SPEAKER_01 0:01

BBC Gardeners World Live, day two at the NEC in Birmingham. The weather is blessing us this year, and there are lots of smiling faces, not least of all uh on the face of uh David Hurrian, who joins me here in the studio, always smiling. David, really good to uh to see you. It was a busy day yesterday.

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Oh, it was amazing. Um I'm on the Let's Talk Plant stage in the floor marquee, and I couldn't believe the numbers of people. It was busy throughout the whole site, but um also in that plant marquee, you know, people looking at our great British nurseries and looking at what they'd got on offer, and it was just a real vibe, a really good place to be.

SPEAKER_01 0:40

Absolutely. So, what have you been talking about on the Let's Talk Plant stage? What haven't I been talking about actually? What are the key topics for this year? Because things go in cycles, don't they?

SPEAKER_00 0:49

They do, and we're still looking mainly at people and trying to help them grow with peat-free, because it's still an issue with people. So we're giving some people advice about that and how not to just rely on picking up a bag of peat-free compost and expecting to use it like we would have done with peat-based compost. So there's that element to it. We're also looking at how to make your garden more climate resilient because you know, with with the extremes of climate that we're getting now, the wet winters or wet summers as well in some instances, and then you know, we've this year we've had a real cold start to spring, and then it heated up all of a sudden for about 10 days. We had real record-breaking temperatures. So we've got to make our plantings much more resilient to all of that. Um, and it's not necessarily about just, you know, some things you read about, they're saying, or plant through sand and you know, making drought tolerant this. Well, not everybody wants to do that, and not everybody has got sandy soil to start with. And you can't just put sand on top of clay. So we're looking at ways, things that you can plant in your clay soil or in your sandy soil, trying to find planting options, things that people can grow and succeed with, whatever the weather.

SPEAKER_01 2:09

Absolutely. And uh, in terms of the uh the sort of plants that people are using this year in their displays and in their gardens, I I've seen salvia, the the the purple mauve-coloured one, everywhere.

SPEAKER_00 2:24

Yeah, so salvia caradona is uh such a great plant. I mean, it's been around now for over 20 years, and it's still a very useful plant because it's got so much resilience. It can cope with, you know, it comes back year after year, but it also can cope with being very wet in the winter and then dry in the summer. So all the salvias really are caulking plants for that. But other plants that are being used, there's um a lot of alchemyolus, that good old staple, um, which is a great doer. It will cope very well with all sorts of conditions, and it has beautiful throths of lime greeny flowers atop this wonderful foliage that catches beads of moisture in it. So it's a really lovely plant that's used very widely. Uh, and then really it's the amount of exotic looking things that there are. You know, if we're we've all been encouraged to look at um drought-tolerant plants with quite thin leaves and a sort of an open airy structure. Well, this show has put turned that completely on its head because there's all sorts of exotic things. There's exotic tree ferns, there's there's exotic canners, um, there's some beautiful palms, most of which are pretty hardy now. With as climate change kicks in, we're not getting those prolonged cold winters. Uh, and we're still getting frost, sure, but but not for weeks on end. And that means things like canners can be left in the ground. And a lot of the show gardens have got some fantastic canners and all big graphic foliages to give that exotic look.

SPEAKER_01 3:57

I've also noticed because of this sort of trend of uh for gardens to be look natural and re-wilded, even though there's an awful lot of effort that goes into making them look like you haven't made an effort if you get my address. A lot of grasses, a lot more grasses have come through. And I've seen them on the exhibitor stands here now. There seems to be more coming through, and people are using them as as backdrops to other things in their gardens.

SPEAKER_00 4:18

Yeah, and I think that's a really useful point to make because certainly the tall grasses are are what's called see-through plants. So they might grow to about three, four, five foot tall, but they're not dense, they don't block the view, and they're great for creating internal division in your garden by having blocks of them partway down the garden so that you don't see the garden all in one go and you're encouraged to go and explore your garden further down. So just creating that thin ethereal screen, if you like, partway down the garden is a really good design idea. But they're using the grasses mixed in with lots of other flowering summer perennials, they're using the grasses mixed in with lots of uh British native plants as well. And I think that's a really encouraging trend because a few years ago we thought that everything had to be British natives and we had to rewild inverted commas with our own British natives. Well, we've got such a small number of British natives, and with climate change we've got to see how those plants actually survive. So mixing some of those British natives with tall ornamental grasses and also other ornamental perennial plants is the way forward because we're creating a much more diverse habitat for all our garden wildlife, and we're creating lots more nectar sources and lots more pollen that those insects can survive on and thrive on that wouldn't be provided if we just relied on British natives. Are British gardeners getting more adventurous? I think they are. Did you notice that pause? Because only because I think there is still a hardcore of people who still do what they think is the right thing, and that's fine. Um they might put out their summer bedding plants or they might plant up containers and you know, and it's perhaps just changing the colour from one year to the next, but there are still some traditional gardeners out there, but I think the majority of people now realize that they've got to try and garden with nature in mind, um, and that they want to try and create a diverse look in their garden, so not just having one garden that looks the same all throughout the whole garden, they're dividing the garden up into different areas, and um yeah, I think they are. They're also moving away from having their patio in the hottest, sunniest part of the garden because I think they've had some summers where they've thought, phew, it's so hot here, you know. So they're creating little corners of the garden, little escape corners that are cool and surrounded by trees and shrubs. So I think people are thinking outside the box and not being led by the nose by what they see in the show gardens. They're taking little ideas from it, but not trying to recreate the whole look in their own garden.

SPEAKER_01 7:14

BBC Gardeners World Live here at the NEC is a fantastic showcase of all things horticultural, the show gardens, the beautiful borders, the wheelbarrows that the kids from the schools have done. Lots of inspiration for the many thousands of visitors that come through the door. The reality is they will take away some of what they see. And when they get back home and they sit there and look at their plot, it all of a sudden becomes a bit real, doesn't it? And at this time of the year, I know for some of the newer gardeners that I've been talking to said to me, so well, that's the gardening year over now. But actually, sort of moving into autumn, it it's it's not, is it? It's it's a busy time.

SPEAKER_00 7:49

What should they be doing? This is one of the highlights of the year, sure. You know, you've you've been working towards this since you know the winter, and you've been working up planting and designing your ideas and putting those into the garden. Yeah, sure. And now it comes to this great summer culmination. But there is a lot more to come, and and I think the gardening year is never over. You there is so much ornamental stuff that you can put in your garden for the winter. For the autumn and the winter, there's all the autumn colour to come. Um at Gardeners World, the autumn fair that we have, you know, you go there and you think, oh, perhaps perhaps there won't be as much colour. There's packed with colourful plants at that time of year, which is about end of August, September. You know, there's loads and loads of fantastic plants right the way through. And in the winter, there are these little gems that pop out their flowers periodically when the weather is mild. And even though you might not be out in your garden between, let's say, October and March, you're looking at it from the window. So it's beholden on you to have something to look at. So if you have blocks of very graphic, colourful stemmed plants or little gems, as I say, that flower and have delicious scents during the winter months, then your garden will become much more part of you. If you just go out and inhabit it in the summer months, or you're wasting a trick. And you're gonna be at the autumn fair, aren't you? I will be at the autumn fair, yeah. So I do the spring and the summer and the autumn fair. So watch this space.

SPEAKER_01 9:26

Always a pleasure to catch up with you, Dave. I know you're going to be busy for the for the rest of the show as well. And the weather's gonna be kind to us for the rest of the weekend.

SPEAKER_00 9:33

It looks like it's getting warmer and more reliance on sunshine, less reliance on rain, and I think we're we're there. The summer has arrived. Factor 50 for me, I'm afraid of notice. And a hat, and a hat. Good to see you, David. Take care.