10 best ideas for your garden from BBC Gardeners World Live 2023...

We can't expect our gardens to look like show gardens because show gardens are prinked and perfected so they're absolutely perfect for two or three days but there are some brilliant ideas that we can pick up from them and which will add wow factor to our garden. I've just been to BBC Gardeners World Live at the NEC in Birmingham and there's 10 ideas there that I thought were worth telling you about so that you can try them out in your garden and the first thing I noticed is how important vertical space is. Your walls, your fences, your hedges, all of these particularly in a small garden are quite a lot of the space that you actually have but one of the things that I noticed both at BBC Gardeners World Live and also last month at RHS Chelsea Flower Show is the amount of different colour paints people are using on their fences. We spend a lot of time thinking about what colour to paint the walls in our house but we so often just accept a standard fence. There were beautiful walls painted a pale pink by T.J. Kennedy and Kerri-Ann Fitzpatrick of BG Landscapes in The Beauty of a Small Space Garden and that pink just shows off the flowers so beautifully and when you're thinking about vertical space don't forget under. For example if a small garden doesn't have room for a large pond Joshua Fenton of Fenton Garden Design has created in his sub-aquagarden a pond that's actually beneath your terrace so the pond is dug below the area you sit there's a grid on top of it your tables and chairs go on top of the grid you can lift the grid for maintenance and then on one side he's got a container mini pond and that's full of water and it slowly drips over the side so that you can keep the water circulating. Both the container mini pond and the pond underground can be kept quite deep and if you're worried about mosquitoes the important thing is to have deeper water and to keep the water circulating. We've got a video about container ponds which I'll put in the description below which will give you a bit more information about that. Also looking at using under something for vertical space I really liked also in The Beauty of a Small Space Garden these bug hotels underneath benches they're in gabions or wire cages and then they've got boards on top I think that's a very easy idea to reproduce. Court and steel is really big and has been for a few years. The great thing about court and steel is it's warm and it's rusty so that it can work in a rustic or a country garden but it's also a very contemporary material and I saw court and steel raised bed planters both on the restoration garden created by Carleen Osborne and the students at Derby Horticultural College and I also loved these half arches half sculptures which are in the garden designed by Lily Matthews and John Tallis. Here these court and steel structures could be used for planting climbers or they can just be ornamentation you'd have to have them high enough so you didn't hit your head on them though. If you've got a new build garden then you may well have found that the builders just flattened the rubble put on a bit of topsoil added a lawn and left it and the lawn doesn't do very well you can't grow very much there the only answer is to pick all that bricks and rubble out by hand but instead of throwing it away why not put it in a corner and create a rock garden with it. David Migas the 3d gardener created this garden to inspire people to reuse things like bricks and rubble and to be honest if you leave a pile of bricks and rubble nature will colonize it into a rock garden pretty quickly but actually if you want to learn more about creating rock gardens then there's a video which I'll put in the description below. Now there's a lot of talk at the moment about a new movement in growing bed which is called edimentals and that's because our gardens nowadays often don't have space for a separate vegetable garden and so many people are incorporating veg into their main ornamental garden and Lucy Hutchings of the Instagram she grows veg account has taken this one step further with a secret homestead garden which uses entirely edible plants even though it looks like an ornamental garden she's used plants that we used to eat but don't eat any longer like cannas, dahlias and hostas but she's also used plants like chard that we do eat and combined them all so that they all look gorgeous and I particularly like she had little trays of microgreens stuck to the window and also some mushrooms which are grown in a sort of sculpture on the wall which seemed like a very interesting idea. One of the things I noticed about the planting at BBC Gardeners World Live is how important foliage is in making your flower color work. In Sue Kent's beautiful borders in the pink she used a dark red bergamia along with a hot pink and softer pinks so she was using pink foliage with pink flowers and in the Barnsdale garden stand there was a red physicarpus lady in red along with a soft pink Jeff Hamilton rose but you can also use foliage as a contrast for example this hot pink Ivan geranium really goes well with the sort of pale citrusy green of this lace esterea and that was on the Barnsdale garden stand too and actually you can make foliage work on its own in a garden and it's particularly good for shady gardens. Kiran Vaidya of Hefty's garden designed this border which is purely foliage based on his own garden in southeast London and what he says is that foliage really shows up in the shade the different shapes and the different contrasts can really glow and it's much easier to look after than a flower garden because of course you haven't got to keep thinking about when something's in flower and deadheading it and things you get impact all summer long from foliage. I also decided I'd start using pots in borders much more often after visiting BBC gardeners world live. I have great trouble keeping hackanacloa macra which is a Japanese grass alive in my borders because my borders are full of self seeders and spreaders and they're quite competitive place and the hackanacloa macra just sort of withers into a tiny little stump but looking at it in these pots I've realized that actually I could grow it in pots and then just wedge the pots into the borders rather like these hoikeras in pots when the green jams nurseries stand where the hoikeras can actually compete with the taller penstemons because they're raised up in a pot and of course pots and hostas. Now that's not a new idea but it is a very welcome reminder that if you want to keep hostas and keep them away from snails and slugs put them in pots. A collection of hostas with different contrasting leaves is so attractive and we did a video on how to defeat slugs and snails which I'll put in the description below but one of the tips on it was if you can actually put pots up on a say a shelf or a ledge it's just a bit harder work for the slugs and snails and of course you won't keep them away completely but they won't choose your hostas first so I feel a little bit more inspired by hostas after having seen this display from the new forest hostas We're often advised to pack borders tightly it's a brilliant way of reducing the number of weeds you get and it can look fabulous however there are times and there are plants when actually giving a plant individual space can make a big difference. Whether you're keeping succulents as houseplants or putting them in a border outside they really benefit from a bit of space beside them As you can see from this border designed by James Fenneberg which is a drought resistant border and it's using agaves and succulents but you can really see how giving them the extra space shows off the architectural qualities of the plants and this gorgeous Echeveria sea dragon is on the fosters exotic and unusual plant stand and gosh isn't it lovely and you just think well you want to give this a display all of its own. If you're interested in more garden design ideas then don't miss the garden design playlist at the end of this video because it has also got more videos on shows and thank you for watching goodbye