17 years in the making： Step inside ALAN TITCHMARSH'S private garden

Hello and welcome to my garden. It's normally private, I don't normally sort of have people in here but as it's such a lovely day and as it's you, I thought you might like to look round. Welcome. If there is an entrance to the garden, I suppose this is it. It's referred to as the cherub pond or the dolphin pond. It's a round lawn with a round pond in the middle with, well it's a copy of Verrocchio's Boy with a Dolphin in the centre to remind me that when I was at Kew, I used to clip the box in the Queen's Garden where this statue sat over a pond. I didn't nick it, this is a cheap copy but this whole garden here with the clipped flagons or decanters of yew at the end is blue and white. Blue delphiniums in June and July and now as we're getting later on in the summer, white Annabel Hyde rangers. It's a sort of willow pattern kind of to it really and although it's formal, for me it makes a sort of imposing entrance which then leads on to the rest of the garden. I love axes in a garden, paths that cross or lead your eye and this one runs right in front of the house down to a little metal arbour that was at Barleywood, brought it with me and a chair in it and a good long view. I like gardens that are made up of garden rooms but I didn't want one, I wanted areas that led you on from one to another without the physical barrier of a hedge between and this gives me a chance to show off my love of topiary, cones and orbs and bits of topiary, mainly box but also quite a lot of yew. These are yew lollipops in gigantic pots and the wonderful thing about topiary when it's evergreen is that it's still there giving your garden form in winter. This rill is the latest addition, the latest extravagance if you like. When I first made this part of the garden here where these little yew trees are, these cones, I had pyrus chanticleer which is a fairly narrow growing pair but they got bigger and bigger and I couldn't keep them small enough. We eventually started to get too much lost views so I took them out and then had a think and there's a natural slope here and I've always fancied a rill so I've got a little round pond at the top, a square one in the middle, square one at the bottom and they all link with these axes that grow across going back to my axes and alongside them borders filled with flowers. This is a garden not just a piece of sculpture and hard landscaping so the lines are strong and firm but within the borders billowing banks of flowers and shrubs. It's a lovely place to be you know. It's very easy to over plant a garden to make it too fussy and to oh I'll just do another bit here another bit there because you want to feel because gardens always are developing it's always work in progress but you've got to know when to leave space. A composer famously said that the most important thing about music is the silences and in a garden you need space. We've got this one large lawn we call it the croquet lawn. We have a croquet set we don't really know how to play and it comes out about every other year but I just like the piece the breath if you like that an area of lawn gives you. This garden is totally organic so you'll see clover in here and little weeds. I use a daisy grubber to get out daisies and plantains but other than that this is a lawn you can have just by feeding it with blood bone and fish meal no weed killer because it's a garden which as much as anything is for wildlife. My borders are always edged with good solid hard lines here straight ones up there curving but within the borders I like what you might call billowing generosity a mixture of old-fashioned shrub roses here there's a purple elder at the back with a golden hop growing over it one or two shrubs dotted in them on but basically border perennials plus dahlias and that whole mix means I get colour here from April right the way through to November. You know if it's one of those borders where you think well frankly by August it's all burnt and gone and done oh I've still got a good deal of the summer I want to enjoy and that way by having things like echinacea and the achilles it's a classic Christopher Lloyd I suppose mixed border and I love a bit of colour. Gardens are about dreams I'd always dreamed of having a wildlife pond and we're lucky enough to have a bit of space here so I dug one we got in a mini digger and took out this pond which is what I suppose about 20 yards by 30 yards with about a third of a duck house in which more hens bring off about three broods every year and a little rowing boat and I can pootle around with the grandchildren. It's surrounded by mainly British native water plants there's a little bit of gunner in there just for amusement but what I want this area to do as well as being a home to wildlife and we have roach in here fish which came from nowhere is to gradually fray into the countryside the garden's being left behind now and we're edging out towards the wildflower meadow and the further countryside and it's all about a journey from cultivation to nature. When we first came here 17 years ago we had just two acres just two acres but I thought we've had a bit more I could make a wildflower meadow so I'm surrounded by farmland I managed to buy two more acres of not organic but proper farmland and they always say make wildflower meadows on poor soil scrape off the top soil two acres scrape off the top soil so I didn't it was ploughed it was harrowed I planted an edge and then I sowed a chalk downland wildflower mix because we're on chalk downland here with a bucket on my own right across two acres and that is about 10 years ago now. Now we have the most wonderful wildflower meadow that begins in March April with cow slips goes all the way through margaretes moon daisies to this far end of the summer now where it's purple with marjoram it has blue scabious and wild carrot growing in it and in another couple of weeks time beginning of September we'll cut it all down take it all off and that's the only cultivation it gets apart from mowing these rides it is a wash with bees insect life and butterflies and I love it I always remember the dictum of William Morris when it comes to greenhouses for me they need to be both beautiful and useful and I think this is a glorious looking greenhouse very Victorian looking but it's actually made of powder coated alloy which means you get all the prettiness of a wooden Victorian greenhouse but none of the maintenance we power wash this once a year and it's well this is about 15 years old now and it looks brand new doesn't it inside it I've always grown the same sort of things in my greenhouse the odd tomato of course and cucumber which has now gone out but pelargoniums for colour almost right the way through the year and I've learned to love succulents like these aeoniums and it's just where I come and potter where we sow seeds in spring and take cuttings it is the boiler room of the garden if you like but I think a particularly beautiful one when we came here 17 years ago this was pretty much a blank canvas apart from a massive yew tree and that chestnut there the conker and this for me was a chance to make a garden for me for the family I've had film crews in the garden for the past 20 odd years and it's been a pleasure it's always nice to share things as I am doing today but I did say to my wife and daughters okay this one's for us I can do here exactly what I want to do lay it out how I want to grow the plants I want to grow for me and that's exactly what I've done but gardens are for sharing so it is nice to share it with family and friends and it's lovely today to share it with you not to show off but to share the passion the joy and the spiritual uplift that plants and flowers can give all of us I don't believe so much in legacies in gardening except when you plant a tree you hope it's going to be there for a good long time after you've gone but if by having a garden like this I can inspire my own family and my grandchildren with the love of the great outdoors and the love of things that grow and the love of beauty then this garden and me well I've done my bit