Monty Don – How we Make Gardeners' World TV

If you're after a completely free-to-enter garden to relax in and explore this summer, then Manchester's Ordsall Hall has it all — a gorgeous garden, a historic hall, and a lovely allotment. Everything at Ordsall is free to explore, making it a must-visit this season.  Want to find out more? Our team took a tour this summer to show you what Salford's oldest building has to offer.  The Gardens Ordsall Hall has lush sprawling grass to the front of the property… But to the back? This is where you can find their impressive time capsule garden.  The rear garden is designed in a traditional Tudor style knot, similar to what would have been grown back then. Rose bushes stand out among carefully pruned hedging.

If you’re looking for new outdoor seating, then why not bring a laid-back holiday vibe to your garden with deck chairs? These traditional, foldable seats are colourful, comfortable and budget-friendly, ideal for relaxing in the sun or shade.

Garden arches are one of the simplest, yet most eye-catching ways to support climbing plants, bringing additional flowers and greenery to your outdoor space. While fences and walls are instantly improved by a flowering wisteria or well-maintained ivy, a garden arch offers the chance to introduce climbing plants anywhere in your garden, not just along the boundaries.

Subscribers to BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine can collect one free Gardeners’ World Guide, choosing fromGrow Your Own, Gardening For Wildlife and Your Happy House Plants, each worth £7.99, at the BBC Gardeners’ World Autumn Fair, on Friday-Sunday, 1-3 September 2023, at Audley End House and Gardens, Essex.

Shrubs growing in shade perform a variety of functions – from serving as a leafy foil to other plants, to lighting up dark areas with bright flowers or impressing with dramatic foliage. Small or low-growing shrubs can even be used for ground cover.

Tomato blight, a fungal infection called Phytophthora infestans, spreads by wind and water-splash. It attacks tomatoes and potatoes and is triggered by warm, wet conditions, making outdoor tomatoes more susceptible than those in a greenhouse. The crop is quickly ruined and even if you pick the tomatoes at the first sign of infection, you can’t stop them rotting.

Remember those heady days at school, when you were faced with choosing your subject options, or which courses – at which higher education establishments – to apply for? There were a lot of things to consider, lots of differing advice on hand, and the prospect of making decisions that would affect (you were told) the rest of your life.

A couple of weeks ago, I was looking for some statistics about the average UK garden size, and I found some interesting ones. According to the 2015 media pack for the RHS The Garden magazine, a document that is aimed at attracting advertisers to the publication, the 380,000 RHS members the magazine is sent to have gardens that are 10 times larger than the UK average, covering over half an acre.

Monty Don was recently explaining how to save tomato seeds on Gardeners’ World. I know this not because I watch it, but because his method (sticking seeds to paper towel) was roundly slated on Twitter. I’m fairly sure I tried that once, and that it worked just fine, but it was a long time ago and to be honest I just can’t remember.

As we’re all stuck at home for the moment, I thought it would be nice to take some virtual tours of lovely places. It might lift our spirits momentarily, and give you some ideas of new places to visit when we are free to wander once more.

I don’t generally watch Gardeners’ World these days, but two weeks ago they broadcast a special edition (episode 20 in this year’s series) as part of the BBC’s Big British Asian Summer, exploring South Asian influences on British gardens. Monty Don ‘hosted’ the show from the stunning gardens of Europe’s first traditional Hindu temple, BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir in London. The stonework for the temple itself was all carved in India, then brought to London to be assembled. Flowers, particularly the sacred lotus, are represented throughout the decorative motifs. Mountains of flowers are used in the temple’s religious ceremonies, and I was intrigued to learn that – in India – there are businesses based around recycling temple flowers into products such as incense sticks, soaps, and eco-packaging, to reduce their environmental impact. At the London temple, the gardens are a fusion of a European parterre-style design, with Indian motifs, colourful flowers, and a delightful lack of symmetry.

Header image: St Canice’s rooftop garden, where a horticultural therapy program demonstrated its benefits for mental health and wellbeing. Author provided