Welcome to our plant stories. In the previous episode, Ann Harrap shared her story of building wildlife gardens in Norfolk, inspired along the way by Chris Bain's book How to Make a Wildlife Garden. And I brought Anne and Chris together to talk about the kind of gardening they have both been doing for over 40 years. Now, in this offshoot episode, I want to give you the chance to wander around Anne's garden. She recommends plants along the way and I'll list them on the website, our plantstories.com in case you want to add them into your garden. I am sure I overused the word magical. As we walk through the mini meadow or the woodland garden into the butterfly, moth or bee garden. Forgive me, I think I have rarely been in a garden which is so alive with insect life.

These are the three trees that were just here.

So these are the original trees. This is all that was here, was the three trees we're looking at.

Yes, these three lime trees, 1, 2, 3 that were here. We walk down there, we can walk under them because in the sun, it's a lovely place to be.

And what we have to remind ourselves is that when Anne started, we all that was in this field was those three lime trees. Now, there are 22 gardens.

Let's walk along the edge of this wildlife meadow where at the moment, lots and lots of common knapweed is flowering. Now, this is, as it says, a common wildflower still, but really packs the punch in attracting bees and butterflies. So a really good one to start with in your garden.

Now, we're recording this in July, but, you know, there are lots of these plants that, you know, this is a long game, isn't it? When you start to plant, you're thinking for, you know, what you might plant this year or next year. It's a process.

Yes. And you want to have something in flower for as long as possible throughout the year. So. So you're always thinking, have I got something for April? Say, have I got something for May? Have I got something for June? Have I got something for October? That way you'll keep the interest going in your garden and you'll have lots and lots of a variety of insects and other pollinators and other creatures that will be able to use your garden all year round.

So tell me about this plant which is currently covered in bees and butterflies. It's just alive.

Yes. This is a Catmint - Nepeta. And this is the large ones called Six Hills Giant, which flowers usually from late May right through to probably September. Sometimes we cut it back but this year we haven't. And it's constantly flowering. And, yeah, with the sunshine, it must produce its nectar, nearly all 24/7 because there's insects on this all the time.

You've got a pond now. Yours is. Just stop there for a second. Yours is quite big. But how important is water in a garden?

Oh, water is very important. And you probably are aware that you can just introduce water in something the size of a barrel into a small garden and that will even bring damselflies and some dragonflies to come and lay their eggs. You know, the best idea is to actually sink it into the ground so that creatures can actually use it and hedgehogs might come along and drink in it. And again, it just provides something that's moving, something that's active with all the creatures in it. And it's really fun to have a look and see what is in there. You know, don't be afraid to pull out a bucketful and have a good look. Get yourself a hand lens and have a look.

I love that idea.

I think people don't know about hand lenses, but actually it opens up a fascinating world. We've got some little ponds here that were made out of tyres, just old tyres. So we put some liner over the top and sunk it down, put logs all the way around. Simple. This is one of our favourite plants, this wild marjoram. We'll see some later on in our bee garden. You can see down here, when we were looking earlier, it was all full of butterflies, wasn't it? I mean, there's a few butterflies here now, but there's suddenly a lot of very small...I think these are mostly like different solitary bees and little flies, all enjoying the late afternoon sunshine here.

Is this a native plant, wild marjoram?

Yes. You mostly find it on chalk downs or limestone downs, sometimes cliffs, so very well drained soils. It doesn't grow as big as this, usually in the wild, but in a garden it's fantastic for wildlife and flowers for a long time. You can cut it and you can dry it. Very lovely plant.

Will it survive on other soils? Could you put it on a London clay? Could you put it, if you've got a new build and they've left a bit of a rubble garden, will it survive or is it.

I think it would survive anyway, to be honest.

That is the perfect plant, then. I mean, it is literally crawling with insects, isn't it? There is not one branch of this that is not covered.

I've always got a little pot with me and if I see something, I Can put it in a pot and think, oh, I'll look that up later. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. But it's always good to recognise whether you've seen something. I get a lot of pleasure out of that, actually being able to think I've seen that before, but I haven't seen that one. I wonder what that is. This is our cornfield annual patch. So here, these are annuals which we sow each year, usually about May time we clear the ground and sow seeds fresh each year. And we have poppies, corn, corn, marigolds, cornflowers, corn chamomile. I think there's a top five. And corn cockle. This one's got an awful lot of bladder campion in it as well.

So this is an annual?

This is annuals. And we try and time this for the school holidays, so it's nice and colourful for lots of visitors to see. So we don't sow it till sort of late May, probably.

So anybody who had a small square of space, earth, could literally sow some seeds. Late May?

Yeah.

And I'm going to put some photographs on the website, obviously, but could have something as beautiful as this.

Yes. You can be looking at this for your summer garden, easy as that.

And are there particular insects you're looking to attract at this point, or is it just....

Nothing particular? There's lot. You know, most things will enjoy the flat flowers, like of the marigold. So it's a nice mix of things, for hoverflies..

it's very open flowers, basically. Yes.

Yeah.

What's it like for moths in your garden?

Oh, very good for moths. We've had a moth group recording here for probably nearly 20 years and we've now got a total of over 800 species of moth that's been recorded. And they were here on Tuesday morning and said, oh, we've got a new one for the site. So they're very keen to keep coming and finding new species for here. But that's astonishing.

That's phenomenal. Do you remember your childhood garden?

Oh, my father grew vegetables, so at some point we were always, keep off the garden, don't pick the tomatoes. Those are going in for the show. But we did have another sort of rough patch where we played and we had a swing and a lot of mud. I remember this poor old lawn with weeds in it and a lot of mud. But we were sort of wild children and we were allowed to roam through the town, so and on the beaches and cliffs and that's where we played.

So you had that experience of connecting with nature beyond your, beyond your own garden into a kind of wider landscape was part of your childhood.

Yes, and so I'd miss that. I think I'd really miss it if I didn't have some wildness on my doorstep or that I could go to. But I did used to miss it, when I lived in the city when I was at Salford in particular.

You knew you needed to be in nature for you personally.

Yeah.

So tell me about this garden, because I think this is - so I came here earlier in the year and it was alive. I've come here now and it's still alive. Tell me about this garden.

So this is the bee garden. So here, this is where we've got different types of bee hotels that you can look at and they're all homemade, so shows you what you can do easily in your own garden with a few bamboo canes and pieces of wood and a drill. So that's one thing. And then we planted things that are known to be attractive to bees all the way around. It's very sheltered in the afternoons, so it does attract lots of insects. And the bee hotels at different times of the year are busy with different solitary bees which tend to have a definite season. So earlier on we had a lot of mining bees, then we had some leaf cutter bees, and now I think we've got some little resin bees that fill up their holes. And the other really interesting thing about bee hotels, they attract a lot of bee parasites. Maybe not so good for the bees, but we see just as many interesting insects that are busy laying their eggs in the same channel. So that's a little bee.

Oh, my goodness, that's tiny.

Yeah, that's not the smallest they come. This year, unfortunately, we are going to have to change our design a little bit because they were visited by a great spotted woodpecker who was able to cling onto here and get his beak in some of the tubes. So I think we're going to put some mesh a little bit further away just to stop him doing that. But this is where the earlier bees have all hatched and this is all the fache that's come out of the tubes. But, yeah, it is fascinating to see. This was a bit of oasis. We're going to replace this now, but it's because it's got a bit old. But we had some old oasis which you can't do anything with, so I just pushed some holes in it with a pencil and they've been using that for about five years. But it's A bit tired now, but so we'll replace that.

Tell me about some of the plants in this garden.

Okay, so we in here we do try and have something flowering all the year round. So we have some bulbs early on.

Snowdrops, and then some bulbs like daffodils or crocus.

Yeah, daffodils. Crocus are good, yeah. Wild daffodils, not so much. Some of the big massive trumpet daffodils. What comes up next? Aquilegias and lots of honesty. And then in the summer, well, now you can see we've got the echinops, globe thistles around there, hemp agrimini, which is good for all sorts of wildlife. And in the middle there, that's actually supposed to be a circle. Woodruff comes up in the spring underneath that. So there's a little circle of woodruff. In the middle is actually a sort of sand bath for sand. The bees that like the sand this time of year. You can see again, it's just covered in marjoram and covered in bees and butterflies because it's lovely and sheltered. So it's got its nice little microclimate, warm and sunny, surrounded by a cardoon up there. You can see the bumblebees in the. In the cardoons. They're fun things to grow. And as many bee hotels as you like, really.

So lots of advice online about how you make a bee hotel.

Yep, lots of advice. Yeah. You just need to put that in. You'll see loads. You can buy them, you can, or you can make them yourself, I think. Put them in the sun, keep them waterproof. We don't move ours at all. We don't do anything with them. You'll read all sorts of things about people taking the tubes out and storing them over winter. We just let nature take its course because that's what would happen. They're just really interesting.

Do you know how many species of bee you have?

Well, we did have some friends come and identify them a few years ago and I think we were up to about 40. So there's I think eight bumblebee species and the rest different solitary bees over the seasons. Some are really early. We get the lovely Woolcarder bees. They've been around. They're fascinating one for people to see. We get the hairy footed flower bees and we've made some bee bricks for them.

That's just the best name, isn't it?

Hairy footed flower bee. Yeah. I mean, you can't forget those. They're around in the. In the spring, really, not around now. So there's several that you can identify and then there's just an awful lot that are just small and lovely bees, leaf cutter bees, mason bees that use soil, use sand. Get lots of different materials in your garden. Some old bark and, you know, just wait and see what comes.

What's the biggest blocker to having a garden that will attract wildlife?

I think people think it's going to be untidy and messy, and we're still a nation of tidy gardeners. People might come here and think, oh, it's untidy and messy and on a cold day with the north wind blowing, maybe it's not as attractive as it is today.

It's stunningly beautiful, I'd like to tell you. Anyone listening to this, it's absolutely beautiful.

Yeah. I mean, we love it whatever the season, but, yeah, just sort of relax, I think, into your garden and see what comes up. If it's what you like, you could leave it because there's bound to be something else that loves it too. The gates are used to keep the muntjac out of the gardens.

Okay. I guess they would cause quite a lot of damage, presumably. The muntjac.

Yes, there are lots of muntjac here. When we first were here, we had red deer and roe deer, but over the years they've decreased and mostly we see muntjac. We'll go through this gate here. So these gardens have got the plants in that we really don't want them to eat, and so we do our best to keep them out. So every night we close these gates up.

We should just mention, shouldn't we, that you have a national collection of gunnera? As a trustee of Plant Heritage, I'm very excited always to meet national collection holders.

Yes.

People think of Gunnera as that enormous plant, don't they? And here are the most delicate, tiny little plants.

Yes. We inherited this from a lady on the Broads where she had these small plants. Because the estate has some of the large gunnera down the track they thought would be an ideal place to have the national collection. And when we saw them, we were like, oh, okay. I think we've got five different species, four of which are very small, and one this African one that you see there is, what, about 2 foot tall, half a meter tall, but has lovely flowers. And that would make an interesting garden plant. Actually, as with this one really good little ground cover plant, if you've got a small area of sun or shade, as long as it's got a bit of damp.

What's this one called?

Gunnera magellanica. That's got a lovely leaf. That's really interesting around here. This is Gunnera hamiltonii which comes from New Zealand and it's where it's very rare. We've only got a single sex plant here which I think is the trouble with it in New Zealand as well. So we've taken some photos of the flowers that appeared. We're not sure yet whether they're male flowers or female flowers. So we don't know which one we need. But that's one of the bits of research we're going to do and see if we can find a mate for this plant because it's a very pretty, lovely little plant and I think in New Zealand it likes sand dunes so we've created a little sand dune bay for it.

I love the way that you're looking for a partner.

Yeah, for a partner. So that might be a winter's evening work.

That's a nice way to spend a winter's evening. Do you think there might be a partner for it somewhere?

Well, in New Zealand it's very. I think it's only in about two places in New Zealand and one of them Stewart island, one of the islands. I've got a friend in New Zealand and she's been trying to find out a bit more about it but I don't know whether it's a bit secretive or who's got those. One of the Scottish colleges I think has got some Gunnera. So that's going to be my first port of call, when I've looked at the photos and we've tried to decipher whether we've got a male or a female clone because these are all clones from just one clump where it's spread by runners. Okay. And so then we'll know target. Interesting stuff. It's all interesting.

I feel like you've never lost your love of this and your passion for it.

No, I think all my plants are like little babies. They're all my plants and you know, I love them all.

Did you kind of start with one or two gardens and they just kept growing basically. Do you kind of, do you sit in the winter and think, oh I can just do a garden with this or with that? I mean, is that how it works? I mean, are there more gardens to come?

Possibly not. I think we've probably got our hands full now but we can always make improvements and we're always trying to find new plants, that will be a bit different or that we can watch to see what they do. And always design new bee hotels, put in little ponds everywhere. You wouldn't believe there's a little pond in there.

You wouldn't believe there's a pond in there. Is it literally where?

Yeah, behind the wall. The water seems to have grown up like a wall of water mint. This is the marshmallow gold. Blimey. You can't really see it at all, can you?

But, yeah, the smell we've just released of the. Of the mint is, Is beautiful. But it doesn't really matter that we can't see it, can we, really? Because actually the insects know it's there.

Yeah. And all this mint is going to flower very soon. And that's another really good plant for attracting Wild life for their summer flower now. And we've got a bee hotel right next to it, waiting for the next flush of bees.

You can't have too many bee hotels, can you?

No, you can't.

I hope Ann has given you some ideas for your own garden. And as I said, I'll put the names of the flowers she mentioned on our Plant Stories website. Perhaps you'll be inspired to build a bee hotel or over the winter months to curl up with a good book about wildlife gardening. Chris Baines' book, How to Make a Wildlife Garden would be a good starting point. My thanks to Anne for being so welcoming and sharing her passion and her knowledge. Our Plant Stories is an independent production presented and produced by me, Sally Flatman.