East Ruston Old Vicarage June '26

And obviously your garden is looking as splendid as ever and you've been pouring all of your usual passion and energy and love and money into the garden as you usually do.

What is your absolute kind of standout? If you had to name one thing at the moment which is blowing your socks off in the garden, what is it?

Well, it's roses still.

I mean, roses were very, very early this year.

I mean, I think it was Motterson Abbey where they had a National Trust collection of roses in the garden there.

They had a rose that was out on the 25th of March.

And so had we, because there's a lovely little Victorian climber called Rosa, Pompom de Paris.

And it blooms virtually the year round, if it's mild enough.

And it has this year again.

And it has these lovely little pink flowers.

No scent, unfortunately, but you can't have everything.

But roses in particular have been doing so well in this garden.

I just want to give a shout out for one particular strain of roses, which is Delbard.

And Delbard, D-E-L-B-A-R-D, was a French nurseryman who bred many, many plants, including roses.

And if you look, if anybody wants to get his roses, Trevor White Roses in Norfolk, he actually sells the Delbard Roses, a selected few of them.

And the thing about Delbard Roses is that most of them are so highly scented as to be almost unbelievable.

I'll give you a little taster of one here, which I picked this morning.

And this is it, you see, and it's on quite long stems.

This is a climber, which I've lost the name, but this is one of the Delbard Roses.

and it is packed with scent as well as petals and it's just a superb rose for cutting because it produces these long stems way back down the stems there's a new fresh crop of shoots coming and each of those will be a flowering shoot so when you cut these stems off cut them hard back and to make way for the other ones and it you know as long as you feed and water them and in times of drought like we're in at the moment that can be difficult But I think one of the roses that I'm most in love with at the moment, because he's new to me, is this one.

Again, it's a Delbard rose.

And this is called Guy de Savoy.

And Guy de Savoy was a chef in a Michelin starred French restaurant.

He's still going, still cooking today, I believe.

But look at that.