Gardeners’ World 2021 episode 20

Gardeners’ World 2021 episode 20: Monty is at Longmeadow, keeping on top of seasonal maintenance as well as enjoying the plants of high summer.

 
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Adam Frost travels to Sissinghurst Castle Gardens to view a new area of the garden which was inspired by a visit to the Greek island of Delos, and in Berkshire we find out how one enthusiast keeps her garden full of interest in every season of the year.

In West Sussex, we get tips on producing the perfect dahlia from a grower with over 50 years of experience, and we travel to Kent where we meet a gardener with a passion for colourful containers. We also get plenty of inspiration and tips from our viewers’ gardens.

Gardeners’ World 2021 episode 20

Sissinghurst Castle Garden

Sissinghurst Castle Garden, at Sissinghurst in the Weald of Kent in England, was created by Vita Sackville-West, poet and writer, and her husband Harold Nicolson, author and diplomat. It is among the most famous gardens in England and is designated Grade I on Historic England’s register of historic parks and gardens. It was bought by Sackville-West in 1930, and over the next thirty years, working with, and later succeeded by, a series of notable head gardeners, she and Nicolson transformed a farmstead of “squalor and slovenly disorder” into one of the world’s most influential gardens.

Following Sackville-West’s death in 1962, the estate was donated to the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty. It is one of the Trust’s most popular properties, with nearly 200,000 visitors in 2017.

The gardens contain an internationally respected plant collection, particularly the assemblage of old garden roses. The writer Anne Scott-James considered the roses at Sissinghurst to be “one of the finest collections in the world”. A number of plants propagated in the gardens bear names related to people connected with Sissinghurst or the name of the garden itself.

The garden design is based on axial walks that open onto enclosed gardens, termed “garden rooms”, one of the earliest examples of this gardening style. Among the individual “garden rooms”, the White Garden has been particularly influential, with the horticulturalist Tony Lord describing it as “the most ambitious … of its time, the most entrancing of its type.