Postbag: Ham House and Garden
Gardeners' Question Time
BBC
4.5 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 19 January 2024
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Could the panel share some gardening tips for wheelchair users? How do I start growing mulukhiyah in my garden? Which hedges could I grow that are resistant to ermine moths and offer privacy? Peter Gibbs is joined by his eager team of horticultural experts as they dig through the GQT inbox and answer your gardening queries. On the panel this week are landscape architect Bunny Guinness, head gardener of Horatio’s Garden Ashley Edwards and curator of RHS Wisley Matthew Pottage. This week they visit Ham House and Garden in Richmond where head gardener John Myers gives them a tour of their unique horticultural treasure trove. Later, Peter and the panel discuss the fundamentals of a kitchen garden and give tips on non-typical fruit and vegetables you could grow in your garden.
Senior Producer: Dominic Tyerman Assistant Producer: Rahnee Prescod Executive Producer: Carly Maile
A Somethin' Else production for BBC Radio 4
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.6 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.4 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable |
| 0:14.3 | experts and genuinely engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC |
| 0:20.4 | makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
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| 0:42.0 | Hello, I'm Kathy Clugston and this is Gardner's Quickson. podcasts. and enjoy the next 45 minutes of great tips, advice and dubious horticultural humour. |
| 0:58.0 | Hello and welcome to GQT. We're out and about this week braving the January |
| 1:06.8 | chill on the banks of the River Thames in Richmond. We're at the National |
| 1:10.8 | Trust's Ham House and Gardens, home to an atmospheric 17th century walled garden. |
| 1:16.4 | Now it's said that winter reveals the underlying structure of a garden and there's definitely a sense of that here |
| 1:22.1 | as a look out across a landscape of strong geometric forms |
| 1:25.8 | low box hedging clipped box cones all enclosing these mounds of lavender all perfectly symmetrical. |
| 1:34.4 | Well the man that has a look after all this and keep it all nicely clipped and it's going to give us a tour |
| 1:39.0 | is head gardener John Myers. Welcome to the show John. |
| 1:42.0 | Thank you. Nice to have you here. Give us a |
| 1:44.4 | quick history of the house and the gardens. So the house is a house that was a 17th century house. It was completed in 1610 by Thomas Vavashore and in the 1620s it was leased by |
| 1:58.4 | William Murray a courtier of the gardens into what you see today with the general layout. |
| 2:13.4 | And it was kind of a center of soft power wasn't it a place to really show off to impress people? |
| 2:18.4 | It was, yes. |
... |
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