BEE BUZZES
BIRDSONG
Hello, and welcome back to Gardeners' World,
and welcome to the most glorious weather here at Longmeadow.
We've all shared the warmest February since records began,
and that means, as we come into March,
spring is here in a big way.
And here in the Spring Garden, that means the snowdrops
are finished, but the hellebores are coming to their very best.
I've got a lot of Oriental hybrids here,
and I've discovered over the years that their offspring -
and they seed very readily -
are always worse than the parent,
and if you're not careful, you'll end up with a lot of
very ordinary, rather muddy colours.
So what I've been doing for the last few years is adding
brand-new, really nice hellebores
to replenish the gene stock, if you like.
Now, this one is a Harvington White Speckled.
You can see the outside as it hangs down is white and fairly plain,
but lift it up and you have the most glorious, speckled plum colours,
and that, of course, is to attract the bumblebees in to pollinate them.
This week, we meet a gardener who transformed his challenging
back yard into a tropical paradise,
and Carol explores a spectacular winter garden
and celebrates the plant that's making a real comeback, the conifer.
Let's go. Come on, Nigel.
Well, March weather is nothing but fickle.
It will probably be snowing by the end of the day, but there we go.
Now, this is the Paradise Garden, and you may remember that in October
I planted these crab apples.
Well, since then, I've planted Acuminata tulips,
a species of tulip with long and very delicate petals.
And the big thing, the big difference, is this -
we've nearly finished the building at the end.
It's going to be rendered in the limewater
and then painted a sort of pinky, apricot colour,
and the whole point is to have this symmetry and formality
and structure, and yet be a place that is fragrant
and somewhere filled with delight.
So, the next phase in the planting is to add fragrance
and colour via roses.
I'm going to put some in the ground and some in pots.
Now, the first one I have chosen is a damask rose called Madame Hardy.
Now, I'm keeping these in these old bags
because these are bare-root roses,
and it is really important with bare-root roses to
not let them dry out,
and so I've got a bucket of water over here.
So, while I'm talking, I'm just going to pop that
straight in the water.
The reason why I'm using bare-root roses, rather than ones already
in a pot, is because they have a much wider range available,
they tend to be cheaper, and also I've found
that they're very often healthy, good, strong roses.
But if you're going to buy bare-root roses, you need to do it now.
The bare-root season ends in the middle of March.
Thereafter you can buy roses in containers, of course.
Madame Hardy is going on the four corners of the bed.
She's quite a big rose.
She's about five foot tall,
with lots of flowers,
so it's going to be quite dominant.
You can see that the rose has been grafted,
and this is the graft point.
And the root system determines how big it grows
and what shape it grows, and then this will determine the flowers.
And the graft needs to be buried.
I like to put it an inch under the soil.
Now, I'm adding mycorrhizal powder in here
because it acts as a conduit,
so the new rose will form a good relationship with the soil,
so it can take up nutrients and water.
That's about the right depth, actually.
Now, there are three more Madame Hardy to go on each corner,
but the next one I'm going to put in is Munstead Wood,
and this is a David Austin rose
with a crimson, almost purplish tinge to it.
Now, David Austin, who unfortunately died at the end of last year,
was the grand old man of British roses.
He was the person who crossed the old roses,
like Madame Hardy, with hybrid teas,
and that made what he called English Roses.
The flowers had the quality of old roses, but they also
had the vigour and the constant flowering of hybrid teas.
The technique for planting them is exactly the same.
You'll notice that I didn't add any compost to the planting hole,
and that's because I want the roots to go sideways.
I want them to go looking for nutrition.
All right, finally, even if you don't have anywhere to
plant roses outside, they grow very successfully in pots,
but you do need to choose the right rose,
and I've got one here which I love.
It's called Pompon de Bourgogne,
and it's got lovely small flowers.
I'm just going to pop that in the water
but I'm only going to plant one,
and that will just have a little soak while I prepare the pot.
This is terracotta.
I've put crocks in the bottom
and I've mixed up a good potting mixture, here.
I've added extra grit, I've added some garden compost,
and also a shovelful of garden soil,
and that will add bacteria and fungi to the mix,
and just keep the whole thing healthy.
Now, to put this in here, the same rules apply -
we want to get it nice and deep.
Now, just to make sure that the compost gets
in amongst all the roots,
what I'm going to do is just wiggle it about a bit,
because what you don't want are air pockets of any kind.
So we just work that down in, and then top it up.
Leaving enough room so I can water it without the water bouncing off
and falling out of the pot.
And, of course, water all roses really well when you plant them,
and if it's in a container, you're going to have to give it
a good soak once a week,
certainly in the growing season.
Now, this is the beginning of putting layers of colour
and fragrance into this Paradise Garden,
which should be a retreat from all of the stresses and strains
of the outside world,
and, in fact, last summer we visited a really good example of this.
We went to Broadstairs in Kent to visit the garden of Dan Cooper,
and when he went there for the first time,
it was a very unprepossessing, small back yard,
but he has transformed it into something magical.
I'm known as the Frustrated Gardener,
and that's because I'm obsessed with plants but I have only
a very small space to grow them in.
I love being surrounded by plants.
I get completely lost in it sometimes, and forget
everything else that's going on outside.
So I've got two small courtyards.
The Jungle Garden measures 20 foot by 30 foot,
and the Gin and Tonic Garden is even smaller,
and it measures 20 foot by 20 foot.
When I came, there was an air-raid shelter,
two outdoor toilets and some crazy paving,
and that was all.
And so I lived with that for a couple of years, before I decided
that something needed to be done.
So I enlisted the help of a designer to help me get my head around
what the potential of the garden was.
There's a raised bed that goes around the edge of the garden,
and then everything else is in pots or troughs.
It's now become quite sheltered as the trees have grown up,
and the plants love that shelter.
It's ideal for tropical plants, which often grow under
the canopies of much larger trees,
and so they like a little bit of dappled shade.
This amazing tree behind me is the Santa Cruz Ironwood tree.
It comes from California.
It grows on rocky, north-facing slopes,
exposed to the sea, buffeted by salt-laden gales,
and it's a really great tree for a coastal garden.
One of the stars of the show is Canna Musifolia,
which is a canna that believes it's a banana.
It has huge green leaves with a flush of red,
and it shoots up ten, maybe 12 feet in a season.
At the end, if I'm lucky, I might get some very small red flowers.
They're definitely not the main event.
They're a bit of a bonus.
But what I really grow it for is that amazing foliage
and the extraordinary height it brings into the garden.
Sometimes plants just work really perfectly together,
and I love this dahlia.
It's called Nicholas.
It's got fantastic flashes of red right there in the middle,
and they flame out into yellow
and then blend into this beautiful peach on the outside,
and I think it's a really exquisite combination of colours.
And it picks up this hedychium, which is called Stephen,
and it's got these lovely spikes of flowers,
with beautiful, coloured stamens.
So, Stephen and Nicholas make perfect partners.
I'm quite a flamboyant person, so I love...
Anything that's unusual or that people haven't seen before,
I'm instantly drawn to.
So this is a fuchsia you don't see very often in gardens.
It's a species fuchsia,
and what I love about it is these beautiful, soft, corally pink bells
and the fact that they're tipped with lime green.
They keep on coming all the way through the summer,
and it's not just the flowers that are beautiful here -
it's also the foliage.
It's lime green and it has a little haze of grey over the top
because of the little furry fibres on the surface.
The midrib is pink
and then, as the new foliage emerges, it's even paler green,
and the whole thing is very pretty and elegant,
and I love it because it suits my style of gardening.
So I would encourage anyone with a really small garden to think big
about what they want to do.
I nearly fell into the trap of thinking very small,
of not really being ambitious enough with what I could do.
Make it what you want, and don't feel that there's anything
really that you can't grow, because with a bit of thought
and attention and planning, you can grow almost anything
in a small garden.
BIRD CHIRPS
I do so agree with that sentiment
that just because you have limited space, it doesn't mean to say
you need to limit your ideas or even the size of your plants.
Big plants look really good in a small space.
But by the same token, small plants can look really good in a big space,
and I love the way that, at this time of year,
as we come out of winter and into spring,
you get these jewel-like plants,
whether they be the, sort of, dwarf daffodil Tete-a-tete,
or the grape hyacinths, or the lovely irises.
The only problem this year has been that they all came too early.
The irises are nearly through,
but from late January onwards,
you get these fabulous, intense colours.
Now, one of the things that is really important
at this time of the year is to get on with sowing seed,
and, by the way, I'm still using plastic seed trays
because although I'm just as keen to reduce the plastic
that we have here at Longmeadow, the starting point is always to
look after the plastic you've got.
Wash it, keep it, almost treasure it,
so that you don't have to buy new to replace it.
Now, today, what I want to sow are two seeds that are for summer
and one which is a real fast turnaround crop.
I'm going to start with some chillies,
and Early Jalapeno is a good chilli -
spicy but not too hot.
So a peat-free compost,
and now if we just put some in there like that,
level it out and then space the seeds out freely.
Chillies are one of those seeds that you do need to get on with.
They're quite slow to get going,
so the earlier you sow them, the more chance you have of getting
a decent harvest towards the end of summer.
So what I'll do now is just to press that down.
By pressing down like that, I'm getting good contact
with the seed and the soil,
and then I'm going to lightly cover it,
and it's as easy as that.
Label it, and then a good idea to put the date on it.
Pop that in there.
Now, chillies need heat to germinate, preferably 20 degrees.
So either on a windowsill above a radiator,
or on a heated mat if you've got it.
And if you're sowing a lot of seed,
a heated mat is a really good investment.
Right, next we're going to sow some tomatoes.
I've got Black Cherry, which, as the name suggests,
is a dark colour and a cherry tomato.
Now, tomatoes take about two months to get to the point
before you can plant them out.
You don't want to put them out into the garden
until the nights warm up.
If you've got a greenhouse, of course, you can put them in there
as soon as the plants are ready.
These will grow quicker than chillies,
and will be ready to prick out in about three weeks' time.
Again, I'll just make contact,
so the seeds are really touching the compost.
When you cover them up, you could cover them with grit,
you can cover them with vermiculite...
It's to hold the seed in place when you water it.
Now, those are two long-term plants - tomatoes for summer
and chillies that could go on until next Christmas.
But you can also sow real quick catch crops,
and one of my favourites is rocket.
Rocket is one of those salad leaves that likes cool weather.
Now, you can see I've already got some here that I sowed earlier,
on the 12th of February,
but we'll start in a seed tray for the next batch,
which will replace those.
You can sow rocket direct outside,
but I really try and grow them as strong individual plants.
Now, with rocket seed, you do have lots of seed in the packet,
and I just sprinkle them fairly thinly.
As a rule with sowing seed, better to sow too thin than too thick.
Like that.
As far as timing goes, these seeds will reach that size
in about four weeks,
and these will be harvested in about four weeks,
so we're getting succession going.
And by the way, rocket, as I say, doesn't need heat,
so these will go to the greenhouse, into the warm part.
This will be just as happy in a cold frame.
Water them well.
You can either sit them in a tray of water and let it absorb,
and leave them there for ten or 15 minutes,
or water them from above.
Keep them moist but not sodden,
and then, as soon as you see the true leaves, you can prick them out,
but we'll do that in a few weeks' time.
Now, this year, Carol is going to be looking at plants
that really celebrate each season,
and the combinations that you get,
and she's starting out in Norfolk, in a winter garden,
looking at a marvellous collection of conifers.
For some of us, our gardens can be very uninspiring
in the winter.
There's no colour about. Everything's dull and drab.
But here at Bressingham Gardens, that picture is completely reversed.
The whole place is asparkle with colour,
wonderful shapes and forms,
and the plants that create this picture more than any others
are the conifers.
Conifers are a mind-bogglingly diverse group of plants.
They can be all sorts of shapes, sizes, textures and colours,
and conifers go beautifully with other plants,
especially at this time of year.
What a symphony in gold and purple,
full of intense, rich colour!
This witch hazel, the Hamamelis, is lit in the winter
with these golden, spidery flowers,
and how beautifully that colour is taken up here by this conifer.
This is a golden form of the incense cedar.
It's got these beautifully flattened fronds,
and that's emphasised by nipping back growing shoots
to keep it nice and dense.
And that's not the only bit that's pruned, either.
Look at the trunk.
All this bark is exposed because all the twigs and branches
have been very deliberately taken away.
But what makes it work so beautifully is what accompanies it
on the ground.
There are these great sweeping lines of acorus
and, through it, a little black ophiopogon.
And as if that wasn't enough, here and there are these surprises -
hellebores popping up
and snowdrops sprinkled through the whole thing.
And it's the kind of combination that any of us could emulate
in our own gardens.
It's just something that you want to rush home and do yourself!
One of the delights of this garden is coming across
these absolutely brilliant specimens,
hugely special conifers here and there.
This is a Japanese black pine.
At this time of the year, it's got an extra-special feature,
and that is these new emerging buds, which are just like silver candles,
and they pick up the white bark of the betula in the background.
All the way through this bed,
there's a very distinctive colour theme,
but it's not kaleidoscopic - it's limited.
So you've got the green of the conifer and the ivy at its feet,
and then you've got these red stems of the Cornus alba Sibirica,
and that's reflected at ground level by these big solid leaves
of the Bergenia.
All you need is a few simple elements,
but think most of all about what conifer
is going to be your centrepiece.
Don't these really prove the point of just how wonderful
conifers can be?
These little blue spruces here are going on for 20 years old,
and so too are the pines in front of them.
They're so slow-growing that they'll maintain this kind of shape,
and they really help to accentuate the whole curve of this path.
I think what's so lovely about them, too, is that this sort of solidity
is emphasised all the more by putting behind them, as a kind
of theatrical backdrop, this lovely Cornus Midwinter Fire.
And then, running through the whole bed,
is Stachys that melds the whole planting together,
and punctuated here and there by these
little, jewel-like Crocus tommasinianus.
The whole planting works so beautifully together.
It's totally inspiring.
Left to its own devices, this Blue Atlas cedar would just scramble
across the ground,
but here it's been trained beautifully to create these arches
and to make the most of this lovely, cascading habit.
Conifers are such wonderfully versatile plants.
You can train them, you can use them as single specimens,
or put them together in a conifer garden,
but I think the very best way of using them of all is to put them
together with other plants, thus creating a gallery
of form, texture, colour.
I confess that I've struggled with conifers over the years,
and you'll notice there are none, actually, here at Longmeadow.
I tend to enjoy deciduous plants more.
But you can always change. Never say never.
So watch this space - I may well be planting some soon.
And you should go along and see them,
because the garden is still open for another month,
when you can see all that winter splendour
before spring really takes over,
and you'll get all the details from our website.
And one of the disadvantages of this early spring
is that the winter jobs become much more urgent,
and one of those winter jobs is the pruning of fruit trees,
particularly apples and pears.
This is a job that normally, I would say,
should be done by the end of March.
I would now say, this year, you should do it
as soon as you possibly can.
This is an apple called Devonshire Quarrenden,
and I haven't pruned it for a couple of years,
and you can see very vigorous, straight branches going up,
which won't bear fruit,
so what I want to do now is get in there and clean it up,
remove any branches that are crossing, that are crowded,
and all those upright shoots can come off.
Now, what I'm looking to do is declutter it,
remove any tangle of branches,
and this branch, for example, is too close to the one below it.
So I get in there and just cut that back...
Can you see here how these branches, this one and this one,
are overlapping and rubbing?
And where they rub, they will chafe and form wounds,
and that's where you get infections.
So I'm going to take this one off here...
..like that.
Now, this needs to come off because I don't want
that upright growth.
And the point of doing this, always remember, is twofold -
one is to let light in,
and two, lots of air,
because if you've got in plenty of air and light,
the apples will ripen better
and also there's much less risk of fungal problems.
I am reducing the crop but I'm increasing the quality.
I've often said in the past, you should have it so
a pigeon can fly through from any angle.
The thing that is really essential to remember, when you're pruning
at this time of year, is that winter pruning
stimulates strong regrowth,
and if you want to permanently reduce it,
then you do that in summer.
Now, this is a job that I like to take my time with,
but if you haven't got a fruit tree to prune,
don't think you've got away with it,
because here are some jobs that everybody can do this weekend.
Annuals, and in particular biannuals like forget-me-nots and foxgloves,
tend to drop their seeds in clusters,
so you get a mass of seedlings in one area and none in others.
So if you thin out the seedlings you have and transplant them,
so you get an even spread across your borders,
you'll get a really good display
without in any way damaging the plants.
Although the soil is too cold for most seeds to germinate,
if you can rake a decent tilth,
then you can certainly sow some broad beans.
It's best to do them in double rows,
with each row about a foot or so apart
and the beans about six inches apart along each line.
Push them into the ground, cover them over lightly,
label them and they should start to grow very quickly.
The late-flowering clematis, like Clematis viticella,
carry all their flowers on new growth,
and if you leave them unpruned, you'll just have bare stems
and then a mass of flowers at the top.
So cut them back hard now, and you can go right back
down to the lowest bud,
and this will mean that the new growth has plenty of light and air,
and you'll have flowers all the way up the stem.
It's lovely being back out in the garden on a beautiful spring day,
but this very early spring weather is a mixed blessing
because, although it's very enjoyable,
I'm not quite sure what effect it's going to have on the garden,
and that is something that we will be watching
as the year progresses.
But no more time today, I'm afraid.
That's it, but I'll be back here at Longmeadow
at the same time next week,
so, until then, bye-bye.