Hello and welcome to the BBC Gardner's World magazine podcast, brought to you by the team here at the magazine.

Join us as we chat all things gardening with the nation's favourite experts.

As well as having a beautiful garden, most gardeners are really quite delighted when they can save a few bob, as we used to say, a few pounds by growing your own plants.

And one of the easiest ways is by dividing them in late summer and autumn.

So here we are a Gardner's World magazine

Tea Break tutorial with me, Alan Titchmarsh, on dividing plants. So which plants are we

talking about? We're talking about border perennials, a perennial, a plant that lasts,

generally speaking, for several years. It will grow indefinitely. But if you look at your border perennials,

your herbaceous perennials, the plants that die down to the ground every winter, you'll find

they get larger and larger those clumps. But the centre gets deader and deader. They move outwards

from the middle. And after a few years you find

the centre of the clump has very little in it if anything at all but the healthy growth is right

round the edge in a large circle. Well the thing to do is to take advantage of that and make more plants

and you can do that quite simply with the vast

majority of abacious perennials by dividing them. Gays paid out come late summer, early autumn,

chop off the top growth right down to the ground. Yes, you can be cruel. They will survive.

Because the resting buds and the business part of the plant, yes, you can be cruel, they will survive, because the resting buds and the

business part of the plant, if you like, is at, or just below, ground level with the roots and

the crown of the plant, as it's called. Now, there are loads of plants you can divide,

Helleniums, Rudbechias, Estrantea, the list goes on. Anything that makes a clump, you can divide and make more plants from by dividing them up in late summer and early autumn. Now, if you look at all the old books, they'll show a person with two spades or forks, back to back in the middle of a clump, and you push them together and you bruise your knuckles.

It's a lovely way of hurting your finger. You don't need to do that.

Just get a spade out, dig up the clump in question, and then have at it with the spade, chopping it into sections.

...