Clare Foster's thriving traditional English garden

The doing of gardening to me is so therapeutic.

You're doing things purposefully

and you're creating something very beautiful,

a painting really.

[bright music]

Working at House & Garden,

I'm visiting amazing gardens the whole time

and also seeing beautiful photographs of beautiful gardens,

and so as soon as I moved out of London,

I wanted to make my own garden.

We've been here about 5 1/2 years,

and there was nothing here.

It was that proverbial blank canvas,

it was just literally lawn.

We've got about 1/3 of an acre, so it's not huge,

but I've divided it up into little spaces.

I made this big kind of curving border at the back

and that was really the only kind of designed space

of the garden, and I actually did a planting plan for that.

I really loved doing it.

It's got a little bit more naturalistic,

a little bit more meadowy as time's gone on.

Pastelly colors, kind of quite mellow colors,

but with the occasional dash of color.

The herbaceous border

is the big English tradition basically.

Mine is very much a mixed border.

There's structure, so we have some big shrubs in here.

We've got the hydrangea, Annabelle,

and I've got some box over here, some box balls.

What I think is important about herbaceous border

is to get the different shapes in,

the shapes of the leaves, the shapes of the flowers,

and so it's all that contrast that I think

is more important almost than the colors of the flowers.

[bright music]

We're in my vegetable garden.

I'm growing things like courgettes here,

spinach, chard and beetroot, beans over there,

and I've got some celeriac right on the end here.

I like it to be quite a kind of relaxed plot

because I want it to look nice as well,

and I think it's quite nice

to have flowers in your vegetable plot

because it is that kind of theory of companion planting.

So as soon as we arrived here,

I knew I had to have a greenhouse,

so all my family clubbed together basically

for my 50th birthday and I got this greenhouse,

and it's just my haven and I love being in here.

I sow all my seeds and my flower seeds

and vegetable seeds in spring.

It's very productive.

Got lots of tomatoes coming this year.

My youngest son has been helping me this summer

and it's been brilliant.

Hopefully I've done the same to him

as my parents did to me, which is, you know,

teach by osmosis.

It's nurturing, being in the outdoors,

and especially when you're contributing

to something like this, it feels very nice.

And you are the only person who helps me in this garden,

so I very much appreciate it.

[gentle music]

[bright music]

I think every garden needs pots.

However big or small it is,

you can build a display by using pots.

I couldn't find a theater,

an old fashioned auricular theater, online or anywhere,

so I had one made and then I decided to sell them.

I've got pots of all different types in the garden,

so I have galvanized pots, terracotta pots,

they're all kind of thrown together.

I filled this big bathtub here with shade-loving plants,

which has really kind of brightened up this corner.

These larkspurs I grew from seed,

and this is something, a Chinese Forget-me-not,

called Cynoglossum, which is really lovely, actually,

really lovely dusky-pink flowers.

Everything that you can see in all the pots

around the house has been grown from seed.

It just means you don't go and spend the money

in the garden center, so you've saved money,

and you've had that satisfaction

from growing them from seed.

[bright music]

The front garden, I think,

is totally different from the back.

It's much wilder in feel.

It's a kind of mad cottage garden, I would say.

We took the laurel hedge out, put a picket fence in,

which is quite kind of villagey.

The only kind of design really

in this part of the garden is the main structure,

so I put some big shrubs in,

dotted them around in a fairly kind of random way,

and there's a clip into balls,

and that just gives the kind of anchor

to all the soft kind of madness in between.

I have plants like this, which is white valerian,

and that has gone a bit mad this year,

so it's self-seeding everywhere,

and you're constantly editing and pulling things out,

and adding things as well.

So, yeah, it's a fun way to garden, I would say.

[quirky music]

For me, the whole thing about gardening

is immersing myself in these flowers.

There's a rose that I really want to plant,

which Dan Pearson is always planting, Rosa Mutabilis,

and I just want to squeeze it in,

but there's no [laughs] space,

so I'm gonna have to take something out

if I want to plant that particular rose.

So, yeah, always coveting new things, new plants,

is a problem really, [laughs] but a nice problem to have.

[bright music]