Gardeners’ World episode 4 2011: As May gets under way at Longmeadow, Monty Don turns his attention to his ‘dry garden’, an area of his garden where the soil is particularly thin and baked by the sun. Rachel de Thame visits the gorgeous gardens of Coton Manor in Northamptonshire, where the owner has planted inspirational combinations in unpromising areas.
Meanwhile, Carol Klein meets a woman who loves gardening, not for plants, but for the creatures they attract to her South Devon garden.And back at Longmeadow, Monty introduces an area of his garden which regularly floods and demonstrates, through planting, how he has used this situation to enhance what he calls his ‘damp garden’.
Gardeners’ World episode 4 2011
Hosta care
Hostas always look fantastic at this time of year with their fresh new leaves. Monty Don gives some handy hints on how to keep them looking good all summer long. These shade-loving plants are primarily grown for their beautiful foliage. There’s a vast range of cultivars to choose from, with leaves in all shades of green, as well as dusky blues and acid yellows, sometimes variegated or flashed with cream or gold, ruffled, smooth or distinctively ribbed. Many also produce small trumpet-shaped mauve or white flowers in summer. Hostas are notoriously irresistible to slugs and snails, but are also much loved by gardeners, who often amass large collections.
You can plant hostas at any time of year, but it’s best to avoid mid-summer when temperatures are high and the soil is often dry due to little rainfall. All hostas give their best in moist soil in partial shade, whether in the ground or a container. In general, though, yellow-leaved cultivars prefer some sun, along with a few hosta that are tolerant of sunny conditions.
Hostas like fertile soils including heavy clay, improved with the addition of garden compost or well-rotted manure. On drier soils, try hostas with thicker, waxier leaves as they are more tolerant. Unfortunately, hostas are not really suitable for dry soils or exposed, windy areas of the garden.
Hostas requires no regular pruning, but damaged or unsightly leaves can be removed. At the end of the season cut down foliage which naturally dies back in autumn and old flower stalks, so that it’s tidy for winter.
Gardeners’ World episode 4 2011
Gardeners’ World is a long-running BBC Television programme about gardening, first broadcast on 5 January 1968 and still running as of 2019. Its first episode was presented by Ken Burras and came from Oxford Botanical Gardens. The magazine BBC Gardeners’ World is a tie-in to the programme. Most of its episodes have been 30 minutes in length, although there are many specials that last longer. The 2008 and 2009 series used a 60-minute format as did the 2016 series from episode 23, for eight episodes in total.
Monty Don
Monty Don was born in West Berlin to British parents Denis Thomas Keiller Don, a career soldier posted in Germany, and Janet Montagu (née Wyatt). Both of his paternal grandparents were Scottish, through whom he is descended from botanist George Don and the Keiller family of Dundee, inventors of a brand of marmalade in 1797. On his maternal side, he is descended from the Wyatts, who were a prominent dynasty of architects. Both parents died in the 1980s. Don has a twin sister, an elder brother David, and two other siblings. His twin suffered a broken neck and blindness after a car crash, at the age of 19. Don describes his parents as being “very strict”.
Don was educated at three independent schools: Quidhampton School in Basingstoke, Hampshire, Bigshotte School in Wokingham, Berkshire, and at Malvern College in Malvern, Worcestershire, a college he hated. He then attended a state comprehensive school, the Vyne School, in Hampshire. He failed his A levels and while studying for re-takes at night school, worked on a building site and a pig farm by day. During his childhood he had become an avid gardener and farmer. He was determined to go to Cambridge out of “sheer bloody-mindedness”, attending Magdalene College, where he read English and met his future wife Sarah. He was a Cambridge Half Blue for boxing.
