Gardeners' World 2022 Episode 12 - BBC Gardeners' World 2022 Full Episodes

Hello, welcome to Gardener's World. Now we're in June, I think we can safely say there'll be no more frost, which means that we can plant out and put out those tender plants that really won't take any frost at all. And dahlias are certainly one of them. I've got a new variety that I'm trying this year. This is called Verone's Obsidian. It's a simple flower with wonderful burgundy petals with a bright yellow center. And I'm going to grow them in pots. And if you're going to grow a dahlia in a pot, it wants to be as big as you possibly can, because if you have them too small, they run out of space and nutrition by about mid-August. Or if you've got a bigger pot, they can continue to grow and you get nice big tubers. So I've taken these out of store in March, potted them up in an old potting compost just to grow them on and kept them in the cold frame to keep them frost free. They've been hardened off for the last week or two, waiting for this moment, and we should have a decent root system. So those are the roots, and inside there are the tubers. And of course it's the tubers that hold the goodness that will create the flowers. So I'm going to pop that in the pot. Yep, actually I've got it just about dead right like that. Now this is a fairly rich compost. Dahlias need good drainage, but they also are quite greedy. So if you can, enrich a peat-free compost with your own garden compost ideally, but maybe a bit of soil improver, and add a little bit of grit or perlite just to make sure that the drainage is still there. Leaving a little bit of space at the top of the pot so we can water it, because these will need watering at least once a week, and when we water we feed a liquid seaweed feed to all our pots. And look, that will flower and shine right through summer. Now coming up on today's program, Frances meets a couple who've created a garden inspired by their travels around the world. We have quite a lot of things like the Restios, the Crocosmia, that will be happy with cold. Restios, we've travelled in South Africa, we're up in the Cederbergs I think it was, and we saw Restios covered in frost, so clearly they can take very cold temperatures. We make a return visit to Adam, as he continues work on his new garden. When you sort of move into a garden, you want to make it your own. Well I'm lucky, I've got these wonderful Texas domes here. What I want to do first is add to that structural planting and then bring in some wonderful colour. We meet a window cleaner in Truro who has a passion for planting trees. Just one urban tree can bring the whole place alive. In come the birds, in come the pollinators, in come the flowers and the colour, in comes the seasonality. And I will be adding tomatoes to my container veg garden. I've got a few plants to add to the dry garden. This is Santolina, cotton lavender. It's small, it makes a mound ideally with these beautiful little yellow button flowers and it loves full sun, poor soil and hopefully in the revamped dry garden it should find a good home. I've got a grass here, this is Fistuca, Fistuca Glauca. We'll add this in the back, it doesn't grow very big but it will add this spray of really lovely grey blue colour. I love Glauca's palms. Whilst the dry garden is slowly emerging, the irises that I planted about four years ago are stunning. Now the third plant I've got is a familiar one to many gardeners and this is Stachys or lamb's ears and of course called that because it has these very soft felted leaves and then it has pink flowers, again adapted well to drought. When you're placing plants obviously you put them out in the pots before you start planting and just make sure that you've got the spacing right and the relationship with other plants. But also think about the bigger picture. It's really important to always keep reminding yourself what am I trying to achieve and what I want from the dry garden is to get this feeling of abandonment that there used to be a building of some kind here and the planting should look as though it's a combination of some plants obviously put in by man, some which have grown naturally. Now pop that in the same height as it was in its container and just remember for Santolina don't let other plants around it crowd it because that will be enough to shade it out and then it will get straggly. Now I'm putting the Stachys right on the edge so it can spill onto the path if need be. Now I've travelled a great deal in the Mediterranean so that's informed and inspired my choices here in the dry garden but Frances went to Worcestershire to meet a couple who've made their entire garden as a kind of homage to a lifetime of travel. One of the joys of gardening is discovering and then growing new plants and no matter how long you've been gardening there's always something new to catch your eye. And for the couple who owns this garden their eye wanders far and wide. Adrian and Sheila James like to travel and they use their garden and the plants they grow to evoke fond memories of their many trips around the world. So Adrian and Sheila this is obviously a quite elaborate garden but where do you get the inspiration for it? Morocco, part of Spain, Iran which was an experience but a lovely experience and if we're in this country nurseries then come into it as well. Of course and what's this particular space inspired by? I'm fascinated by formal courtyard gardens, some people call them Islamic gardens maybe, and the idea when we laid out the garden here was we wanted to put something at the heart of it which really reminded us of that style of garden and so we have all the elements that you'd find in a Persian style garden. We have the water, we have the use of the colour green, we have shade. If you sit here it's quiet, it's peaceful, it's contemplative, it sort of does all the things that a Persian style garden should do. The terracotta pots that you see lining the side of the rail they're actually a permanent feature here. We then drop into those terracotta pots, plastic pots of plants in season. So for example earlier in the year these would contain daffodils then we have tulips after that. Sometimes at this time of year we might have agapanthus in them but this year we've gone for the spider plant. And I love your cypress because it really echoes that water, being a water loving plant too. Yeah we keep it in a saucer of water all the time while it's out and it's very easy to propagate. It's one of those very odd plants isn't it because we propagate it by taking a stem off, leave a four or six inches of stem on it and we literally turn it upside down in a bowl of water and the roots come from the centre of the plant, from the centre of the flower as is now. So each generation is a sort of upside down plant really. You have quite a lot of things like the restios, the crocosmia that will be happy with cold but they really won't cope with being very wet. For example restios, we've travelled in South Africa up in the Cederbergs I think it was and we saw restios covered in frost so clearly they can take very cold temperatures but they were growing in very very free draining conditions and so we have a restio over in the duck patch for example that stays permanently in the garden on very very free draining soil of course never sitting around with its feet in the wet. It survives quite nicely. But there's also a real mix of other things aren't there so like you have the Indian bean tree and the tetrapanax and then this huge eucalyptus which is obviously Australian and you don't notice it particularly when you come into you but it just gives that feel that you're in a hot country. And then we can liven it up by adding dahlias that brings in the colour into the garden. And I love the architectural plants that you have in here as well like this formium with its amazing flower spikes and even things like your cannas and it just gives that really lush unusual feel. It gives you a feeling of opulence almost. Definitely. As well as creating a wonderful garden Sheila uses the plants from around the space for her other hobby which is flower arranging. So we're doing agapanthus? Yes agapanthus. Do you take them when they're about to come into flower or do you take them when they are fully in the flower? A bit half and half. Half and half okay. And we're strictly within a theme of South African so I can't go off piste and start adding. Well this is a bit off piste but there's lot of grasses in South Africa so maybe that's okay. If you say it's okay I'm sure it's okay. How many grass stems are you using Sheila? Just a couple just to give it a bit of lightness and fairy fairy. I might stop there then. Cocosmia keep well? Oh yes and they add a different shape all together and the seed heads of them they look just as good as when they're in flower. Oh that's good. And they'll keep for ages. Gardening's my passion flower arranging's my hobby. It's funny how they always connected. So Sheila with the nephothia am I taking blooms that are blooming but not yet gone over at all? Yes. Or ones that are just about to bloom? Either of those but not the ones that are starting to go. Okay. Now I have one big exuberant one. One big exuberant one. Okay you're the boss Sheila. Well there we go. What do you think Adrian? I think they're absolutely amazing. They're really nice bunches of flowers aren't they? Well I think with this much to choose from you couldn't really go wrong could you? It's such a beautiful garden and I know that no one can pick their favourite plant, none of us can, but if you had to pick one that had a particularly significant or special memory for you what would it be? Well I think we would find it very difficult to choose one in all of these flowers but I think both of us would probably go for the very plant that you've been cutting some foliage from which is the Acacia baleana purpureum. It's a South African tree, it's associated with our travels and it has two really good seasons. In the winter sort of February time, January February time, lovely bright yellow flowers which are slightly scented and it's a real beacon in the garden when you know much else in the garden is fairly quiet to be honest with you. Even now though it's beautiful and you get it against the sky that it just sets it off, really stands out. Yeah in that case I'm very sorry that I cut some foliage off your favourite plant but thank you so much for having me today it's been so lovely. Oh you're very welcome, it's been lovely to have you here. I do think that all of us are bound to be influenced by gardens that we've seen anywhere and I've always said that the best education you can have for any gardener is to visit gardens. Now I bought out these agapanthus from the greenhouse. Three types of agapanthus I've got. I've got evergreen ones which are not hardy and obviously keep their foliage and they must be kept frost free over winter. There are the headborne hybrids which are evergreen but hardier and finally you've got herbaceous ones which this is a good example of this little one here which die back completely and therefore are much hardier and if you've got free draining soil these can stay outside in a border all winter. Now what I want to do is re-pot and divide a couple because once you start to see new growth from the herbaceous types it's the best time to re-pot them or even plant them out. This one you can see has completely filled the pot and I should have potted this one a few years ago. In fact the council of perfection is to divide them and or re-pot them every two or three years. Now what I do have is this wonderful tool because what you do is you slide it in around the pot and just work round and it's quite hard work because the roots sort of attach themselves to the terracotta which is slightly porous. Okay let's give it a go. Yep it's coming there we go there you are that is all root just a massive root and no compost at all and one of the extraordinary things about agapanthus is they flower best when they're constrained so when you re-pot them if I put that into a big pot with lots of potting compost all I get are lots of leaves and no flowers so what I want to do is put it into a new pot that is not too big. Yes that's perfect. Ideally you want no more than about an inch two maybe three centimetres of fresh potting compost around the roots so we'll put a crock in the bottom let's see that's okay right this mix is a bit of leaf mold a little bit of garden compost a little bit of peat-free compost and a lot of grit and that will be perfect that's fine it's also happy and re-potted now when you have a larger one like this it makes sense to divide it this is an evergreen one this is a little bit easier actually right let's see if it's done its job it's not too bad at all there we go now you can see very root bound now there are a number of ways you can do this but probably the best thing is if you've got an old saw not much good for cutting wood anymore but ideal for cutting through woody roots like agapanthus there we are so there we have a lot of root pretty solid that will make a perfectly healthy fresh plant I've got two plants for the price of one the only trouble is it's a curious shape leaving big space on two sides of the pot no space at all in the other so what I'm going to do is divide it again and then turn the sides in on themselves so I have a more compact plant although the same mass of agapanthus that will be okay now now is the time if necessary to trim the roots and that will stimulate regrowth okay now we should get flowers this year because this year's flowers are formed in agapanthus in the previous year's growth next year as long as the pot isn't too big we should also have decent flowering and the one thing we can be certain is we will have a healthier plant as a result I'll do the others and in fact I plan to do the whole lot over the course of the coming week but it's time to visit the first of your gardens this week well I say your gardens because although it's definitely a beautiful garden it doesn't seem to belong to anybody hi gardeners world my name is Beth and I live in deal on the east kent coast and today I wanted to show you a little bit of garden that my neighbor Tasha and I did together last year back in lockdown so this patch of ground didn't really belong to anyone but it was really sort of scrubby and brambly and together we created this space which I think is amazing and everyone can enjoy and we've planted loads of bulbs and spring flowering blossom trees and summer flowering beaners and daisies and it's just completely gone crazy this year what we found really nice was that when we were working on the garden together various neighbors came out and offered us seedlings and plants from their gardens and so that all made a big difference it's been really nice to watch people's reactions we get a lot of dog walkers down here so everybody that walks past comments on how different it looks hopefully this video has helped inspire you to do something similar with your neighbors thanks for watching I'm sure there are thousands of places like that what we used to call lost spaces not really belonging to anybody or at least no one knowing who should be looking after them if communally they could be created into borders and gardens just think of the pleasure it will give to people now this here is the tree I planted in March as part of the Queen's green canopy this idea that we celebrate the jubilee by planting thousands of trees in gardens and parks and spaces right across the land now this is a fastidious silver birch fastidious just simply means it grows upright which will work here in the grass borders and you can see that it's not doing much which is absolutely fine because if you've planted a tree as part of the jubilee celebrations don't expect it to do anything at all in the first year other than be healthy and just have healthy leaves because all the activity will be going on underground developing roots and once they've started to grow and get established they can then support new growth in years two and particularly three after year three you'll really start to see it grow away strongly so to help that underground root growth make sure that it's watered if it doesn't rain for a week give it a good soak keep it as weed free as you possibly can a meter wide is not too much because weeds take a lot of the moisture and the goodness and then mulch thickly to suppress further weeds and to keep that moisture in and if you do that the tree will be completely happy now talking of the jubilee we're in the middle of a long bank holiday weekend i hope you're enjoying it and spending as much time as you possibly can in the garden and we on gardeners world are having our special celebration of the jubilee and trees by visiting seven tree champions over the coming weeks one for each decade of the queen's reign and our first visit takes us to a window cleaner in his hometown of Truro in Cornwall i think it's safe to say that i have an addiction to tree planting well and trees generally just one urban tree one tree in a prominent place can bring the whole place alive in come the birds in come the pollinators in come the flowers and the colour in comes the seasonality i'm Richard Argyle i'm a window cleaner and i've been cleaning windows in Truro since 1983. I kind of just started looking around town and thinking there's not really many street trees not many trees generally in parks and gardens in the places that i was working so i then contacted the parks department and asked if we could plant some trees in some of the public grounds around Truro. I just started planting virtually anywhere and everywhere we could get a tree in. I imagine we're up for about somewhere in the region of a thousand trees it did become an ambition to to plant a tree in every street that i clean windows in so there's very few places where whilst i'm working i can actually enjoy and care for and look at a lot of the trees we've put in. I like the idea that i'm a tree curator for all those trees within the city not necessarily just trees that i've planted because any tree can bring you pleasure it's sometimes it's not very easy to find time to visit the woodlands outside of your immediate locale but most of us experience some greenery within our lives you maybe you open your curtains to it or maybe you go shopping and have to walk past it maybe you're in your car in a traffic jam sitting next to it and i think that's the importance of urban tree planting i particularly like it when i can place a tree within a very stark urban environment if you get it right and you can get that tree that you want in it can completely change the way that that square street garden feels it completely can wake it up you do have to be very careful when you choose your tree the main thing that you have to consider is size of tree and how it will fit into the space that is available if you've only got a small garden to play with and i must admit a lot of my customers might only have small gardens then my favorite tree for putting into that space would be an amelanchier there's quite a lot of different cultivars there's quite a lot of different species they sing and dance they're beautiful creamy white flowers a lot of them are followed by fruits which are really tasty if you can get to them before the birds i really like this idea of getting edibles into the public realm so that you can start foraging for for grub when you're out and about and typically when i'm window cleaning and feeling a bit peckish i'll help myself to a berry that might be ripe or some unusual fruit crab apple jelly i'm very happy with although i once made a mistake and tried to make crab apple gin but it was more like paint stripper i'm afraid really good if you had a sore throat but not much good for anything else really some of those trees now are substantial trees 30 years old some of them and most of them are very happy healthy trees and to think that they will continue hopefully for many many years to come into lots of different people that's the satisfaction it brings me a great deal of happiness i'm 62 i could retire in three years time and i'd like to think that my retirement plan involves me being able to walk around the town as an old geezer and actually taking a tremendous pleasure in all the benefits that those trees are going to bring it's a wonderful legacy to think of all those trees living on for generations to come and enjoyed by everybody and doing good it's very beautiful i put my citrus fruits oranges and lemons out here into the paradise garden from their winter protective quarters a few weeks ago and they've settled in and you can see they've got nice vigorous new growth on them and once you see that new growth it's time to prune and when you're pruning any kind of citrus for maximum fruit you do need to let light and air into the plant you want it to be nice and open a pom-pom a ball on a trunk is a really bad idea for citrus if it's fruit that you want now the first thing to do is to open up the center a crowded center like that is going to have bad airflow you're not going to get enough light in so i'm going to get my secateurs and go in there and cut low down like that so that comes out now i've had this orange since 1994 and i've learned that it's tough they're very forgiving plants you can cut hard into old wood and it will grow back strongly so if you make a mistake it's not the end of the world now essentially i don't want this to get any bigger but as a rule of thumb it's a good idea not to take off more than a third of any tree of any kind in any one year remember this will need a weekly feed with a high potash feed we use liquid seaweed and if you haven't done so already mulch it with fresh garden compost or if you haven't got your own a good soil improver and that will certainly make a difference and give it a good drench once a week with water and then let it dry out completely in between watering final point is if you've bought a small citrus plant and you're expecting it to produce fruit you might have to be patient because sometimes they can take up to five years before they start fruiting now still to come on today's program adam plants a shady north facing border that is my first real border planted in this garden and it feels good but also it shows you doesn't it if you stop give a little bit of thought you can start to create something that is really quite special and puts a smile on your face i'm adding some tomatoes to my container vegetable plot and this is a variety called gardener's delight which grows very well outside as well as in the greenhouse too and i've decided to do a bit of an experiment because i have used grow bags in the past but not for quite a long time and i thought i'd give them another go and i've chosen three different ones for three different techniques and at the end of it see if there's a difference and we'll put gardener's delight into all of them now the first thing they all say is give them a good shake so let's follow the instructions shake it well get rid of the compaction that one okay that's puffed up quite well finally this one on this one which is bigger and in fact is the same size as a normal bag of compost i shall simply follow the directions cut three holes and plant three plants directly into it now this one does say make drainage holes uh around about ground level so i'll just make little knife slits like that and then again at this end i'll just put a few drainage holes in there now let's cut out the squares where they say now we just go like that now as a rule of thumb you shouldn't plant tomatoes until the first flowers open and when you're planting any tomato doesn't matter whether it's in a grow bag the soil outside in a greenhouse in a pot try and bury it as deep as the first pair of leaves because that will anchor better and also grow roots that will improve feeding now all cordon tomatoes need support now how do you provide that for a grow bag because you can't stick a cane in so that's something i'm going to have to bear in mind but let's see how that does i'm going to move this back out the way for the moment to give us some room now this one i will cut holes where they say pierce the bottom but it does have very small perforations which means that you're not to make any extra drainage holes now this one i'm going to use these pots and what i'm going to do is take out the bottom and i've prepared a couple already you can see that the bottoms have been cut out and it's very easy to do just using a pair of sectors hook into the drainage holes and cut and that will go into here and put it in like that and then this and then we'll sink that in okay i need a little bit more compost now this is actually compost from a spare grow bag so i'm not cheating by using extra special long meadow mix right now we're ready to plant into that of course the whole point of doing this is to give a better root run and the more roots we have the better the tomato plant in theory should be let's move on to the third way of using a grow bag the idea is to cut the grow bag in half turn it on its side so we have two polythene bags if you like filled with compost and plant directly into that so we cut like that what i am going to do here is just make some drainage holes okay so we turn it on its side and we've got a container filled with compost of a nice size so i'm going to move these before i plant them now i'll plant this nice and deep there you go now obviously you could use this technique not just with a grow bag but any bag of peat-free compost now i will water them and as i said i'm going to have to turn my mind on how best to support them because all of these will want support with tomatoes it is important to keep a regular water supply and i would stress that this is not a scientific experiment this is just me trying out different ways of maximizing the potential of a grow bag and i'll also be growing tomatoes in terracotta pots in raised beds maybe even plastic pots as well and towards the end of the summer we'll see how they get on grow bags are ideal for a small plot or even if you don't have a garden at all and you can produce a relatively large harvest from very few plants talking about produce from a small space this is a bed of parsley we love parsley and use a lot of it and i planted this out last august and we've been harvesting it from september right through till a few weeks ago it's now going to seed it and i'm going to clear the bed but before i do that i just want to show you if i pull one up here look that is an individual parsley plant that is one little seedling of parsley so when you buy it maybe from a supermarket in a pot which is full of maybe 20 30 little seedlings it looks great but when you're growing them at home raise each individual plant so it has the space to grow and can be this big then you can cut it four five six seven times and get masses of leaves we collect great bunches of it because we treat them as large plants this is a tray of climbing beans it's a veratical blue lake and i like it for a couple of reasons one because it's very tasty and two because it has rather narrow string beans very like some french beans now whatever type of climbing bean you're growing you do need a strong support system and you need to put that up before you plant and then the second thing is to plant inside the supports because you're walking up and down and picking the beans and watering on the outside that will get compacted and that would damage the roots and i'm going to plant one bean to each of these uprights and just pop that in like that you will need to tie them in until they get established after a few weeks they will develop tendrils that will cling naturally but just give them a hand to start with i've added lots of compost to a trench in between these bean sticks because these are plants that really respond well to moisture they don't like drying out so the compost is as much to act as a sponge rather than directly as a feed these should flower in about four or five weeks time be ready to harvest a couple of weeks after that so we're looking at the middle to the end of july and the important thing in this growing period is to keep them well watered so if we do have a very hot dry spell these will be high on the list for a good weekly soak now it's time to visit the second of your gardens this week and it takes us to Bermondsey in south london hi my name is alice thomas and welcome to my garden as you can see it's not very big it's only eight by nine meters but we pack a lot into the space this has all been grown in the last year because we moved back in after some building works i'm very pleased with how it's coming along one great thing about the garden has been how all the bits tended to fit together i'd originally planned it as quite separate zones so we had wildlife in the front and then raised beds for fruit and vegetables and flowers in the back but actually when it came to it we've managed to get cut flowers out of this lawn and then we've been able to feed the birds with the flowers and vegetables as well i grew all of our wedding flowers here this year and that included this wild rocket which has beautiful little yellow flowers that the bees absolutely adore we also have white campion and red clover growing by the side of the wildlife pond and those are perfect for the bees they also look great in my bouquet slightly more classic flowering plants include this pink rose but as you can see the leaf cutter bees have had an absolute field day we also get loads of flies eating the nectar off these chinese asters just before they flower it's been a really interesting first year to be gardening and particularly trying to grow flowers with the weather that we've had but i've learned that with the salvias sweet peas snapdragons cosmos all kinds of beautiful things are really good for the birds and the bees as well i've just cut a vase full of them so on that note i'm going to go thanks alice your wedding bouquet sounds lovely and if you've got a garden any garden any size anywhere that you would like to share with us then please do we'd love to see it go to our website and get all the details particularly actually if you are celebrating the jubilee in your garden we'd love to see that the damp garden has changed quite a lot this year and to my mind in an entirely good way the problem was that although the pond was fine the back area which is surprisingly large was pretty dead we weren't using it for anything really it was dominated by a couple of quince trees which in themselves were nice but i cut them down and dug out a big crescent shaped bed to make a bog garden and what we've got here are plants that are adapted to growing in very wet conditions so you've got ferns like the regal fern you've got the shuttlecock fern persecaria big ram ram palmatum which already is doing very nicely and you can see the the dots of yellow from the candelabra primula which is picking up the color of the irises and it's working very well and as well as making the the boggy area at the back we lifted up paving here which was getting flooded all the time and getting very slippery made a soft path that curves round and a new border here in the corner now this is almost in total shade it never gets direct sunlight perfect for hostas and a few ferns and a little strip here which looks a little bit bare at the moment but it's specifically for candelabra primulus so i'm excited about that however not everything is perfect because the camassias are proving to be a problem camassias are absolutely lovely and i wouldn't be without them but i have learned over the years growing them that if you grow them in a border they can become quite invasive and their foliage in particular gets bigger and bigger as the plant grows and takes a long time to die back and suppresses everything around them if you want decent flowers you mustn't cut the footage back you've got to let it die back naturally so what i'm going to do is take out some of them and if you are growing camassias in a border i'd recommend that you regularly thin them i'm just going to dig out the bulb if i can it's probably quite deep in there out you come now do you see these are the bulbs and it's a great cluster of bulbs we only planted one now what i'll do is pop these up let them die back naturally and then in the autumn i will plant them into the orchard individually problems like this if you think of them as a problem and i don't i think of it as a process a result of time in a garden you do some new planting inevitably it takes a year or two to get established then it looks great for a year or two and then either it becomes too much too congested just like these camassias or maybe dies back and needs regenerating but adam has recently moved to a new garden and we rejoin him as he continues to develop it i just love june the sun is shining i've got a few days off to celebrate the queen's platinum jubilee there's excitement in the air and all over the garden there's this sense of anticipation summer is within reach and although it's still early days in the garden it really is starting to come alive i've been a busy boy since you were last here i've been concentrating my energies on the front garden there and just to get a veg bed built so i don't miss too much of the season so i've got one large bed that later on in the year here we'll have two paths put through the middle and timber all the way around behind me i've got another bed that'll be mixed herbs planting edible flowers and then i've got six still beds and nine still beds over there i've also been trying to get the structural planting right and to do my bit to support the queen's green canopy in a jubilee year i've also planted four step over apples now these are a great way of adding fruit to a small space so these are actually step over apples there's two cookers up there and two edibles here and when i say steppos they're exactly that you imagine you'd be able to step over them but they're grafted onto a dwarfing rootstock and that's how you buy them and then they've been basically trained across so at the moment i've put them in i've tied them in nicely give them a little bit of a tidy up i'm not worried about fruit this year in fact actually in reality i'll probably tease off anything that really appears let them get their roots in this year and next year they'll really start to perform but that's the front garden today there is something that i really want to get on with in the back garden as you can imagine i haven't been sat around i've been a busy boy and you know when you move in somewhere and there's these little things that bug you this was one of them as you walked through this gate you came pathway along here straight into that paved area in front of you and it that all felt exposed and there was no real wow whereas now i've dug it out boom it's going to be in your face and then you change direction and move yourself around and today what i want to do is get this planted up but it's interesting when you sort of move into a i suppose let's call it old garden new garden you know you want to make it your own and you're inheriting structural planting well i'm lucky i've got these wonderful taxus domes here what i want to do first is add to that structural planting and then bring in some wonderful colour so before we put these plants in it's a little bit about the border it's north facing i think straight away we think north facing not a lot of light but then also what we worry about is things like rain shadows so this patch here getting too dry interestingly here because the garden comes down on layers this doesn't dry out that much and i've been keeping an eye on the sun over the last four weeks and the higher it's got in the sky the more light this gets so the summer months it gets a lot more light than you think it would planting we already had as i said we had the taxes that they worked through and then the amelanchier but i had these sort of red-veined sorrels that have seeded from somewhere else in the garden and that's another prime example you pick a book up that would tell you that that wanted sunnier position than what it gets it's happy so i'm going to leave it then what i've done planting wise the rose has gone in here and this is shropshire last again we look at north facing walls and think oh you haven't got that many plants there is there's a lot of roses there's honeysuckles there's hydrangeas that'll go up there this what i want to do is grow it partly as a column and then i'm going to actually shape it from there i think a really simple point is how we approach growing climbers up walls for me i just use these really simple horizontal wires so what i've done is started at the bottom probably about 30 centimeters just over from the ground i've put a screw eye just about every meter and then we put the wire the wires galvanized it's about 1.52 millimeters thick don't go too thick because it becomes very hard to twist round this is not that difficult it's about just putting a nice vertical line up marking it getting your distances right between the lines and using the pliers i'm just going to pull that as as tight as and i'm not over pulling and then just tying that off and not only you know is it good for maintenance but it's just really easy once that's in we can now get this rosy you hear a lot conversation about how deep you should plant your rose the root stock is just below the ground so actually i'm just going to go with what the grower said so this is containerized rose which means you can plant it any time of the um the further you get into summer obviously the more tlc watering looking after this plant's going to need i think growing anything against the wall it's that early year forming that is really important and what i mean by that is don't let it just go up and up and then try and train it you know pick some shoots tie in the horizontals make sure it's tied in nicely going up there and actually if we have a few windy days as the season goes on don't let the plant wave about because then you'll end up with wind rock which will start to loosen those roots at the bottom so there we go one thing that really caught my eye at the malvern flower show was geranium fame springtime a lot of geraniums are great for dry shade and here's a tip for you when you buy a plant like this and you get it home and the flowers look beautiful the best thing to do is cut them off all right i know you can always put a bit of vase inside but what that will do is that will make that plant now really put the work into getting its feet in getting its roots into the ground and that's what you want so next year when it comes out that foliage is fresh and beautiful but straight away my eyes getting moved over to the spotty dotty we're nearly there peony molly the witch it is slow growing the flower is fleeting but for some unknown reason i've always wanted to grow it though i want them to be part of the scheme this year i think if i go and disturb the roots in this pot i'll set them back so what i do now is because i want to enjoy them in their final home just dig a little hole enough to sink them into the ground which means they'll pick up moisture well they'll get used to their final position and then all i'm gonna do is just sort of plunge it in and then in the autumn when i've still got warmth in the soil and hopefully the root systems have really kicked on in those containers i will just transfer it into the ground so that is my first real border planted in this and it feels good i think it looks right as well but also it shows you doesn't it if you stop give a little bit of thought understand the soil the way the light moves the backdrop and then looking in the layers the trees the shrubs you can start to create something that is really quite special and puts a smile on your face and i think that's exactly what that will do it's good to see adam enjoying making his garden and of course we will be paying repeated visits to see how he gets on now it's time to sow sweet corn sweet corn is one of those vegetables that is best left to mid and late summer if you try and sow it too early it just won't grow it needs heat so if we sow them now they should be ready to plant out in about five or six weeks time and start to harvest in august and september so let's fill that up with seed compost so that will do give it a little shake and i've got a variety called lark this is an f1 hybrid so that you can't keep the seed but it does grow very fast it has good cobs that are exceptionally sweet and it's the sweetness that you want from sweet corn now in pots this size i sow two seeds and i intend to weed out one but also it will act as a spare if any one pot has no germination at all and to ensure germination the key is warmth so don't let them cool down put them in a warm place to germinate and keep them warm as they grow i'll just cover those up a little bit now i will put this in the greenhouse to germinate if you don't have a greenhouse do try and find a warm spot that is also sunny right here are some other jobs you can do this weekend most tulips will have finished flowering by now and in order to ensure a display next year snap off the seed heads which you'll find will happen very easily this will mean that all the energy from the stem and the leaves will be put into making new bulbs for next year homemade comfrey tea is a really effective high potash feed and of course free cut the plants down to the ground using the stems and leaves and flowers chop them up and pack them into a container and then top this up with water until it's full set it to one side for at least three weeks and it will smell bad i warn you and then you can strain it off so that you have a comfrey tea concentrate to use as a feed early sown broad beans will now need supporting using canes and string create a few tiers of support just so they don't topple over under their own weight and then when the beans are finished in a month or so's time the whole thing can easily be dismantled although of course the jewel garden is completely dominated by this extraordinary bobbly wave of purple from the allium purple sensation it actually looks its best now because there's enough else going on to set it into context whether it be the lovely silvery glaucus leaves of the cardoon or the bright spots of vermilion from the gym the touches of mauve blue from the aristoburica the golden of the hop all these things are acting as a foil for the alliums and it only lasts for a day or two this combination but every year i love it more and more it's just one of those highlights of the year and it's very very temporary too in a week or so the alliums will just be seed heads and we will have moved on to another season so that's the end of today's program but i'll see you back here at long meadow at the same time next week so until then bye-bye made to be heard but not listened to music night on bbc4 delves deeper into the joy of now and we're out of the frying pan and into the fire next year on bbc2 as life proves no easier for the former inmates in the terror infamy