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Toby Buckland

Toby Buckland - our fruit tree and herb garden specialist

Fruit trees

Ninety per cent of all our fruit is imported and with our orchards disappearing, we’re in danger of losing our great fruit-growing heritage. As a gardener with a passion for growing produce, Toby Buckland wants to put home-grown fruit back on the menu.

In this episode, he hosts his revival from West Dean Gardens – a beautiful walled garden in West Sussex. On his campaign, he meets a fruit-tree conservationist who seeks out and rescues species that are close to extinction, as well as a Kent-based Iranian family whose passion for fruit has led them to create the largest collection of different fruit trees in the country, totalling over 900 species.

Toby visits two ladies who have a life-long love for cooking crab apples, and we see an initiative in Birmingham called the Urban Harvest, which picks fruit from public and private spaces all over the city that would otherwise go to waste.

Throughout the episode, Toby gives tips and advice on how easy it can be to plant and care for your own fruit trees. He shows us how to cordon a pear tree, prune espaliered apple trees and how to store the results of our autumn harvest.

Herb gardens

Toby Buckland loves plants that you can grow and actually use. Throughout history, herbs have been used in medicine, to stimulate the senses and, of course, as a flavouring in food - but he thinks there’s a danger that our knowledge and understanding of these plants is being lost.

Tucked away on the banks of the Thames, The Chelsea Physic Garden is the base for Toby’s Herb Garden Revival. He shows us how to get the very best from fresh herbs: harvesting seeds, how to grow and look after them whether you have a garden or not, and how to make the most of herbs by storing them in clever and unusual ways.

On his campaign, he discovers that there was no such thing as a weed in Tudor times; he meets a woman whose garden is overflowing with herbs we’ve forgotten about, and a botanist who grows plants to capitalise on their unique fragrances and essential oils.