Gardeners' World 2022 Episode 16

Hello, welcome to Gardener's World. I'm cutting back this oriental poppy. I'm doing this for a couple of reasons. The first is that they have a tendency, particularly the foliage, to die back and then sit on the crown and swamp the surrounding area. And even though the seed heads look lovely, if I cut them back hard, I will get regrowth. And by doing it now, I create a bit of space that I can plant around and then the light and the air that I'm creating will mean that we'll get regrowth of foliage and sometimes, occasionally, regrowth of flowers too at the back end of summer. But even if we don't get flowers, the foliage, that lovely sort of glaucus, hairy quality to it, looks really good and sets off the planting around it. Now, coming up on today's programme. Nick visits a garden offering colour and interest These beds are just literally the reverse of the way most people approach gardening. Do I want to look at a rectangle of lawn with the plants around the outside? No, this is what I would like to look at. My favourite rose would be sombroy. I did, I did. I like anything with the name rose in front of it, if I'm honest. Sue's preparations for Hampton Court go into overdrive as the day of the show draws ever closer. There's one final step today. Taking the plants we've chosen and putting them together to see if the combination actually works. I think it looks amazing. Yeah, I'm really happy. And I shall be harvesting my elephant garlic and using the empty bed to plant out some radicchio. Last week, I planted up these regal pelargoniums as part one of my plan to use this greenhouse to create a particular display in the summer months and then in the winter months, it houses the succulents, which it does very well. And for those of you who didn't see that, the problem I've been having is that this greenhouse with the vine in it gets very shaded in summer, which is a problem if you're growing tomatoes and chilies, for example. So I've tried to choose plants that will thrive in shade, but also not mind the heat. And the regal pelargoniums are perfect. Also, they have that lovely cherry plum sort of range of colours. And what matches them perfectly are fuchsias. And I went to Gardeners World Live a couple of weeks ago and selected a few rather special ones to add to this project. Now, the first is the one that looks least like a fuchsia. This is fuchsia arborescens. And you can see that the leaves are rather bigger. The flower head looks like a lilac. It certainly doesn't look like a fuchsia, but it is. And it behaves like a fuchsia. Fuchsias fare best in mild conditions, round about 13, 14, 15 degrees. And for example, in here, it's now 28. But I've mitigated that by having good drafts. So if you're going to grow them in a conservatory or in a greenhouse or even on a window, so make sure you can get plenty of fresh air. Now, the second one which I've chosen is this because it's got such tiny flowers. It's called cherry pop. And these flowers are full grown. We think of fuchsias having these voluptuous, great hanging bells of colour. But look at that, absolutely minute, tiny, tiny little flowers with vivid foliage and the masses of flower. This remains delicate and yet really striking. So I'm certainly going to pop that one up. And I chose a couple more. I was attracted to this one, which is called Brian Breary because of the stems as much as the flowers. Now the flowers are this, again, very delicate, small pink flower. And apparently this will grow to four foot tall. And like all fuchsias, this can be cut back hard. That will mean that the new growth will have the best colour. Now, finally, I couldn't resist this. Doesn't look like much, does it? But this is called Patty's Love. And it's got delicate little flowers. It will grow bigger, but I'm growing it for Patty. It doesn't matter what fuchsia you grow. They share mostly the same conditions, which are for fairly cool, slightly shady, but quite moist conditions. And a growing medium that is loose and open. Retains moisture, but drains well. Now I've got a mix here, which is homemade in so much that it's mainly leaf mould, a little bit of sieve garden compost, and some coir. But if you take a peat-free compost and just add a bit of perlite, that will do most of the work for you. Let's pot up Brian Breary. See, nice healthy plant. Pop that in there like that. So there we are, that's Brian Breary. Now I will pop these up, but I've also bought some less unusual ones. This is a fuchsia called Bella. And what makes it slightly different to some fuchsias is that the plants face upwards more than they droop. So you can look down on them and enjoy them. And I've got a pot which I think they'll look really good in. I will stress that all these plants will be perfectly happy outside. Perfectly happy growing in a border as much as in pots. Three and four. A little bit more in that. That's good. Well, I think that the combination of the intensity of this colour and the fascination of these really very unusual fuchsias is already making the collection interesting and I will be adding to them. Now, about 15 years ago, I remember that the winner of the Gardener of the Year competition was a certain Sue Beasley. As a result of that, she went on to establish her own nursery, which now is highly respected. She's also created a garden in which she displays her plants. And Nick went up to see her. If you dream of a garden full of colour and interest year-round, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better one than this. Swathes of wispy grasses float in arching sprays, catching the sun, and through their vertical stems, flashes of colour. Sue Beasley is an award-winning nursery woman specialising in perennials. Back in 2007, she started designing this naturalistic garden, playing with drifts of these hard-working stunners. When you arrived at this garden, Sue, it was a blank canvas, right? And this is glorious. So how did you get to this point? The first project I did was these two big square borders. Just carved them out of this vast lawn that was here before and got stuck in and planted them up purely with perennials. And actually, most of the key plants that are in here are exactly what I planted in that first year. Wow, well, it looks fantastic. And I mean, these beds are just... they are literally the reverse of the way most people approach gardening. Of course, the bog standard is lawn in the middle, beds pushed out to the outside. It quickly became really obvious that the plants were absolutely thriving. These perennials, which some people say, oh, you have to stake them because they collapse, they don't because they're out in full light rather than up against a hedge with light on one side. They just stand upright. They don't need staking. I mean, I can see just in front of us here, this geranium, which could, in a traditional side border, flail around and become a bit lanky. Actually, it's being held up by the phloemus and by the baptistery either side of it and then contrasting beautifully with them in terms of flower form and colour. So it's perfect. And the lovely thing about growing the plants in the open, quite apart from the fact of what the plants themselves do, is it gives us the option to walk around and see all these different combinations and see them with different lights behind them at different times of day. For a lot of people, they feel, well, that's fine, Sue. You've got a big garden. You can do that. Well, this border in front of me is 10 metres by 10 metres. It's quite a typical back garden size. So if I was standing here at my future kitchen window, do I want to look at a rectangle of lawn with the plants around the outside? No, this is what I would like to look at. And I am now an absolute advocate of put the paths around the outside, put the plants in the middle, in effect, turning the standard model of a English back garden, if you want to look at that, on its head. There's a real practical element to this garden. And one of the gardening principles I'm most passionate about is successional planting. And I can see immediately that Sue is a like-minded soul. So this is our entrance border. It's one of the first things people see when they walk into the gardens. So to me, it's just really important that they look good for the whole season long. I mean, I can see down here at the front of the border, there's Brunnera, which of course, is doing its thing in spring. Yes. There's Gelania flowering beautifully here, but you've got a whole load more to come, right? Well, that's right. So this is a plant that the flowering's finishing now, but it's a wonderful plant. It's a form of honesty. And in spring, it's got these mounds of really scented white flowers. And then later in the season, there'll be these wonderful pointed seed pods. And obviously, this is Thalictrum. It's a May-June flowering form, which as you can see, the bees love it. But then still to come, we've got these Actaea. They'll have these superb unfurling stems, which of course, again, the bees love. So I mean, this border is basically north-facing, which is something that most gardeners say is a real challenge. It's slightly northeast-facing, so it does get the morning sun. If what you've got is an east or northeast-facing border, a lot of plants really like that slightly softer light. Actually, these plants are really thriving with just that little bit of dappled shade and just that bit of sunlight in the morning. But it's not just successional planting that Sue's used so effectively. If you want a garden to deliver every day of the year, you need plants that work with you. This Flomis is a truly year-round perennial. Right now, it looks fantastic. It's got these sort of primrose yellow flowers arranged in whorls up the stem, and it's absolutely covered in pollinators. These will last for a couple of months or so through summer. Going into autumn, it loses its leaves, but it holds on to these stems and to the old flower whorls, and they just get better and better as you go into winter. They get gradually darker, so they show up against the snow, and they come with an extra bonus. These old flower whorls hold on to seeds, so they provide food for birds. They also provide hiding places for lots of overwintering pollinators. As well as the structured formal areas, there's one part of the garden with a much looser, wild feel. But, as ever, there's a huge amount of planning that's gone on here under the surface. So we've been looking at the glorious, long-flowering perennials in your borders, but actually, as a meadow, this is equally long-flowering, right? Yeah, it was just plain lawn about 10 years ago, and it was just sown from seed on sort of stripped off, stripped the turf off and just sowed it, and it has worked out really well. So these are all native British plants. I mean, I'm noting an absolutely key species in here, which is the yellow rattle, which, of course, parasitises the grass roots, right, and kind of keeps the grass suppressed so the floral species can come through. That's right. We can always tell where the yellow rattle is even from a distance because the grass is so much shorter. And I'm noticing just over there, geranium pretense. And I mean, if you want to cheat a meadow, something I've done in the past is to allow an area of lawn to run wild and then slot in potted perennial plants that naturally grow in meadows. And of course, this is one of our natives. It naturally grows in this environment. It looks great. It does look great. I have to tell you that I didn't drop that one in for effect. That has just arrived naturally from seed around. And that's what happens with meadows, isn't it? They evolve themselves once they've been given a chance to get started. I think Sue's garden is incredibly inspiring, but of course, it's on a huge scale. However, you can take some of the core principles and use them in much, much smaller gardens. So if you aim for succession, in other words, a series of plants which will flower before and after each other, if you go for long flowering perennials, and finally, how about reversing your garden and putting the planting in the centre? With all of those things combined, it's absolutely possible to have colour and interest across the year in your garden. I'm interested in what Sue was saying about plants in full sun need much less staking. Certainly here in the grass borders, we don't stake very much. Although we do find that with our heavy clay and high rainfall, the lush growth inevitably does need some support, whether it's in full sun or not. This is a bed of elephant garlic. And now we've reached July, it's time to harvest it. In fact, I could leave it another couple of weeks, but because it's starting to turn yellow, that's a sign that the bulbs aren't getting any bigger. And I need the space, so I'm going to harvest them now. Now, you can see elephant garlic, which is actually technically a leek, is big, much bigger than normal garlic, and milder. And it's become very popular in the Don household. And there's something about the size of these bulbs that is very satisfying. And they break into individual cloves, the bulbs, and they store very well as long as you let them dry. And that is important. So what you do is lift them out with a fork, never yank them out the ground, because when you lift them, you want to keep the roots on them. And that's because the roots are attached to the bulb via a basal plate. And if that gets damaged, then it won't store. So leave the roots on, and then they need to dry thoroughly. Dry so there is no green left at all. And then when it's completely brown, then you can tidy them up, ready to store. And this applies completely to garlic, as well as elephant garlic. By growing them in a raised bed, I get better drainage. And you can see these are little bulbules coming off the side of them, and they will create new plants, and do if they're left in the ground. That should come, there you go. These now need to dry out. Now, if I didn't need this bed, and if I knew it was going to be dry for the next week, I'd just spread them out on the surface, and they're dry in the sun. However, there is rain forecast in a couple of days' time. And also, I found that the greenhouse at this time of year is at its emptiest. So that's why I'm going to take them. And then I'm going to get some compost to dress this bed, reinvigorate it, ready for planting out the radicchio. But before we do that, it's time to visit the first of your gardens this week, which is in Surrey. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Sue Smith, and this is my garden. I've had three gardens in my married life, 50 years. First was chalk, second sand, and this one, very, very heavy clay. But over the years, we've got grit and compost, and now I think it's looking pretty good. So I'm going to just show you quickly my garden and show you how I use oil, different pot, how I use these clippers. They're very good. I'm going to show you here. You just have to release it and clip what you're going to clip. Hold on to it. Wonderful. And in the pot. And so I don't have to bend down. I just flip away and get it all sorted. My favorite tool. I do like vegetation that's different. So the hostas, all the other plants, give it texture with occasional pop of color. That's a glorious color, isn't it? Anyway, this is my garden. Thank you for coming and watching with me. Well, I think your garden looks great, Sue. Now, I have spread the compost, worked it in, planted out the radicchio. Now, the life cycle of this is that I sowed this about six weeks ago. They will now grow in this bed and develop lots of green foliage. And then gradually I'll remove that and it will be replaced by the tight red and white hearts that are so delicious. The container veg is doing fine. Doing well, actually. You can see that we've been eating the oak leaf lettuce. It's regrowing. That's the beauty of these cut-and-come-again varieties. You cut them and this is regrowth. There's regrowth evident there. So you get at least two pickings. Whereas on something like the cos lettuce, that won't regrow. It's good to harvest it. Grow it, eat it, sow some more, keep it turning over. So that will be next to be harvested. But look at the courgette. This is a veritical defender. It's growing strongly. It's happy. And the critical thing is developing lots of flowers, which in turn are developing fruits. Now, when they're flowering, that is when it's most effective to water them. So if you see the flowers, give them plenty of goodness. The tomatoes, which we're doing this trial with, of different types of grow bags, a bit early to say which is doing best, but they're all looking pretty healthy. And I'm supporting them using this system here, which was a homemade clothes rail, which wasn't very good because when I put the clothes on, it fell over. So that got put to one side and has sat outside a barn for the last two years or so. And suddenly in the middle of the night, I thought, I know what I can use that for. So that is good. We can tie the canes on and these are supported. Now at this stage of the year, it is really important with cordon tomatoes to remove the side shoots. These are the shoots that grow at 45 degrees between the stem. And here's a good example. There's the stem, there's a leaf, and there is a side shoot growing out at an angle. And because they're at 45 degrees, they're very vigorous and they do bear fruit, but not so much as the shoots that come off the main stem. So what they do is they basically take bigger from the plant and you can just pinch them out like that. And if you do that regularly, they never get too big and the plant puts all its energy into growing nice and tall with really good trusses of fruit. And you can see they are beginning to form. We are getting some fruit here. Now at this stage of the year, it's getting a bit late to sow seed for some things. If you want to go leeks, for example, the moment has really passed to get a decent crop, certainly this autumn. However, garden centers do sell quite a lot of different veg. And I've got some leeks here. What I'm going to do is to break them up and plant them individually in a larger pot. I've got a recycled quite large pot because we want some depth for these. And I've added some garden compost to my normal peat-free potting compost. So there's extra goodness. Now, if I take some out, if I just push on there. So we'll break these up to tease them apart. That's it. And then just plant them in little clumps. And I'm planting them quite deep because what goes underground will blanch, which means that the green will turn white and that's much sweeter to eat. So I could just pop that in like that, which is why a deeper container is a good idea. Very important to keep leeks well-watered. But they're no trouble. So leave these and they should be ready to harvest somewhere between September and January. These are really hardy vegetables, so great for leaving in the ground over winter. But let's not talk about midwinter when we've got summer around us and we should be enjoying the very best of it while we can. So we went to visit Sheena Poo in her garden in Somerset where she positively revels in roses. I like roses so much because they're so beautiful, come in so many different colours. There's a rose for every situation, however big your garden, however small. They're romantic. What more can I say? I just couldn't live without them. My mum always loved gardening and especially roses and I think that was passed on to me. The pretty rose in my front garden, which is a deep pink centifolia, which you can see in this bouquet, came from my grandmother's garden and then my mother took a cutting and that transferred to her garden. And when she died, I had to take that with me and that moved twice now and it's now here in my front garden. It's got the most glorious scent and it's one of my absolute favourites. If you're going to transplant a rose from your garden though, you need to dig that up in February and move it then and then you'll have the greatest chance of success. My garden measures approximately 8 metres by 7 metres and I've got roses growing all around. There's roughly 33 in the back garden so if I can grow roses, anybody can. I love this rose. It's called Rural England. It's a small rambler and it's great for a smaller garden. If you deadhead it, it will flower all summer long. It's a great doer. I planted Rural England in this part of the garden because I think it links beautifully into the wider landscape beyond. This is another great rose. It's a floribunda called Cream Abundance and it flowers and flowers its heart out all summer but you do need to deadhead it. So when I deadhead, I take it back to that first leaf node like that but don't expect them to flower in the first week. They'll take three to four weeks to come back into flower so you have to be patient. It's a beautiful rose. One of my favourite roses of all time. I love this old rose because it has the most beautiful carmine pink flowers that are open. The bees love it. It has a lovely form. The foliage is really healthy. It's called aficionalis or the apothecary's rose. It was used in ancient times. They used to extract the essence from it for medicinal purposes. It never gets black spot. It's a beautiful, beautiful colour and it's got a beautiful myrrh scent. Another thing I really love about this rose is the archetypal rosebud. It's so pretty. It has such a special moment in time. Aficionalis or the apothecary's rose is my favourite rose of all time. I think with roses you need to try them out. I mean my garden here is only seven years old so it's amazing what can be achieved in a short space of time. You have to be a little bit patient with them. They sometimes take a while to get going but never be afraid to try. This lovely rose is called raubrita. It's instantly recognisable by its globular flowers with deep centres and pale pink reverse. It almost looks like a small peony. Flowers all summer long. Normally it would have a lax habit but given a support it will grow into this beautiful shrub shape. I mulch my roses well in early spring sort of end of February to the beginning of March with a mushroom stroke horse manure based compost. I don't water my roses in normal time but in really hot weather I water them every three days and I never spray my roses because I don't like to hurt the beneficial insects and the bees. They just take their chance and get on with it. Generally roses like sunshine. There are roses that tolerate shade but they need light and space to be happy. This is Tuscany superb. A very old rose again. Very pretty form. Lovely deep crimson flowers. It does remind me of my mother's garden. My mother had upwards of about 40 roses and so they're special to me. They hold a special place in my heart because of her. This lovely rose is zephyrine druon. It's a great climber. It has a wonderful scent. It has a lovely open flower. You can see that the stems are virtually thornless. You do have to deadhead it because it's a repeat flowerer so it keeps going all summer. It will flower in the shade and in the full sun so it's a rose really worth growing. My favourite rose of all time would be sombroy. It's a climbing hybrid tea and the rose is just such a beautiful form and scent and it looks like scrunched up tissue paper. You said apocathy earlier. I did, I did. But I like anything. I like anything with the name rose in front of it if I'm honest. They're all beautiful and it's like choosing between your children, isn't it? I'm with Sheena on this. It's impossible to choose a favourite rose. There are so many that are wonderful. I tend to say whichever one I'm nearest to at the moment. Okay, for right now, this one can be my favourite rose. It is felicity perpetua and it's completely wonderful. It's got these little pink buds that open out into ruffled pom-poms of white flower. A mass of them that started about a week ago and will continue for maybe another 10 days if I'm lucky. So, maximum of three weeks of glory and that's it. That's its performance for the year. And the fact that it's limited actually makes it more precious to me. Now, this is a classic rambler rose. Ramblers tend to have a mass of smaller flowers. Most of them only flower once in midsummer and they flower on the previous year's growth. For example, this shoot here will bear flowers next year but there are none on it now. This is a new growth whereas all these flowers are produced on shoots that grew last summer. Whereas climbers form their flowers on new growth which means that you can prune climbers quite happily as late as March and they will flower perfectly well that summer. Whereas ramblers should be pruned immediately after flowering any time from July to August depending which rambler it is. Now, still to come on today's programme. We catch up with Sue as she makes our final preparations for her first show garden at Hampton Court. For a show garden, every plant has to be in tip-top condition. I want to know how to keep them that way on the long journey to the showground. Big click. Oh, wow. And that's it done. So much quicker than tying everything on with individual string. Which is what I'd be doing. And I'll be getting my waders on because it's time to start clearing some space in the pond. But first of all, we're heading off to the Netherlands for the second film that you've sent to us. Hello, I'm Marcel Bartels from Holland. I've been watching Gardener's World for almost 30 years. This year, we made our garden even more beautiful by splitting and replanting all the plants we collected the last 12 years since we lived here. I made the borders from straight lines to curved lines. I made even borders in the middle of the lawn so you can walk around it and enjoy the view to the flowers and the colours from every side. This geranium, Oxonianum, I divided this spring and it's now looking good as a group of flowers. I made this year a bath for the birds and I made it from some old materials like this old planter, some blocks of wood and some stones to make it look better. And it's also very nice to see the birds take a bath. So this is my passion. This is my world. Well, thanks very much for sharing your garden, Marcel. And you make a really good point, which is that although gardens inevitably change, they change from day to day and season to season, the plants grow and the weather changes, sometimes you have to be the agent of change. Sometimes you have to be very proactive. But this part of the garden, that goes outside the back door, which we call the spring garden, is the least changed of the whole of Longmeadow. It's remained looking really good in February and March and April and then into May. And by the end of May, it's losing its oomph and by June it's over. So now is the time to do housekeeping for spring plants. Now this geranium, this is geranium fyme, really good for dry, shady spaces. It needs to be cut back hard. It'll be radical, it'll create a lot of space, but it will regrow and will reflower. So just get in here and cut really close to the ground, like that. And we can just pull that out. This is not something you can do in a hurry because there are plants here like hellebores, atalema, tellurella, that you don't want to cut back. So you just have to do it plant by plant in a sort of steady way. There's something very satisfying about seeing it as a process. So this needs to come in here. This is cow parsley. Now I love cow parsley and I never want to get rid of it. But all of this I need to pull up or at very least cut back. It's an annual. The seeds have fallen or are falling. We know there'll be lots of cow parsley next year. We've never been without it. So I'll cut this back. And the crucial thing to remember about all these spring flowering plants is that they flower while there is light. And because they're under the cover of deciduous trees, by the end of April and certainly into May, they put on a lot of leaf and it's getting very dark. And now the shade here is really deep. So by flowering in February and March and April, they get whatever light they can. And then when the shade is at its deepest, they go dormant. And if in July you can get it all cleared and let it rest, just leave it alone, that's fine. Then in August, you start to get that growth underground. And late August and September are really good months for planting in a spring garden. And that's what I'll be doing when we reach there. Now, over the last few months, Sue has been preparing for her first show garden, ready for Hampton Court Flower Show. And we join her as she reaches the final stages. Since looking at how the structural and artistic elements of the garden have been coming along, I've been incredibly busy starting to really pull the planting together. I visited RHS Malvern, taking inspiration from other show gardens, but it might have only added to my nerves. I'm in a complete panic. They're so good. And I just don't think I can get to this standard. And I want to leave the country and hide somewhere until it's all over. Since then, I've been seriously ramping up my efforts, acquiring fruit trees, which are in my design, and tending the plants I'm growing at home, with mixed results. But the bulk of my plants are coming from farmyard nurseries in Carmarthenshire. It's a big day for me today. I'm coming to see the plants growing for my design. It all rests in the planting, and I'm eager to see my ideas being realised. Luckily, I'm in the capable hands of Richard, who's been involved in growing plants for plenty of Chelsea gardens, and can give me his expert advice on how to get the timing right, so the plants will be show perfect for my garden at Hampton Court. I'm starting by showing Richard what I've grown at home myself. You can see the difference between amateur and professional here with my Echinops. It's got some browning of the leaves, and it's not as healthy looking as yours. What can we do about that? Ah, that's no problem. We'll just put it in a bigger pot, and we'll pot it up into some new compost, and we'll give it a bit of feed, and then we'll put it in one of the polytunnels, and it'll be fine. And what will we do about the leaves if they're still brown? Hide them. Yeah, we'll just hide them away. Hopefully the new ones will grow out quite nicely, and they're quite low down, so there shouldn't be a problem. Oh, great, that's great. Well, then my next issue is my Swan River Daisies or Braccuscum. Mine are all a bit weedy looking compared to yours. So what do you think we can do to make these look a bit better? So we're going to have a little bit of difficulty with those, because what we've got to try and do is make them bush out a little bit more and make them a little bit more like these. So what we can do, we can sort of pre-empt it, and we can put three in a pot. We'll pot them on into some new compost. We'll give them a little bit of food, and then we'll trim the flowers off of them because there's a lot of energy goes into the flowers. And then hopefully in a month's time, they'll be looking a little bit more like this. Toes crossed on that one. Now this is my Foxtail Lily, and it's looking very sad, but then this is your Foxtail Lily, and it's flowering now, and it's not, may I say, looking like the catalogue shows it to be. No. When you said Foxtail Lilies, I thought it sort of fills you with dread. Timing is absolutely crucial, and they only have one flower. So if you get that wrong, you've had it. Unlike these Echinops, which are hopefully in the right condition. You can feel the flower bud in the top of them. We've got another month to go, and the timing should be just right. Obviously they need watering, and I'm worried about over-watering them. I'm doing it just once a day. Is that right? Yeah, once a day should be fine. Just keep your eyes on the weather. If it's really hot and sunny, then in the morning and in the evening. Evening watering is really good because it gets a chance to soak in overnight then. Give them everything they need. Everything they need. Right, tender, loving care. The rules for show gardens are that I can change my brief up to six weeks before the event, but I have to stick within the main themes that I've already submitted. Like plants that are soft to the touch, are easily maintained, and have a long flowering period. The planting must include daisies, fruit trees, and herbs. The RHS like to have shrubs and perennials, and I didn't really want to do that because my brief is about it being easy to do for people with dexterity issues and weaker grip. But I thought I'd have a go at shrubs, and I chose these willows for their foliage. Unfortunately, some of them have got burnt. Part of my brief is that I'm choosing plants that I can just cut with secateurs or scissors, and these stems are really beginning to thicken up, and as they develop, they'd be too difficult for me. So I feel confident that I'm going to stick with what's good for me, and they're not going to be in the show. But these really fulfill my brief. These can be cut with secateurs, and they're beautifully soft, and I've mentioned the fact that I want plants to caress the skin, not because I have to get so close to sort of be scratchy or anything. So these are going to go in my herb border, these beautiful fennel. For a show garden, every plant has to be in tip-top condition. Any variants, brown edges, or saggy stems just won't be acceptable for the judges. I want to know how to keep them that way on the long journey to the showground. So there's a couple of ways we can do it. The first way is for staking them, and we've got this tool here, which takes a lot of time out of how we stake things. And it's as simple as that. Little click, putting around the cane, big click, and that's it done. So much quicker than tying everything on with individual string. Which is what I've been doing. So when we get there, we're not going to keep those on, are we? No, so when we get there, we'll cut the tape, pull the cane out, and everything will be perfectly upright and good to go. If we move on to a sort of more spreading type of plant, how would you recommend that we transport those? These are even more difficult than these, believe it or not, because what happens is the branches all get tangled up in the flowers. So we've got these little cages, and they're simplest to themselves. All you do, you put it on the floor, you drop your plant inside them, and you just pull them up until they click into place. That is easy. I can see how well protected and easy to carry. And what you can do, you can stack these close together now. Right, I'm just going to see, because these will solve problems for me transporting my plants, so let's just see if I can do it. It looks pretty okay. So I pop them in. So nothing's damaged, isn't it? Such a great idea. They are, they're fantastic. And I give it a hoik, and then, so that's really easy. I'm going to solve my problems. And these baskets can be used again after the show in my own garden or back here at the nursery. There's one final step today. Taking the plants we've chosen and putting them together to see if the combination actually works. I feel mightily relieved because I couldn't imagine it at all until we've done this. I've just got to think, does it fulfill the brief? And I've got that row of daisies because I need a row of daisies at the back, which will be lovely. All the plants that we've chosen are definitely cuttable with scissors or secateurs. They're all gentle to the touch. And I love the colours. I love the zing of the white and then the lovely purples. I think it looks amazing. Yeah, I'm really happy. I'm really pleased with my choices of gora, salvias and cosmos. But there is still one thing missing. For personal reasons, I'd love to find something that offers visitors to my garden a touch of Wales. I wanted to try leeks, but Richard has other ideas. This one is geranium Celtic white. Well, where can it grow? Would it go under a sorbus tree? Yes, it would. Because I haven't got anything to go under the tree, so that would be nice. And that would give the Welsh contingent, wouldn't it? It will, we need a bit of Wales. We've got a lot of Wales in this garden. And I think it'll look better than leeks, don't you think? Yeah, lovely, great. Fabulous. Yeah, fab, well done, thank you. Well, it is Hampton Court Flower Show next week. So if you go along, you'll see Sue's garden. And if you can't get there, we'll be covering it. So we'll all get a chance to enjoy it in its finished state. And good luck with the last stages, Sue. In the damp garden, I've spent a lot of this spring focusing on the outside areas, the bits around the edge of the pond. And it's going well. We've got lots of lush foliage from the rayum and the hostas and the dharmara. Now we're starting to get some colour. The persicaria has got these white plumes of flower. We've got the yellow of the lysimachia. The candelabra primrose are flowering, and they will get much better as they get bigger. I'm struggling with this extremely ungainly pair of waders because it's time now to give some attention to the pond itself. And the key thing that I need to attend to is the yellow flag, Iris pseudocorus. Which, although I love because it's beautiful and great for wildlife, it can be very invasive. So I need to get into the pond and get to work. You can see it's quite a mat. Now I would stress that I love the flowers of these. Bright yellow, fleur-de-lis. And this sort of really brilliant display that you get at the sort of beginning and middle of June. It's wonderful, and I wouldn't want to be without it. So it's a question of controlling it and cutting it back a bit rather than getting rid of it. I don't see it as a weed. I see it as a glorious plant that I'm very happy to have in my pond. But like some other glorious plants, it can become invasive. Now when you take anything out of the water, and I mean anything at all, whether it's algae or a large plant, don't put it straight into a wheelbarrow or a container to take to the compost heap because there may well be little creatures in amongst it. So you put them on the edge and leave it for 24 hours so that dragonfly mints, water beetles, any little creature can crawl back into the water. The truth is I'm aware that by cutting them, they will regrow. The only way to get rid of it is to pull out the rhizome, which is in there. Can you see all those roots? If I want to reduce it substantially, I need to cut that back. There we go. See that? There you have a massive root in there and these great fleshy rhizomes. Can you see where I've cut there? And that will reduce them a bit. I'm going to work my way around, which is quite tricky because the depths are very variable, and reduce the iris by half. That will open out some space, let more light in, more room for other plants to breathe, but still leave plenty of cover for wildlife and also the beauty of their flowers next spring. And I'll probably have to repeat the process next year too. Now it's time to visit the last of your gardens. It belongs to a first-time gardener and was filmed last summer. Hello, I'm Marie-Claude and I live in Manchester in the city centre. I bought this house four years ago. The garden was a builder's dump. I had never lived in a house. I always lived in flats, so I didn't know what to do with the garden. I asked my husband if he wanted to do some digging. He said, yes, okay. So yeah, fortunately. Sometimes I'm rated as a free labourer. Digging and stuff and pruning. The garden is now full and I still go to garden centres. And when I go there, I always go with the intention of not buying because there is no more room in my garden. But I always come back with little plants, maybe sometimes it's bigger. But this is why this garden is full now. When I designed my garden, I wanted to have islands with different plants in them and pathways. I have grandchildren and I thought that would be nice and playful for them to walk between the plants. I'm quite happy with the design. It started four years ago on paper and I still have the same design. It's just more full, that's all. I planted some fruit trees and they were that high when I bought them. Look at them now. They are the apples from my apple tree. And I'm going to make a crumble for you tonight. I hope you enjoyed following me in my garden. Gardening has been a pleasure for me and become a passion. And even if you're a beginner like me, you can still enjoy it. So I encourage you to do it. Cheers! Well, thanks for sharing your garden with us, Mary-Claude. And you may have only started a few years ago, but it looks really good. Now, this revolting bucket is potentially comfrey tea. A month ago, I cut comfrey and stuffed as much as I could get into a bucket, then topped it up with water. And I've left it. It looks truly repulsive. It smells worse, trust me. But it's magic. Comfrey feed is probably the best feed of all for flowers, roots and fruit. It's not what you use to promote vigorous foliage. That needs to be a higher nitrogen feed. This is essentially a potash feed, but so much more than that because it takes up lots of trace minerals. But we need to process it. And that means a process of sieving at this stage. So I've got a fairly coarse sieve going into the bucket. OK, we'll put this back in here now. And that can go on the compost heap. OK, that's there. I'm going to sieve it again because it's nice to get rid of the smaller bits. So that goes in there. Right, we'll tip that out into there. So what we have there is a concentrate. I've got a homemade funnel here, which I hope works. And so we will just funnel it into the container. So this needs diluting. And it's easy enough. I've got a watering can which I keep full so it's at the right temperature. Then it's simply a case of adding the comfrey concentrate so that it's approximately one part comfrey to 20 parts water. Now, I will give this citrus the whole of this watering can because with citrus in particular, far better to water them thoroughly once a week than give them a splash every few days. By and large, that's true of all plants too. Give them a soak, not a splash. And if you combine the feed with the watering, that's easy. We have feeding Friday when all the major pot plants get a water and a feed. Right, that's my job. So this needs diluting. And it's easy enough. So here are yours for this weekend. Soft fruit like these Morello cherries are ripening fast. But the birds often get to them before they're ready to be picked. So it's a good idea to put up temporary protection in the shape of netting to keep the birds off so that they have a chance to ripen properly and you can enjoy them before they do. Florence fennel is delicious but grows best in warm weather. So sow the seeds now and I think it's a good idea to do it into plugs so you don't have to handle them too much. Put them somewhere warm to germinate and they should be ready to plant out in about five or six weeks' time and then to harvest in September and October. The best time to water plants is always in the evening. But on a hot summer's day, greenhouses can get very hot indeed and it's a good idea to cool them down by watering the floor. Give them a liberal soaking and this will not only cool the temperature but also increase the humidity, both of which will be good for your plants. Come on, there's a good girl. Throughout the year, we try and share with you as much horticultural advice, wisdom, experience, sometimes some failings, as we possibly can so you can make your gardens as good as they can be. But there comes a point in the gardening year when all of that pales into insignificance around the sheer loveliness of gardens and now is that moment. So my advice to you, based on a lifetime of horticultural experience, is stop and just enjoy your gardens. Give yourself to them and let the garden give itself to you in all its summertime glory. Well, that's it for today and next week is the RHS Hampton Court Garden Festival. Now the team will be there and we have a programme next Thursday at nine o'clock coming from the Flower Show. Until then, bye-bye.