Herry's Journal: July 2021

In May I was contacted the TV company - Spun Gold TV - that has made Alan Titchmarsh's 'Love Your Garden' programmes for 11 years, as they were looking for a garden in which to film a new series (of 'Love Your Garden Specials') that would concentrate on showing people how to make a garden relatively inexpensively. They had realised for some time that the gardens created for 'Love Your Garden' were actually prohibitively expensive for most people, even though they were made in a week, as they use lots of hard landscaping, small mature trees and good garden furniture in addition to masses of labour!

The TV company had found Old Swan House garden online on the NGS website and thought it might make a suitable site for filming. Initially they wanted to make a flower bed and a garden pool from scratch as well as plant up a patio, but it was obvious that the garden couldn't provide the space to do all three, but fortunately they found Sally Milligan's garden at Trout Cottage in which to create the flowerbed. as she was prepared to have her lawn dug up! The pond was made in a garden in Crondall. There was no money involved, but we could either keep what was done as well as the plants - or have it all put back the way it was.

Several people from the TV company visited, including Matt the executive director /producer who approved the gardens for use, Colin, the director of the episode, and Andrea who chose and sourced the plants and containers. All were extremely nice and the whole team, eleven in all, were extremely easy to work with. On Thursday 22nd July, the team arrived at 8am and started by digging out the flowerbed in Sally Milligan's lawn.

Alan and the. crew in Sally's garden before work started

Alan and Sally. I didn't get a selfie!

The new arrived in my garden at 10.00 to begin filming here. Alan arrived and proved to be every bit as charming and friendly as he is on his TV shows, and what is more, throughout a long hot day - ending at 8.30pm - he remained good-humoured and friendly with the crew, despite doing a surprising amount of the actual work himself.

Alan in the loggia. He had water, wine and tea as props

Fortunately, he was also prepared to take time to visit the different parts of the garden and be photographed there, which was exactly as I had hoped, not having had any professional photographers and garden designers assess its qualities, and he and the crew were extremely generous in their appreciation. I also look forward to seeing it later though the eyes of a professional photographer. I also took a mass of photos and some are linked here - though the photos of the work on the patio and Sally's flowerbed are kept out as they might otherwise compromise the 'reveal' when the programme goes out in the spring of 2022.