This place in the summer is absolutely buzzing. I love working here in the summer. It becomes a real riot of colour
and interest in the summer, and also a riot of people!
So, it's a very busy garden. The summer months are about our summer displays. and our summer displays in colour terms are
probably our most spectacular. Well when I designed
them this year has been a very special year being Hampton Court Palace 500. The six beds along the front
were from previous decades and the carpet bedding that you probably saw
a lot there, that was Victorian. We're deadheading the pelagonians
so that they flower again That keeps them flowering, it makes it look nice. The big challenge through the summer
is keeping on top of everything. We've got mowing, weeding, edging, hedge cutting. All different operations that
we need to keep on top of. Well this is a spider lawn mower. We used to use the flymo on a rope where we used to stand at the top
of the bank and hold the rope down and just let the flymo sort of hang, but this is a remote-controlled mower. There's only about three or four in the country. This is a lot better than doing
it with a flymo on a bit of rope. Well at the moment I'm maintaining
Queen Mary II's Exoticks Collection, which we bring out to the lower Orangery
for the summer months. Usually they're in the glass houses
where I take care of them, but while they're out here I have to
pop out every now and again. I've just been trimming these yew topiaries, it's a regular job that we do this time of year, just to keep them looking smart and nice
and to maintain the shape. As the maze is 500 years old, we're
having to try to rejuvenate it, so one way of doing that apart
from replanting the hedge, is to cut it back as hard as we can, and you can see here
we've already got growth starting These are yew trees and they date back
to William and Mary and they're cut every year to get
rid of the excess growth and to keep their shape and health. We use what's called a cherry picker
or a nifty lift, otherwise it used to be done by ladders but for health and safety reasons
that was far too dangerous. Summer is the colourful time in the gardens. It's the absolute showtime. The highlight for me is knowing the rose garden
perhaps in my t-shirt the sun on my back It's one of the peak productive
seasons in a kitchen garden, so most of the beds are now full and
they're producing things for us to harvest, and we're harvesting weekly and we
are selling it at a market stall. The grapevine is the oldest and
largest grapevine in the world The longest branch which was
measured in the winter is 120 foot, and the whole vine is nearly
250 years old planted in 1768. I'm just taking off any
shriveled or damaged grapes or any that aren't perhaps
quite good enough for eating so that they are as perfect as we can manage them.
We'll wrap them in cellophane, a piece of ribbon. I think if a gardener from 300 years
ago came to visit the gardens today they'd be quite surprised at how scientific it
can be. you've got to know about soil fertility, how to maintain that over time. If you don't then your crops are going to suffer. Home Park is one of the more unfamiliar
areas of the gardens for most of our visitors It has recently been designated a 'Triple SI', meaning it's an area of
special scientific interest. Hampton Court here in Home
Park has a herd of fallow deer. At the moment, with the fawns, it
probably a holding herd of about 400, This time of year is also when the deer are
having their young and their fawns. They've got the trees, they've got
the acorns, they've got the chesnuts, theyve got the grass, they've
got the acid grasslands. They're absolutely spoilt rotten at the moment.
The Magic Garden is a new garden that we've created
specifically for children to enjoy playing in and I think when children actually get in there they won't have experienced a
garden like that anywhere else, certainly in England and
probably in Europe as well. The challenge is: will it be finished in
time? And the finish date is Easter 2016. I think we're a little bit
behind but that's because there's so many elements of the garden to build. We always get things done always. I started in 1999 after a career
in the city in investment banking. It's quite a leap, isn't it? Ha ha! I love the people. I love the
place and I love horticulture It is, it's the best job in the world and I'm surprised
when they pay me at the end of the month. You know, I don't think 'I'm going to work', I think, 'Great! I'm coming in here.' I'm learning every day. You never
stop learning when you're a gardener I've been here as I said, eight years now, and I'm
still learning about the history of the gardens. And the team, everyone says hello to everyone. They all smile and wave if
they go past on a vehicle. We wave and smile to each other.
There's no happier place. It's lovely. These jobs are like winning the lottery and
that's how everyday I take it. It's like winning the lottery and
I feel very, very privileged. The best thing to see in the autumn for me
would be the different tree colours. Reds, browns, oranges, yellows. Even when they've fallen off the tree
I think they look quite pretty on the floor. Until we suck them all up! We roughly get anywhere between
70 to 80 tonnes worth of leaves, which we then take to our barn which then
gets recycled for leaf mulch. It's a key time of year for us, when we're changing the planting schemes over
from the summer schemes to the winter schemes. I'm looking at which ones aren't performing
well enough to stay for another season and I'm rearranging the colours a little to make
them a bit more showy for next year. These are all of the pumpkins that we
grew this year in the Kitchen Garden, and they've been brought inside to have a
final few weeks of ripening. And that really helps them to get hard
skin which makes them store better, and it also improves the flavour because
the flesh gets denser and sweeter. Hopefully we'll have them ready for Halloween
because everyone wants them for Halloween. What we're doing this time of year this
is during October and early November is we're bringing in the exotic
plants which are part of a national collection of Queen Mary II's Exoticks So we've been bringing them
in using a forklift truck. It's the easiest and most simple and
safest way to bring these into the nursery. We plant over 200,000 bulbs each autumn, so I think getting those
all into the ground in time is probably the biggest challenge we face
at that time of year. We all suffer from backache. You know some of us suffer from backache. you get into quite interesting positions
when you're doing the planting. You can see for yourself. It's a time when we are
thinking of our winter projects which most of us find more interesting than the day-to-day maintenance
of the summer months. You can spray things or you know put in
biological control after you've got a problem, but if you don't have the problem to begin
with, that's the best way of tackling it, so keeping things clean, tidy,
just really good housekeeping. It's a great way to stop problems
just destroying all your crops. Even visiting Home Park where it begins to
start looking a little bit bleaker now and it looks lovely on some frosty
mornings if you can get out, there's some great shots you can get on camera. So the male deer normally all
have the poor feeding area, and the females have all the good feeding area and they all sort of stick together. The males are in the peak of what we would
class as the fallow rut. Which is in layman's terms mating season. Now they've got hatred for each other because they want to be alpha male to
breed with all the females So we'd work up at the palace
giving rides to the visitors, and today as it's near the end of the season
we're also working out the back. You want the least amount of impact out there,
and horses do that. You can't find us if we're working out there
because we don't make any noise. It's not like you've got a
chainsaw or you know a strimmer. There were a million of
these horses a hundred years ago at beginning of the First World War. In England there were a million shire horses. And now worldwide there are only 1,500. You can't keep these horses as
pets they eat too much. A horse like that will eat a dustbin full of short
feed a day plus hay, you know. So they have to have a job.
And they're happier working. You get to meet loads of people you know and you get to tell them things
about the horses and the palace. I'll never get fed up. I say the same things
over and over again about these horses, but I never get fed up with
talking about them you know. They're my babies really. So there you go. We've got a wonderful bunch of people,
all ages, all personalities. At lunch time we get a
chance to play pool or darts where we have a friendly
competition for a nominal fee. Yeah well I've played for the
last 27 years so I keep my hand in, but I don't tell them that. [Chuckles] We've got a radio. We've got
towels. Power tools. Beer. We've been doing the raffle for about 15 years. TV. It started off just in the actual gardens and it
got to known throughout the palace, and we've just gone biger
and bigger over the years. Some people get carried away buying tickets.
They'll buy 60 quid to 100 pounds worth of tickets. I just like raising the money
for different charities. Yeah we always put forward a selection of
charity options each year, and then we'll kind of vote amongst us
which one we all feel is the most worthwhile. Yeah, yeah, I'm quite proud you know.
I'm following in Capability Brown's footsteps. And he's probably one of
our most famous gardeners, and yeah I'll be glad to pass that
on to my grandchildren and children that I've been part of working
in such a spectacular place. You can start with the seeds
and end up with the tree. The tree behind me is a
tree that I planted in 1977. This tree thrives in amongsts other trees. We're just on a journey here
looking after these gardens. It wasn't a dead straight boring stem and also
it's got a very attractive deep-veined bark, which is another reason why I selected the tree. and I think seeing that transformation
is a wonderful thing to be able to do, and to work with those sort of things. [music] All the naked branches on the trees, the fantastic
silhouettes, the wonderful sunrises and sunsets, and the lights that you get only at this time
of the year on the Long Water. Well we've got a saying in the gardens you know,
"Gardeners don't hibernate in the winter," and that's because that's when
we really do all of our work. If you don't do your work in the winter, you won't have a display from the
spring round to the following autumn. At this time of the year we're trying to
divide all the herbaceous borders, but the problem being January that a lot of
the ground is very frozen, so we're trying to get on
but it's just slowing down the job really because you can see, it's just totally too hard. You're just digging in ice. Hopefully by lunchtime
it'll be defrosted and we'll add the manure. Basically rake over the ground,
level it, and the plants have put back as soon as possible. we've just been doing some
mulching on the tree circles. You have to redo it every 2 or
3 years because it breaks down, So it's not all sitting down, drinking tea
as it probably used to be in the old days, maybe. At the moment we are winter supplement feeding our deer
which is part of our deer management programme. There's still loads of grass but all the nutrients
have gone from the grass. at the moment the male deer
have gone through a rut which has taken about eight weeks and they've not
eaten for eight weeks so they're at their leanest, and the females have been for the last
six months been weaning their fawns. There is nowhere else they
can go, so it's our duty to really to get them through the lean period. If you put them all in a condensed area the males,
the bucks, being too greedy - typical man! - would literally just scoff the
lot. So we put it in a great big long line so everyone gets their fill. We should roughly feed about
a kilo of this per deer per day, and this stuff is not cheap. We do a lot of path repairs with lot of
wood and edging repairs in the beds, or hard landscaping past
repairs and things like that. So we're trying to make a wider path, width-wise
it's going to be about two, three feet wider than it was. and we're also putting in a
wooden edge just a permanent edge so you can see where you should be driving. So it's not really gardening, it's more labouring,
but someone's got to do it. There's so much going on in the winter,
more than people think actually. Turfing. We do a lot of manuring and pruning. We start off by cutting out
any dead or diseased wood. Anything in the middle here, crossing stems, we clean it up creating a
wine glass effect which is the right environment for a rose to grow healthily. You can't prune when there's
a heavy frost on the floor so we have to wait for the frost to lift. Obviously hazards of thorns so you need a decent
pair of gloves and a decent pair of trousers. It's well worth it when you see it in June. It's one of those jobs I personally don't think
you ever stop learning about, because there's always new techniques,
new machinery coming on board. These guys need machines that we need to maintain So I mean if you see some of the old
pictures of what machines they used to use, and instead of using like a petrol hedge cutter
they would use shears. I've been taking with things apart since
I was about seven or eight years old with my dad going mad that I'm taking my
toys apart and I've only just got it. We have the remote-controlled one. This one, it's even got a start button. Chainsaws. Then we go to new technology which
is the battery-powered machines. This one we use to cut the East Front lawns.
If you've been out there. That's one of the bigger,
the biggest cutting machine we've got at the moment. There's one of the little tractors there.
That one is the little one. See. This is the Massey
Ferguson and it's used to cut some of the meadows out the back in Home Park. It's a little mini road sweeper. There's a mowing deck and
there's blades under there and they're for doing the park, the grass, like scissors but very fast. Well I've actually worked on
this site for 33 years. I've been in charge for 25. I mean I personally have
been here 45 years this year, I was 16 when I started. It's a very diverse profession and if you live
to be 300 you wouldn't crack it all. The first two years I hardly
said "Boo" to a goose. I was very, very quiet. I was a very quiet person. Yes it has definitely changed me. It's made me feel good about myself,
and yes, I feel... yeah. There's a board outside the office, with all the names of all the head gardeners
that have worked at Hampton Court over the years. It makes you realise that you do
stand on the shoulders of giants, that some of the greatest gardeners
in this country have worked there, With a garden of this age, it is a contribution of many, many people's work
over many, many centuries. and this is just your time with your people. So it's about stewardship and it's about
continuity and it's about heritage. Nature perfected.
That's what you're after. You're after the best
possible job you can achieve. And it's always lovely when you get
the members of public coming up and saying, "Oh wow! How wonderful the gardens are." And how it always gives you
a good buzz and a good kick. People have been saying, "Wow!" about
these gardens for hundreds of years and to know that we've still got the wow factor is the thing that gives me the
greatest sense of achievement. [music] Well spring is really here when you start to
see the fruits of your labours come to life It's kind of a time of lots of hope. There's a real sense of expectancy I think. We're all really excited
for spring, really excited! You'll see them growing
around the paths where we cut. They're just absolutely beautiful. Everything's starting to grow and you're starting
to get like vague smells of the gardens. It just smells like heaven. Daffodil scent,
it's one of my absolute favourites. and there's so many different types
bi-coloured or tri-coloured, it's just beautiful. It's a really, really lovely time. Everyone just seems a little happier as well. Today we're going to be cutting the footpaths, the grass paths just in front of me here
with a ride-on machine. These paths originate back
to William and Mary's time and every fortnight we cut
the paths in to stop the bulbs from popping up everywhere. Spring means sunshine and flowers and growth and it's just so exciting seeing
like little seedlings popping up. It's springtime and we're in the nursery. First of all we have to have a tray. Then you put some compost in there. Then you get - well it's easy really -
you put your seeds in the top. and then we can put them in our prop house. When they're big enough,
they get taken out and we stick them in a new pot. We just let them grow until
they're ready to go out. It's about thirty thousand in the summer. We're currently in this
citrus house in the nursery, and at this time of year
we prune back the citruses to get them into shape ready
to go out in the summer. Well right now we'll be preparing our paths finishing off some of our big winter projects
like the Magic Garden. The Magic Garden is going very well. We're on the final push now when the garden
will be ready to open in the spring. Today we've got the tractor rake out, and the purpose of it is to give that
final groomed effect to the path. But we like to do it ideally
about six times a year. We're doing our best to improve
habitats for a whole variety of species We've got these bat boxes which
we're going to install in various trees and gardens around the estate. It's all rough-sawn wood [scratching on wood],
so they just grip onto here and crawl up into the gap. These are bones that we've
recovered from an owl pellets that we found in the parks.
So these are from barn owl pellets. When mink pass through they'll
leave their footprints, and these are casts of the footprints and this
indicates that there's presence of mink onsite. These are fallow deer antlers that have
fallen off some of the deer in the park. And they're going to be put into
the interpretation cart for the gardens. We're in Home Park.
It's still very, very cold I'm afraid. We're preparing the tree crates because
the deer are breaking them all up, where their antlers are very itchy. This will protect all the young trees, because
if they take all the bark off of both sides, the tree will die. So every single tree that's young
will have a tree crate around it. So today we're doing the potholes, so we store
all our materials and that lot down here. So we'll be doing the
potholes down the Barge Walk. This is the barn and this is where we
store all our materials. And also we do all our waste,
all our recycling waste. We've probably been recycling our green waste
now for about 15 years. We've got woodchip. We've got leaf mould.
We've got horse manure. We have shredded green material.
And we end up with this. To take something that's dead and then
to put it back onto something and then you can see all
new growth coming through; the benefits: the water retention the weed
suppressant that it gives. It's just amazing. We absolutely love and adore this place, and at the same time feel
absolutely privileged to work here. You want to be able to look after it because you want to be able to see
it grow, flower or fruit, and eventually maybe even outlive you. We're just here in a snapshot of time. These gardens have been running
for three, four hundred years. We're only here for a little bit in our our lives,
but we're going to make the most of it. We've got a great sign on the barrow
that we sell the plants on, and it says 'growers of flowers'
for like four hundred years. To be part of that history is
something really special. I think it's really lovely
to think of the work that we're doing now being history for someone else. I think that's really lovely.
