new roots so I've got a pot here that we'll stick it in. That is going to be protected and then the next one I shall cut back and then next spring we'll see which plant has come through winter best and is growing strongest and then I'll take the principle of that plant and apply it to all the rest of the Heleniums that I fully intend to try and grow in the garden for as long as possible. Now still to come on today's program Arit visits Great Dixter to find out how important our gardens are for wildlife but first we're going to Stockport to meet Geoff Hoyle who prepares his hundreds of dahlias to rise to a glorious crescendo every September. Every year I make a plan to try to make sure that all my flowers are in bloom at the same time. I have a planting scheme to try to create a wall of colour that looks at its best in the first week in September when we open our garden for charity. Now you might notice that I quite like dahlias in fact I grow about 450 of them. There's such a wide range of shapes contrasting colours some have delicate flower formations some are big and brassy and some are just downright weird. Some only reach 18 inches in height but others can reach about 8 feet in height. In fact some of my favourite varieties are the taller growing ones such as Westerton Ella Grace Rycroft Delight Kenora Clyde Homatland and Kenora Wow. In theory it will be possible to create a wall of colour using dahlias alone but because dahlias come in every colour apart from blue I needed something extra so I invested in some blue asters verbena and some salvias to create a blue effect. When a bloom's past its best and starts to expose its pollen I deadhead it to try to stimulate further flower growth. That's not good for attracting the bees so I'd grow some open scented plants like Argyranthemums Rudbeckias salvias and late sown marigolds. In addition to deadheading it's also vital that you keep your dahlias well tied up especially in windy summers like this one. It's only in recent years that I've discovered rebar reinforcement bar that they use in concrete. I bought some rusty rebar painted it in green rust resistant paint and they've been absolutely brilliant for me. They don't bend they don't rust and they're dead easy to get into the ground. All in all despite a very dry spring and summer monsoon and gales throughout it's not been a bad year. The plan seems to have come to fruition but next year I'm determined to do even better. Geoff didn't open his garden this September so let's hope that next year when the garden is going to be better than ever that it will be open and that as many of us can go and visit and enjoy it as possible. Now I've got some salvias here in the jaw garden and the salvias that we grow in this part of the garden are all tender. This for example is salvia curviflora and it's got the most incredibly vibrant magenta pink flowers but the first frost could kill it. So the important thing to do is to protect it before it needs it and that means that whilst it's still happy and healthy and flowering I'm going to dig it up. I'm not going to cut it back I'm just going to dig it up as it is and pot it up and put it into the greenhouse. There we go just lift it without damaging the roots. I've got a number of other salvias that are tender that need lifting. I've got garinitica which actually frustratingly has only just started to flower. I've got amistad which has been flowering all summer long. It's hardier than most but I still bring that in but behind me I've got my favorite salvia of all. This is salvia dombiae the biggest salvia that you can grow in your garden that will reach over two meters tall given the right conditions and these long red trumpets of flower but like the curviflora it is tender. It comes from the mountains of Bolivia and Peru and certainly wouldn't last through till next spring if I left it outside. So I need to dig this up too and take this into the greenhouse as well. Now all of us have had to adapt and change our plans this year sometimes radically and we've been sent a film from Stone Market in Suffolk from a young couple who set out this year on their allotment growing flowers for a very specific purpose. My name is Elizabeth and I'm here with my fiancé Branwell and we've got this allotment recently we got it in November of last year so it's our first ever allotment. The plan is for it to be a cup flower allotment for our wedding that's in September if that still is allowed to happen. At the moment the plan is to have two rows of dahlias which are going to be things like café au lait which is the very wedding-y flower and then we're also going to have some cosmos and some snapdragons as well. At the moment it's just all weeds weeding has just become our full-time job at the moment. Hello it's Branwell and Elisabeth here and this is our allotment in August. It was going to be a cup flower allotment but after we decided to postpone our wedding in September we decided to plant some more veg. We're growing some cucumbers some courgettes and a one big marrow that I have named Marilyn which we hope will be a prize winner. We've got cosmos purity and over here cosmos cupcake which the bees love and they also love our sunflowers which were a gift from a lady who was visiting the allotment and gave us all the seedlings. Well let's hope that Elisabeth and Branwell have their wedding next year and it is bedecked with flowers from their allotment and I know that so many couples have had to postpone their wedding plans so let's keep our fingers crossed for them. Now this time of year the wildlife garden is like everywhere else beginning to recede into autumn but I leave everything here exactly as it is I cut nothing back at all I leave the weeds and the dead flower heads and the stems and anything that's flopping into the water leaves that fall on the ground I don't collect any of them up from in here because it is all cover and at this time of year and over the coming winter months cover is really important to protect those insects and vertebrates and small mammals that can do so much good in your garden particularly in spring and summer and as well as leaving some areas untouched you can create cover very simply and I've got a big old log here which if I put this against the tree because it's curved creatures will be able to get in and under it and it's really safe and strong and I've also got bundles of these sticks put that on the ground next to it and immediately you've got these long tubes of space that little insects can get into even if the space is big enough little mammals and that is fantastically good because it's so protected and these are much smaller twigs you can put that on top and that's covering the space next to the log I've got another log which is wrapped around with ivy so even the space between the ivy will work well we can put that there and then a few more logs stack it up it's protected and it will be so useful because so many of the creatures that use and need cover like this are really beneficial to our gardens for example ground beetles are one of the most important predators of slugs in the garden there are pollinators that will use that then come out in spring to pollinate your flowers and plants so you will benefit wildlife you'll benefit the garden and personally you'll benefit the gardener I think because it is so interesting if you have a garden that is rich with a wide variety of life now it seems to me that this is the perfect moment to rejoin Arit when she went to Great Dixter now Great Dixter of course is one of the most famous gardens in the world and Arit was talking to the head gardener Fergus Garrett about how they are adapting and changing so that they can encourage as much wildlife as possible into the garden Fergus you've been here over 25 years and I'd have thought that you would know every inch of this garden you know every flower every blade of grass but recently you've had some new insight well Arit I thought I knew it inside out this place but actually I hadn't really opened up my brain to the wildlife side of things we're not planting a plant because it attracts pollinators we want to create an ornamental garden so we've just gone ahead and done that but secondary to that has been all the wildlife that's come along and I think the interesting thing for me has been that I expected all the wildlife to be out in these meadow areas but all the results are showing that these things are here in the garden and now you know that you're sharing it with all those wonderful creatures that used to be throughout the land here we can expand on that and make sure that those populations grow recently you got some new revelations I hear I asked the British Arachnological Society to come here and under the stone they found a spider that hadn't been recorded in Sussex since 1903 and then we were away and next thing we know it we're a front page of the British Arachnological Society magazine four pages in there and I thought well hold on you know there's a lot more to Dixa than meets the eye the person who delivered this amazing news is entomologist Andy Phillips what sort of habitats do you have to create in the garden to enable all of the biodiversity and you need to provide the different microhabitats and that's what they do here in Great Dixa in abundance the log piles, the bare ground, the sandy banks it's very well known that how important ponds in gardens are especially for amphibians, dragonflies, water beetles but what is not well known is actually there are some pollinator groups that actually have the larval aquatic stages such as drone flies which are important pollinators or even in a stump of a tree which is hollowed out and water collects in it that's a very important habitat for some hollow fly in the thatched roofs here at Great Dixa we get hundreds of pale footed black wasp which are preys on aphids within the gardens within each nest burrow they'll be collecting about 200 aphids why is biodiversity so important in the garden? creates a very nice balance in the garden I think there are certain things that are eating some of the nasties so that we don't feel the urge to sort of spray everything because the insects are doing that job oh this is a fantastic wall you get quite a variety of different bees actually nesting in the loose water and the crumbling parts of the wall one of the most abundant species here is the green furrow bee tiny little metallic green bee Mexican daisy I mean presumably that's good because it flowers long times get a very long flowering time so there's a fantastic nectar and pollen resource on this wall and especially as it's south facing it heats up and so you get a huge variety of mining bees and furrow bees actually collecting pollen you know you've got quite short grass here and then you've gone longer is that deliberate? well this is a meadow that's that was cut and this is the mown bit but you don't need to mow this all the time because if you look in here you know there are lots of little sort of vetches and odd bits of dandelion and sort of clover and all those sort of things that would be our lawn weeds and they provide an interesting nectar and pollen source for certain insects the taller meadow and the shorter lawn with the bare patches is really important for a lot of different species of mining bee mining bees were actually all nests in the ground in these little bare patches and they would then use the dandelions as flush of dandelions in early spring as a pollen and nectar resource I know this garden wasn't created as a wildlife garden but what do you think you've done to kind of really keep that going in terms of your gardening practices? the fact that we don't cut everything down at this time of year and we've always had a long season of interest at Dixter which gives you a really long season of pollen and nectar sources and so it's not only as good for insects to lay their eggs in the stems of grasses and we've got the seed heads there that are so nice for the birds as well as well as you know aesthetically the winter skeletons are wonderful with a bit of hoar frost over the top of them in the winter the botanical diversity of a garden such as Great Dixter is really good for a whole range of invertebrates but particularly moths and this is a typical sort of autumn species of moth called the myrtle du jour there he is yeah he certainly is more like marvel du jour yeah it's a stunning little feeds on oak buds and then oak leaves later on and comes out in September or October well some moth species actually are pollinators so they will actually be feeding on flowers and pollinating flowers the same as butterflies do in Britain there's about 2,500 species of moth and sort of around 60 species of butterfly so yeah the diversity of moths is much greater and they're an important food source as well you see they're part of that chain so the birds and the bats and those sort of things will take the moths so they're all part of that that web and that really is the classic Great Dixter view isn't it? so the interesting thing about this is that it relates to somebody with a smaller garden because collectively a number of small gardens working together can have the same effect the wildlife doesn't need to exist out there in nature reserves and out in the countryside it can come into these suburban and urban places obviously a garden like Great Dixter has lots of different opportunities and environments to encourage wildlife but no garden is too small to make a real difference because together gardens make up one of the most important habitats for wildlife in the country and we should never underestimate that and one of the things that I've learned to love about autumn and winter is feeding the birds and I do this because I get so much pleasure from watching the birds and we start this in October when the table that we feed them on has all the plants cleared off it and for six months of the year this becomes a bird feeding table in fact I feed the birds on top of walls, on stones, on the table to try and have a lot of different locations so different birds can use them and to that end what birds love are seeds, nuts and fats now I start with the single best thing that you can ever feed birds which are sunflower seeds they come in two forms you have them when the husks are taken off and quite a few birds prefer these blackbirds for example will always go straight for these and then you can get them unhulled and some birds like the process of taking the hulls off and they're beaks especially adapted to do that of course if you're growing sunflowers in the garden don't cut them back but leave them for the birds to extract every last seed and I sprinkle them on the log what I want to do is make it hard for some birds to get at it and make sure the little ones like the robins can get their sharper beaks into the crevices I also have stones which I put on the table which again just provides variety the other seed which I always use are niger seeds these are absolutely tiny little black seeds that are ideal for finches gold finches for example love them you'll see them in the garden feeding off thistle heads and just sprinkle those on it's just like creating a dish and then on top of that you can buy some of the dried mealworms which you'll find blackbirds and robins absolutely adore and the starlings will come in and eat these as well so we've got a little bit of protein there for them and a favourite are peanuts you can fill a wire hopper like this and hang it up and this will attract not just tits but also we get the great spotted woodpecker and it's important to make birds feel safe so don't put it out in the open if you can put it under the shade of a tree or a shrub and what we find is the birds like it if you hang these up on a wall and that also keeps them out of the way of rats and squirrels too you can also feed fats fats are very high in calories and that's really important you can provide fats in slabs and these cages which you hang up and we find that the long-tailed tits which arrive in great family groups of up to a dozen birds will feed greedily and then there'll be a noise and the whole thing like a puff of smoke will disappear I love watching them so you hang that up or you can use fat balls and you can get special containers for fat balls you just pop them in and you can either stand them on a table or hang them up finally don't forget to have fresh water it's really important that there is a water supply all the time and birds will use this not just to drink but also they will use it to wash and if it's frozen really important to make sure the ice is broken and there is a supply of water even in the hardest frost and as well as a reward that you get from sharing your space with birds there is a huge benefit to the garden because the more birds you have in the garden the fewer caterpillars and aphids and slugs and snails you will have and birds are one of the linchpins of a really healthy garden now I love to see the films that you're sending in of your gardens wherever they come from but I get special pleasure if they come from the other side of the world and we've been sent a film from the United States of America Hi I'm Meg and we live in the mountains in Eden, Utah this spring we had a lot of time at home so we decided to redo our front yard it was a manicured lawn which we felt didn't blend in well with the surrounding natural landscape so we wanted to replace it with wildflowers we started by killing all of the grass except for a strip down the middle which we kept for a path then we tilled the dead grass raked it and put down seed what are you guys doing? sprinkling wildflower seeds we also had space for a vegetable garden we laid a border of old railroad ties around the outside and bordered the vegetable area with lumber we filled the raised beds with good soil all of the dirt's been tilled and raked we got all of the seed down we've watered the seed and we'll keep it wet for at least a couple of weeks until everything germinates and hopefully we'll have a nice wildflower meadow when we're all done within a couple of months we had a beautiful full wildflower garden our vegetables were growing the bees were buzzing and we had many insects and birds it has been a wonderful place to sit, relax, and enjoy nature i would absolutely recommend to everyone to replace their lawn with wildflowers i agree with meg i think everybody should turn their lawns into wildflower meadows right this looks as though it is pretty disastrous but actually these are perfectly good potatoes these are pink fir apple potatoes that i've grown in this bag they were planted at the beginning of june just a couple of tubers pink fir apple are a main crop and very late to develop so october is perfectly good to harvest but whether it's a good crop, a bad crop, or no crop at all i can't tell but let's have a look now they may just tip out into this barrow no that's so wedged i think i'm gonna have to cut it out it always seems a shame when you cut one of these bags which are very useful all right there we go are there any oh yeah at least there's one i can see that there we go i've got a container here it's not too bad pink fir apple are remarkable in shape they're long and they're knobbly and very waxy and oh yep there are more in there look that's fantastic whoa really good well let's put that on the ground for a moment how about that just from one bag i think that's what you call a good job and here are some more for this weekend now is a good time to take rose cuttings choose a nice vigorous growth about the thickness of a pencil this can be subdivided into lengths about six to nine inches long but make sure that you mark the bottom of each piece by cutting it at an angle remove either all or most of the leaves and then bury the cuttings in a gritty compost so only the top is showing put this to one side it doesn't need any special protection and leave it over winter and it'll start to show signs of growth next spring if you're growing some late season salad crops you can extend the harvest by starting to protect some now cloches are ideal and if you've had some stored away give them a good wash so they let through as much light as possible cover up some of the plants but be sure to leave the ends open so there's plenty of ventilation if you pot up paperwhite daffodils now they will be ready for flowering indoors at christmas time i'm choosing a variety called ziva which is full of flower use a fairly deep pot put in the bulbs and then cover them up with at least two inches more compost water them and put them aside so they're protected in about six weeks time the shoots will appear and then bring them indoors to a sunny warm windowsill and they'll start flowering a few weeks after that i confess that we haven't nearly kept up with the picking of the scarlet emperor runner beans but they look very decorative and they're still producing more beans and we'll go on doing so until the weather gets cold so we could easily have a few more weeks of harvest and we'll have a meal tonight of the runner beans and the pink fur apple potatoes that's it for today don't forget that on sunday morning the clocks go back so tomorrow is your last day of summertime and i will be back here next friday for what will be the last gardener's world of this year so don't miss it i'll see you then bye