Gardener’s World 2021 - Episode 13 - 11-06-2021

Hello. Welcome to Gardener's World. It has been such a strange spring and early summer. I was looking at pictures of Longmeadow last year and I reckon we're fully two weeks behind and it means that we've got tulips still flowering well into June. But whenever they flower you still need to deal with them once they're over in the same way and the important thing is to break off the seed heads and any spent petals so that all the energy can go down into the bulb and if you leave the seed heads on it diverts energy from that and they put energy into seeds but the bigger the bulb the better the chance of flowering and the bigger the flowers will be. So leave them to die back completely naturally and then you can store them and with any luck you'll get decent On today's programme Joe visits a garden created by an award-winning landscape designer where contemporary and traditional meet in perfect harmony. This is a garden with simplicity at its core which showcases how to design with restraint. Last year three extraordinary sisters sent us a film from their garden in Dorset. We caught up with them again to find out about their latest gardening project. Our head gardener painted them to match the sheds and we started planting them up with one for veg and one for flowers to attract the butterflies. What's this one Kirsty? You call it a bina? Vabina. And I shall be planting some spectacular foliage plants in the jewel garden. I'm going to refresh the colour in the four big pots at the centre of the jewel garden. Now these are the central point of the whole garden. Everything really revolves around this so they've got to be grand, they've got to be dramatic and obviously fit in with the colour scheme of the jewel garden. My central plant this year on all four is going to be the ginger. This is one called Assam orange. Wonderful upright stems with these superb orange flowers and the bottle brushes at the top of them. They grow well in pots but they do need lots of goodness. These are tropical plants. So I've made a compost mix especially for them which is one third accoia based compost, one third leaf mold and one third garden compost. I know from experience that the gingers will be really happy in that mix. I'm going to add a layer of neat garden compost to the bottom and this is like an insurance policy really. It just means that when the roots do get down to the bottom of the pot they will find moisture because that's the key to it. So we'll just put some in there like that. That'll be enough. Let's hope this comes out the pot. There we go. There we are. Now you notice I haven't put it so it's flush with the top of the pot. These are plants that will need quite a lot of water when it's very dry so the best way to ensure that is to leave at least a couple of inches free from the top of the pot so you can fill it. It just retains more water whereas when the soil gets dry if it's filled to the top it bounces off. Now that's the centerpiece but by no means the whole performance. This is Biden's Hawaiian orange drop. Lovely marmalady caramelly orange which will go very well with the ginger and that looks a pretty insubstantial plant but they grow strongly. So I reckon we can have four of these in each of the pots. So we'll put one here. Bidens need full sun to perform well and gingers will take a little bit of shade but will do best in full sun. Now this is an astertium Alaska deep orange with variegated leaves which I think will pick up on the leaves of the ginger which are not variegated but they do have slightly different shades of green. We've got extra rich compost which is ideal for the ginger and the Bidens will be fine but nasturtiums flower best in very poor soil and if you put them in rich soil you will have more foliage than flowers but in fact I rather like the idea of this foliage hanging down over the edge of the pot and because the soil is rich it will grow longer and it will flower it won't flower so much. So I'm only going to put in three because I know they're going to grow with extra vigour. So we'll put one there like that right on the edge and they do like sunshine so make sure these have full sun. Now I've got a cosmos this is cosmos dazzler and this has a rich magenta colour which will offset the caramel and the orange of the rest and just just give that little injection of energy. I think that can go in there right well that's a beginning I've got three more to do. Now last September Joe went to Winchester in Hampshire to meet a garden designer who'd been commissioned to solve quite a tricky problem which was to integrate a very modern building into a very old setting. When designing a garden one of the biggest challenges is where do you start? Well there are lots of ways you can go but there are thousands of plants to choose from and an infinite number of layouts. Here in this beautiful Hampshire garden designer Helen Elksmith has used blocks of warm dusky perennials and grasses alongside a calm palette of natural materials to create a garden that really blends in with its built environment. This is a garden with simplicity at its core which showcases how to design with restraint. Helen a beautiful garden incredibly stylish and contemporary and it goes with the contemporary house but you've also got this you know old Victorian brick wall that surrounds the whole property so how did you you know approach the design and blend those aspects together? This is an old kitchen garden and there's something that's very lovely and magical about every kitchen garden that's absolutely true of this one as well. The wall has the most beautiful colours in it and absolutely lovely and the house obviously has got some really sort of strong colours it's got sort of black glass and black flaming and then there's obviously the timbers and actually the job of the planting was to bring these two things that are very different together. One of the things for me was a decision to use green to use green which is not just one colour it's lots of colours to play with texture and to have a really limited colour palette. I think a lot of people who have their own garden might think well that's going to be a bit boring isn't it you know I've got this wall I should put roses on it and jasmines on it all these different climbers. And I think roses and climbers you know things are you know beautiful lovely things but because we've got this very old wall and then we've got the very contemporary building if you put a traditional garden into this it would be beautiful with the wall but it's not going to work with the house and if I make this too contemporary it's going to work with the house but not with the wall. With the range of plants available how do you go about narrowing it down to find the exact plant that's going to do the job? So here where we've got a lot of really hard horizontal elements the roof the windows the doors the cladding everything is completely horizontal and then we've got these horizontal lines that run all the way around by the wall itself. What I was looking at is those lovely mounding forms and the arching forms just to create that soft contrast. And the landscaping materials again it's all paired back really you know we've got stone we've got gravel and we've got decking and they all work really nicely together. When you look at this border which has a lovely flow about it those sort of soft mounded shapes all melded together to get a really fantastic sort of outline against the building you actually pick out each shrub and you realise that these are really quite bog standard shrubs that we've seen in many gardens for many years and you'll buy them down the local garden centre but it's the way they're used and put together that makes them a success. So we've got things like the choisea tonata over there it's still flowering it's soft white flowers all summer long then we've got euphorbia mellifera there's three of those which will flower the you've got a beautiful scent to it and then these two you know which really are standard evergreen shrubs hebe i think this is southerlandii with its tightly clipped glaucus foliage and then this is pittosporum tomthumb now i have to say i have to admit this has never been one of my favourite plants but Helen shows that it's all about the right plant to do a job it's got that sort of light green new growth and underneath plummy purply almost black foliage beneath and it adds drama and contrasts beautifully texturally with the rest of these plants and looks absolutely stunning against the cladding of the house so you know it's not about the plants and getting snobby about what they are it's about using them and making them look great together like this a common scenario is to put some paving in outside your patio doors or in this case bedroom doors or deck like this and have the plantings beyond it feels if the garden's miles away and there's a disconnect between the interior and the nature of plants but here Helen has brought the plants right up to the wall here and on the other side there so when you come out onto here you feel surrounded by plants immediately you feel as if you're in a garden and then you might put some furniture out here and it looks a little bit cluttered but Helen's designed in this fantastic seat into the deck it ties in beautifully with a second step there so it almost disappears apart from when you're sitting on it and when you're sitting on it you get a great view of the planting tearing up towards the back and in the old Victorian wall in the background it's just a great composition and this seat right here is just making me look at it when I studied garden design in 1990 ornamental grasses were just hitting the scene everyone was really into them but they were thought to be a bit of a flash in the pan but they've really lasted the course and Helen shows in this garden just how versatile they are she's used loads of them this Stipa gigantea makes a wonderful division between these two spaces it's a hedge really but it's not too blocky I can see through I can see beyond and it's light and frothy and these seed heads are at eye level absolutely perfect and she's used others as ground covers under trees edgings for paths some tall some short and some floppy ones and over there we've got Callum across this Carl Forster a very similar color to this steeper but it's got a different form it's narrower it's more upright and it works beautifully just to break up the old Victorian wall over there and this is Miscanthus starlight what a stunning plant it's silky tassels are just incredible and it holds the light beautifully but is this just ornamental no of course not it's doing a job this is blocking the car parking area from behind I can't see anything behind there at all this is a proper screening plant and it's been repeated all the way through and then it licks into more grasses behind me as a lovely flow and naturalism to the entire garden as a whole from the interior to the exterior from the modern house to that lovely Victorian wall tying things together is what this garden is all about the fact that it's been done so subtly and so sympathetically is what makes it really stand out as a design I love it when you get that combination of the very modern and the old working together and I think what that shows more than anything else is you don't need rare and unusual plants to make a beautiful garden it's not what you use it's how you use it that really counts well I hope what I've used here proves to be as good as I think it will be but just give it a few weeks and this will fill out and by the end of this month this will start to flower but it is really important with containers that you do water them adequately and the key thing is to water and go on watering until the water runs out of the bottom it's far better to give it a soak once a week than a sprinkle every day now it's time to visit the first of your gardens this week and this is a first for us too because we're going off to visit one of our viewers in East Africa My name is Alice. I come from Nairobi, Kenya. My passion is gardening. Come let me show you around I have a locart tree which is a fruit tree that grows in Africa and when my daughter was young what we used to do is just sit here and just collect those locart fruits and just gobble them up. After she left home the tree started growing really tall and I couldn't reach it so what I did I grew this morning glory tree with all its glory in between the locart tree because I wanted to see some drama. Cascades of white almost like a chandelier During lockdown last year I got a bit stranded and I decided for my own mental health let me create a happy place so I created it Now the entrance has my hibiscus mutabilis which is the most amazing hibiscus. This one has just flowered. What I love is the salvia plant. The salvias are so easy to propagate they're so easy to maintain and look at these beautiful flowers and you get bees you get butterflies I grew so many salvias in different colors and just as I sit there in the morning with my yoga mat I can breathe in the fresh air and all I see is color Slow Gardeners World thank you so much for giving us this opportunity to be part of your program we're all very very excited and as we say in Kenya welcome Well thank you Alice for sharing your garden with us it looks fantastic. Now it's time to plant out tomatoes outside. The key thing is to wait for the nights to get warmer. Tomatoes do not respond well to big variations and fluctuations in temperature and ideally you wait till the temperature is reliably around about 10 degrees or above and I've chosen for planting outside Gardener's Delight. It's a cherry it's quite a large cherry but small nevertheless tastes really good eaten raw is really good cooked as a sauce and it's pretty healthy and grows strongly. So I've prepared the ground it's good rich soil with reasonable drainage and I'm going to plant these in a couple of rows so I can get in between them there we go when you're planting tomatoes you really don't need to space them more than about two feet apart and the other aspect of spacing you want to think about is ventilation. Ventilation is the best defense against blight and when it comes to planting you need to plant them deep right up to the first leaf and that will do two things one it will help them steady in the soil because these are going to get big plants and two you do get roots growing off the stem so if you bury the stem new roots will form that will stabilize it and provide an extra source of nutrition. And firm it in well. The big advantage of growing them in soil is that as long as there's a reasonable amount of organic matter in the soil most of the nutrition you could possibly need is here in the ground in other words you don't need to feed them. Cordoned tomatoes must have support otherwise they just fall over. Now I've got these canes which are rather long actually but I'm loathe to cut them but you do need a cane that is firmly in the ground and at least five foot tall so a minimum of a six foot cane. Push that in good and firm. The indoor tomatoes I support on strings and wind them round obviously when you have a cane like this they have to be tied in. If it's been raining and there's been a reasonable amount of rain that's fine I leave them but in a normal summer I will water these once a week. We're now off to Staffordshire because we've got another chance to visit a national collection of angels fishing rods or diorama. The diorama is called the wand flower or the hair bell of Africa. People are very surprised when they see a diorama flower because they think that maybe it's grass but they can't understand why. At the end they've got the most beautiful hanging bell. My name's Ruth Plant and I live here at Yewtree Cottage with my husband Clive. We have a cottage garden which has vegetables at one end and a flower garden at the other end. Our name is Plant and we are both really plantaholics. Dioramas are part of the iris family but they're a corm. They're closely allied to cricosmia. The diorama season here starts towards the end of May and they all do have their flowering times and you can almost set your clock by them so they have an order so I know when each one is going to flower. The individual flowers don't last very long especially when the bees get at them. The bees do love to pollinate them. They can go over the individual little bells just in a day but because they come out in a spray you might have a plant that might be in flower for a week maybe two weeks depends on the heat. After the dioramas are flowered they're still actually very beautiful. They have these lovely little bracts which are like little pieces of paper. They blow around in the merest hint of wind, arching nodding little heads. It gives a real feeling of movement in the garden. They are so lovely as they dance around in the breeze. People think because they come from Africa that they like to be dry and actually that's not the case. They grow in areas where there is summer rainfall. They quite often grow in marshy meadows. What they do in the wild is they put their roots down long and deep right down beneath rocks and so they get a good water supply. So they like plenty of water but they like to have it drained away so they don't sit with wet feet. But if they're in too dry an area they won't flower and if you put them in a mixed border it's too much competition from other plants. So the reason that I grow our diorama in gravel beds is the gravel stops the competition. It aids the good drainage, helps keep them moist at the roots but underneath that gravel is good retentive soil and that's when they'll grow well. In terms of numbers we have around about 100 species and maybe 23 cultivars. Life would be very dull without the excitement of growing the plants and when they flower it's the pinnacle of achievement and I've got the most beautiful result. This is diorama Sarastro and isn't she beautiful? She's one of my favourites and as you might be able to see one of the favourite of the bees as well today. She's got the most beautiful burgundy plum flowers that hang down so gracefully. As you can see she's quite tall, she's as tall as I am so you can look her right in the eye. She's also got very nice papery brown bracts which you can see just above the flower there and they really add I think to the contrast and the gracefulness of this beautiful diorama. This is diorama Argyrium, so this is one of the National Collection reference plants. This is white with a lime sort of green blush that's showing through the base of the flower and inside it's got little tiny eyes right at the centre of the plant. It doesn't flower for very long but it's an unusual colour break and you won't see it very often. This diorama only grows to about two foot so it's a smaller diorama and that's the height it would reach in the wild. Everybody should have a diorama in the garden, they are the most fantastic plant. There's nothing like the joy when you can see that finally your diorama has come into flower, such a pleasure. If you want to visit Ruth and her collection you can do so in the first two weeks of July when she's planning to open. If you can get along you're pretty much certain to see dioramas at their very best. Now you wouldn't get that if you came to Longmeadow because I don't grow dioramas because our conditions are just not right for them. We have this heavy rather wet soil, everything is crowded, they wouldn't get the light and the drainage and the air that they need but there are compensations because what we can grow are lupins. The lupins here in the cottage garden are fantastic and I can say that without taking any personal credit at all. I just bunged them in the ground but they've really come into their own this year. They've been here for about three years and it's taken a little while to establish. They seem to have loved the weather. Of course whereas dioramas come from South Africa these are an American plant growing in the fields, very different conditions but aren't they fantastic? They are really really superb. Now still to come on today's programme. We pay a visit to Dorset to meet three sisters whose recently gained passion for gardening knows no bounds. This is some pumpkins ready for Halloween and there's another chance to enjoy a jungle oasis in Runcorn where a garden of limited space is bursting with tropical plants. But first we're off to visit a viewer's garden in Northern Ireland. Hiya this is Colin. I'm Shardene. And this is our little garden in Edenderry village just in the outskirts of Belfast. We've got about five meters square and it's all south facing. Sun rising over here and then setting over on this side so we constantly have sunshine in the garden. In amongst all of our gardens we've got lupine, we've got a little cherry tree and some pansies popping through and the last of the tulips still coming up. The main thing I wanted to show you in the garden was our two espaliered apple trees. The one on this side is spartan and the one on this side is Everton's russet. So to get the espalier every year whenever it's growing you just easily fold down the branch careful and tie it off and then as it grows throughout the summer once you have a good six or so inches of growth then you can continue to tie it down. The other thing I like to do at this time of year is just to check any of the previous ties to make sure they're not too tight and start to mark the branches. If it does you just loosen them off and then tie them back on as the branches will keep widening. I think Colin makes the case for espaliers perfectly. They are brilliant for growing fruit in small spaces. Anybody can do it however big your garden is and they combine the gardener's craft and that lovely fresh fruit in season which tastes so much better than anything you can buy. Now I don't have any lemons on this tree yet but my lemons don't do too badly however they've been slightly neglected and it's time that I did give them a little bit of TLC. Ideally you re-pot or pot on lemons and oranges every three years. Well I haven't done any of mine for at least four or five years so it's no wonder that they're looking a little bit tired and exhausted and they need freshening up. Now when you pot on a lemon as with anything that grows permanently in a pot the secret is to do it into the next size up. Don't go from a small pot to a big one because that just creates a sump to hold water. Just go into a pot a little bit bigger an inch or two in radius bigger. That's fine I don't have a pot like that and yet I want to refresh it so what I'm going to do is take it out of this pot clean it up and put it back in again. Right let's see if this will come out. There we go. So what I'm going to do is just break off as much of the old compost as I can so all the nutrition from this compost would long ago have gone. I've lost some root but I'm actually going to trim the roots a little. It will then grow a flush of new more fibrous roots which are better adapted to feeding. Basic rule of thumb is the thicker a root the less the role it has in gaining food or moisture in a plant. What you want are lots of nice small roots. So these thicker ones can be cut back a little bit. Trim that back and that and that. Okay that is ready for replanting and remember put a crock over the drainage hole. It's not necessary to improve drainage but to stop the hole blocking up with soil. We'll just put that over there like that and that's plenty. Put some fresh soil in the bottom. This is very gritty and the mixture is bought-in coir compost, sieved garden compost, some leaf mould, grit and some garden soil. They do like a bit of nutrition. Work the compost in around the roots like that. Clearly this is a trauma for any plant and it may well respond by losing some leaves or not flowering but don't worry too much about that. It should settle down relatively quickly. There you go. There are just two more things I need to do. The first is to put it onto chalks. Any citrus, any type of orange or lemon need to be raised up off the ground because if they're flat on the ground, however good the drainage is in the pot, the water will come out and sit on the hard surface around the pot and effectively it's sitting in a puddle. So we put that like that Lift it up. Yep. Put that on there. There we go. Nice and steady and raised up. Right the last thing to do is to give it a nice water and a feed. So now last year we received a film from three sisters living in pool in Dorset who delighted us with the sheer joy that they took from their garden and were able to share with us. So we decided it was high time that we went back down to Dorset and paid them another visit. My name is Mandy. My name is Josie. My name is Rebecca. And we live in pool in Dorset. Welcome to our garden. You might remember us from last year when we started gardening. What are you doing? Planting water beans. Oh perfect. Kirsty took to it instantly. Keeping warm and like that. She soon became head gardener with sister Rebecca as assistant. We soon flew past just growing lettuce for our tortoises with chillies, tomatoes, sunflowers and much more. This year Kirstie was keen to get back out in the garden as she started early. It's Mother's Day on Sunday. We've been trying out with new veg. We've been making sweet corn and pumpkin. Though not all choices have been popular. What do you think of them then Bex? She thinks they're real snakes. It's not. It is to me. The next job was working out where to put our new veg. Our garden is mostly paved as our mum is in a wheelchair and the narrow borders are full of her beloved trees with lots of shallow roots making it difficult to grow much. And this year there's been another change. Guess what? What? I've got no vegetables. No vegetable patch? Patch. Why not? For the tortoises to eat. Our tortoises live in the shed with an outdoor run but they keep growing so we needed to extend their run over winter. The new area is perfect but crucially last year this was Kirstie's veg patch. It's changed because I've grown tomatoes and sunflowers. But what can we do now? Put them on pots. Yeah we'll still grow them but we'll find some pots. Yeah. Looking around we realised we had quite a few options including a planter on our dad's memorial bench so we started there. I'm painting dad's bench with my daddy. I miss him so much. This is the same colour as the cover for it. It's the same colour as a bluebell colour. It worked so well we decided to go big. Painting the old sheds too. We've got annuals in small and big containers and we've made hanging baskets and started planting out the growing seeds. This is pumpkins waiting for Halloween. This is sweetcorn on cob for barbecue and melted butter and melt. You're dreaming of a barbecue already? Yep. We like barbecues don't we? Oh yeah I love them. Kirstie was right in there planting them up but Becky isn't a great fan of getting her hands dirty. All right Rebecca how's the gardening going? Brilliant. We still needed more space for veg so we asked our friend Paul to turn some old benches into a raised planters. It went down very well. Come and see what Paul's done. What do you think? This is a fantastic Thank you. I love it. It was amazing. Our head gardener painted them to match the sheds and we started planting them up with one for veg and one for flowers to attract the butterflies. What's this one Kirstie? It's called a vabina. There's herbs too like lavender, trailing rosemary and chamomile. I like chamomile for my tea. You like tea don't you? Can you smell it? Then it was on to the second one with lots of strawberries. If we get enough we can make some strawberry jam. Oh yeah for toast for my boxers. Oh nice. It also has rows of bedding plants with spaces in between to plant salad leaves and beetroot, one of Becky's favourites. We're so pleased with the result, looking forward to watching them grow and after all the hard work Kirstie has decided she has a new title. I love gardening. My name is Monty Don Jr. Well Mandy, Becky and Kirstie it's lovely to see you and your garden again and Kirstie I'm honoured that you should be joining the Monty Don team and I look forward to seeing your garden again before too long. Now the orchard is slowly being converted to a meadow and the secret of a meadow is not to let the grass dominate, to have enough flowering plants that they are predominant because otherwise grass will always take over. Now something I've only started to do recently is to add the bulbs that I grew in pots into the meadow. So I've got some tulips here, these were growing in the jewel garden, they looked fantastic until a week or so ago, now they're finished. But if I plant it directly out into the meadow it'll die back in the meadow, that will feed the bulbs and there is a chance that it will flower next year. Now I have to stress only a chance, it's not guaranteed. If you want guaranteed tulip performance you have to buy new bulbs. As for planting just cut a bit of the turf out as deep as you can, the deeper the better, and just pop your pot load of tulips in. This is a variety called Fly Away and I don't try and colour combine it, they go in randomly and the effect if you put them all over is a really dramatic tapestry of colour, points of colour. There we are. Now it's time to pay our final visit to one of your gardens this week and it takes us to Wolverhampton and covers one of my favourite topics. Hi my name's Ed, welcome to my garden. I've been here 25 years, the garden's had a few guysies over the years, there's been a football pitch, a rugby pitch, even a wrestling ring a couple of times. I'm going to show you a bit that hasn't got a lot of colour, it's very important. Compost corner folks, every garden should have one. Modern estate gardens aren't very big but I've got room here for a little compost corner. Every year when the plants stop flowering, dying off, I chop them up, pull them out and they go in these two bins. Every few months I get them out, chop them up again, turn them over, fantastic workout for an old fellow like me. So moment of truth, what have we got? Lovely stuff, look at that. You can't buy compost like this people, just can't and when you think it's come totally from waste, just shows how worthwhile it is. No matter how little room you've got, you must have room for an old bean. Give it a try folks, it's well worth it. I could not agree with you more Ed. To my mind, good compost is always the foundation of a good garden. Now I use compost for two things here in the garden. One is as part of anything edible, our vegetable garden and herb garden and fruit and the other half we sieve and use as part of our potting mix on the basis that gives every plant a good start and I'm about to pop these on and use that potting mix. Now this is sweet corn which I sowed just a couple of weeks ago and you can see that it's grown really well and quickly and I probably could plant this out today from a plug but I don't have room for it. I'm not ready to plant it out for at least another two weeks and probably another three or four and this is where potting on buys you time. You pot on to a bigger container, the roots can grow out into it and as a rule it buys you at least four weeks. Right so we'll just put a little bit in the bottom, take one out like that, pop it in and there we are. I've always felt that the single most important part of any gardener's education is to visit as many gardens as you possibly can and I don't think I've ever visited a garden anywhere in the world where I haven't learned something even if it's what not to do or what I don't like. It all goes into the mix and you learn from it and it seems to me this is a good moment to revisit the garden of Derek Ferguson in Roncorn because he had a nice garden that he liked, his friends liked, they looked good until one day he went to visit a garden on the other side of the country and that changed everything. When people tend to come around the garden hopefully the first thing they say is wow and then they say oh it's so jungly and that is such a compliment because that's the design, that's a style I go for and considering it's such a small space it's quite difficult to achieve that. It worked really well I think. Big exotic plants look good in a small space. A few years ago we went on holiday to Norfolk and I'd heard about a garden in Norwich city centre and it was just breathtaking. The size, the scale, plants you just wouldn't dream would grow in our British climate. Could I possibly do this type of style in my garden? That gave me sort of the impetus to at least give it a go. Initially it was a cottage garden and so I needed to remove the more cottagey plants and to introduce more tropical plants. Friends were very grateful because a lot of the plants which wouldn't have fitted into the style, things like delphiniums and lupins, my friends got. I want things to look natural. That might sound contradictory sitting in runcorn in a tropical garden. One of my favourite plants is the tetrapanics. It's the most tropical looking plant. The nickname is t-rex and rightly so. The leaves are palmate and can be a metre in diameter. When you stand under it, it envelops you. It's totally hardy. It is deciduous. You'll lose all the leaves in the autumn. I tend to hang things from it. I've even been known to put tinsel around it at Christmas. I've got a habit of buying palms. I've got 44. My favourite genus of palm is tracheocarpus. I've knocked off them all but I'm working on it. So I might have to thin them out eventually. Again, friends and family will benefit from that. The tender bananas I grow at Encete, there's a purple one called Morelii. You can buy it as a plug and in just a short space of time it will grow sort of six, eight feet. But it's totally tender. It won't take a temperature lower than three. But if you dry it off in October, you cut all the leaves off. It's a large pseudostem, so it's packed with water. If you tip it upside down, put it in a shed or an outbuilding for a few weeks so all the water drains out. And then you can put it in your loft, wrap it in a bit of hessian and just leave it for six months. In late March, put it in some compost, give it a bit of water and away you go again. One plant I bought recently is a plant called Snekio, Angel Wings. It's a very touchy feeling plant. It's purely decorative, but it's a very sensual plant as well. The Heliopsis is a survivor from my cottage garden. In fact, it's one of the oldest plants in the garden. I don't plant much yellow, but I think the zestiness and the vibrancy of the yellow just helps it stand out. In the last few years, I've started growing dahlias. I wouldn't have touched dahlias five years ago, but now I can't believe I ever live without them. The water is a major feature in the garden. On the top tier, I used to have a large, fattier japonica. When I removed it, the crater it created just cried out to be used. So I got a liner and filled it with water and created a pond. You imagine in a jungle effect, there's always a stream running through it and with the big plants around it. It's just a nice calming effect. The garden builds to a colour crescendo. I love tethonium. It starts to flower in July. It just pumps out hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of flowers. Provided you don't get a heavy frost, it can be flowering at Christmas. That doesn't often happen, but you can still get a good array of colours. It's been a challenge, but I love creating the space. It's nice. It wraps around you, you know, like a blanket of colour and foliage and texture. When I come here at the end of a busy day at work, I sit on the large settee in the conservatory. It's almost like a chaise lounge. I relax out and I put my arm over and I glance out into my paradise. I just find it very peaceful. Derek is absolutely right to say that big plants look good in small spaces. Having seen Derek's garden, I'm now persuaded that what we lack here is a little bit more foliage, particularly in the shape of a tetrapannax. So I've got one here that I'm going to plant over in the corner of this bed. This is tetrapannax rex and the reason why it's called rex is because the leaves are more finely cut than the species, although they too will grow enormous. The leaves can be three foot across and they will look like an enormous claw, like a tyrannosaurus rex, hence the name. Now tetrapannax will grow really substantial, as we saw in Derek's garden. This is small, but this can put on four foot this year and given a chance it will reach five or six meters tall and that's what I want in this corner. I want a backdrop to the garden. It does like a sunny position, but it'll take some shade and what's really important is it's sheltered from the worst of the wind. It will cope with most winter weather, but what it does need is good drainage. There's lots of organic matter in here, which means the drainage won't be too bad and it can fend for itself. There we go, well that's a nice healthy plant. Now that's part one of adding drama and foliage to the jewel garden. If the tetrapannax is big, this is a plant that is potentially much, much bigger. This is a polonia tormentosa, the foxglove tree, which will flower with wonderful lavender purple flowers, reminiscent of a foxglove, hence its name. However, it's not the flowers that I'm interested in, because I have no intention of letting it grow into a large tree. The great virtue of polonia is that it coppices and pollards very well. When you cut it back, it will respond by throwing up a flush of new shoots and these shoots will bear leaves that are substantially bigger than if they're being left uncut. They can be truly enormous. It comes from China and it's pretty adaptable. It likes full sun if you can get it, but will take a little bit of shade. It's hardy, effectively fully hardy down to about minus 20, although when it's young in the first year or two, if it's very cold, you might want to protect it just to let it get established. It doesn't need as much drainage as the tetrapannax does, but it will respond well to good soil. Right, I will go and refill my watering can and give that a good drink and then when I've done that and let the water settle, I will put a short stake in there just until the roots get established. Okay, I've got one or two things to do. Here are one or two things for you to do this weekend. Chelsea chop is so called because it is best done around the time of Chelsea flower show at the end of May or beginning of June and its purpose is to extend the flowering display of late flowering perennials like Phlox, Helenium or Rebecca. Reduce the plant by about a third. This will encourage side shoots that will flower a little later but last a lot longer. Although garlic and elephant garlic won't be ready to harvest for another few weeks, many plants like mine will be trying to develop flower heads or scapes and these will divert energy away from the bulbs. So break these scapes off and they just snap easily and that will buy you another few weeks to maximize your bulb harvest. By the way, don't throw these scapes away because they're very good to eat. Pot marigolds are the perfect plant to give your borders a late season boost. Sow them now either direct where they're to grow or into plugs. Cover them, water them well and they will germinate quickly and become big enough to plant out in about four weeks time and then they will flower gloriously from mid-August right through to autumn. The glory of the damp garden at this time of year is this Viburnum It is an absolute joy with its horizontal tiers of white flower. Not difficult to grow and not only does it have fabulous late spring early summer flowering but it's one of the best autumn colored plants that you can grow. It's absolutely fantastic and I love it. Well everyone's feeling rather sleepy here. Certainly Patty's found herself a nice nest. Nellie keeps flopping in the shade. I think that's it for this week. Next week we are back to the earlier time of eight o'clock so I'll see you then.