floral designer and lover of all things horticultural.

In this series I'll be exploring some of the most stunning English Heritage garden sites in the country.

I'll be delving into their history, meeting the talented teams that care for them and discussing how each garden is kept

as faithful to the origins as possible.

Coming up in this episode I visit Mount Grace Priory, House and Gardens in North Yorkshire,

one of the best preserved monastic gardens in England and a real monks paradise.

I also meet the team behind the site's 13 acres of recently restored arts and crafts gardens

designed by award-winning gardener, Chris Beardshaw.

Hazel: Hi Michael.

Michael: Hi Hazel, welcome to Mount Grace Priory.

Hazel: So we're standing here in a magnificent cell garden

but what is a cell garden? What exactly was it used for?

Michael: Well it was used by the monks as part of their  living space. This is a Carthusian priory.

The cells are hermit cells because they were a  hermetic order. There were 23 cells in all and

this is their contemplative space and it's also  space where they grew stuff for their own use

but also they made it beautiful as a kind of  paradise - as a prayer to God so to speak.

It was a European order founded by  Saint Bruno in the 11th century in Chartreux in France.

This monastery was one of the last houses  founded in Yorkshire. It was founded in 1389

and it was dissolved in 1539 by Henry VIII  and it's the largest preserved Carthusian

house in this country, the best preserved.

As we can see here the form and structure of this garden is quite formal.

Hazel: what was the reason behind laying it out in such a way?

Michael: We excavated it in the early 90s and  we found it to have this structure

so we know that there was a trench  round that had hedging plant and we don't know the

exact hedging plant but there's only a few  available so we chose box.

Box was widely used in that period so we know the layout but we don't know what was planted

so the planting is speculation. We'll call it speculation but it's  from herbals, from contemporary texts.

We know what other groups of monks grew in the period so  we have a shrewd idea what was grown shall we say.

The lovely thing about this garden is it's not  very big and they are really gardening a very

small space so it's intensive. So if you've got a  small pot, you've got a courtyard garden even a

window box something like that there are ideas  here that you can adopt for your own garden.

So it would be great to just have  a look at specific varieties that

you've got growing here. Hazel: Could you take us around?

Michael: We'll start with the the flowering plant here. This plant here is,

that the bees are loving at the moment, is  pulmonaria - it's lungwort.

Lungwort was grown because in the medieval mind there was something called The Doctrine of Signatures - a god given

signature to all plants. So God gave clues to  the human beings in the plants form what they

were used for. So this one's got leaves which are  spongy and they've got spots on and so in their

mind that reminded them of lungs. They believed  that it had some useful qualities in terms of

bronchial disease and fortunately it has.

The celebrity plant is mandrake or mandragora.

They used it in operations as an anaesthetic.

It was grown specifically because it had those qualities and as such it's a really useful plant.

It's also got a kind of mystical quality.

The root looks like a human being and there's the story that if you pull it out it screams.

Many people say that to pull it out they tied  a dog to the plant, the dog ran off and you hid at a safe distance,

the plant screamed and the  poor dog died and then you got your mandrake.

So it's got a wealth of folklore surrounding it as  well so it's a really, really interesting plant.

Just in front of you is artemisia absinthium,  which is wormwood.

It's main use for the monks was as an anthelmintic, which is basically, everyone in the medieval era had worms and

what the anthelmintic does is it it paralyses the  worms and they're flushed out of the system - so

it's basically like a worming tablet.

The other interesting thing about wormwood is it's used in a beverage

and it's used to this day by the Carthusian order at Chartreux priory

in a drink called Green Chartreuse. There's two monks today who make Green Chartreuse.

It's a secret recipe and it is kind of like absinthe but it's a bit sweeter and it's an acquired taste should we say.

Should you wish to have a go you're more than welcome.

Hazel: Michael, I would love to try some - let's go.

Michael: It's going to be an experience;  do you want me to pour? Hazel: Please do.

Hazel: Well, chin chin.

Hazel: Well Michael, what can I say?

Michael: Yeah...potent.

Hazel: Yes!

Hazel: Hi Karen.

Karen: Hi Hazel.

Hazel: So you're the gardener here at Mount Grace.

Karen: That's right.

Hazel: And as you can see I have a tool in my hand,

which I'm very excited about, and we are going to plant some stuff.

Karen: We are and we're going to plant mandrake,  which you know a little bit about already.

And when we've done that we can  then plant some henbane which is

another weird plant from Mount Grace.

The monks, under The Doctrine of Signatures,

thought that the seed heads on this look like  teeth in a jaw so it was really used for toothache.

Hazel: Oh wow.

Karen: And it works.

Hazel: In terms of improving the soil - did  you have to bring in lots of compost or?

Karen: Well every year we mulch and obviously  before we started doing the replanting

we did apply a thick layer of mulch everywhere  and because of the terrain here you can't just

get a truck across the site so everything has  to be carried. There are no proper roadways

through the site so generally speaking it's  down to the garden team and the volunteers to

carry the bags of soil improver around.

We have to cover our ears now incase it screams.

That's perfect.

Hazel: It's actually really decorative  when you get this close up.

Karen: It's actually a really pretty plant.  The slugs love it unfortunately.

Sometimes if it's a wet week we might put copper  rings and a bit more grit around just to deter

the slugs a little bit because they'll demolish  it if given the opportunity.

So there we go.

Hazel: Then we're moving on.

Karen: Okay so here's our henbane.

Henbane's a strange one. It has to have a period of  chilling before the seeds will germinate.

Hazel: Oh that's interesting.

Karen: It's called stratification  and they have amazing flowers.

Hazel: Yes so what colour are the flowers?

Karen: They're kind of, they're a yellowy mottled  black. They look a bit toxic actually.

Hazel: And how long will it take for that to flower?

Karen: Once they're in and in the sunshine and they'll  send up some really good leaves and then I'll

usually pinch them out a little bit just to  bush them out a bit. We'll plant quite a few

to make a good display for the visitors and yeah  they'll be flowering say in June time and then

then they start to develop the strange seed  heads which are really decorative, so we tend

to leave them on for a long time so people  can admire the strange shape of their teeth.

Hazel: Karen, it's been fantastic to meet you.

Karen: It's been great, I really enjoyed it.

Hazel: It was so good putting something in the soil here.

Karen: Yeah it's been really good to meet you.

Hazel: The gardens at Mount Grace have been hugely  influenced by the arts and crafts movement

known for its combination of exuberant  planting and formal lines as a reaction

against Victorian garden design.

To find out more I'm meeting Head Gardener, James Taylor.

James: Over the past couple of years we've had a £700,000  project here. We got Chris Beardshaw onboard, the

famous Chelsea gardener, who redesigned the  whole planting scheme which incorporated

about 27,000 bulbs and about 7,500  herbaceous plants.

Our top terrace, as we call it, is our typical herbaceous  planting which moves down into an

alpine terrace and goes down to  more of a woodland-themed planting

and that's your different zones of the arts and crafts theme really.

Hazel: If people wanted to take away something from the gardening here that they could use,

whether they've got a small  garden or something more grand,

what kind of structures could they be inspired by?

James: We tend to leave a lot of the plants upright  in the winter for their decorative berries

or thorny branches. It's quite attractive and popular now.

We've collected natural materials - hazel  or willow which you'd probably use in a pot.

You can just build little  structures like fans

or supports just to hold  tall herbaceous plantings upright.

Hazel: So that concludes my tour of Mount Grace Priory.  It's been fantastic to meet the whole team here

and really delve into all the fantastic gardening  techniques. There's a couple of tips I really want

you to try at home. The first one is to grow your  own herbs. You can try out using chives, oregano, thyme.

It's perfect if you've got a windowsill  or obviously if you've got a garden you can pop them in there.

A second tip is to use the natural  planting structures that we've seen dotted around

all of the gardens here today. They have a utility  purpose but they're also really decorative.

I hope that you can join us for our  next episode where we'll be exploring

another spectacular garden.

See you next time!