Wild About Your Garden - Milton Keynes

Thursday, 18 December, 8pm BBC ONE
Episode 5/6: Bumble Bees, Honey Bees and Robins

The ‘Wild About Your Garden’ team are in Milton Keynes, home to the Gibbons family. Builder Pete’s idea of gardening is to bring in a JCB and a blow torch. His meddling has managed to cause nigh-on irreparable damage to the family’s garden, much to wife Anne’s despair. Their teenage son Andrew wants wildlife but the only thing visible from the kitchen window is the family’s huge dogs.

Dad Pete has to stand by as Nick Knowles and the team strip out all of his building ‘projects’ in order to transform this ‘junkyard with rats’ into a wildlife haven. Before anything can grow in this urban wasteland, Designer Chris Beardshaw must perform a minor miracle to make the soil fertile enough to plant anything at all. Wildlife buff Ellie Harrison wants to help dangerously declining bumble and honey bee populations and offer one of our favourite garden birds a place to call home. It’s a massive task but somehow even the dogs end up doing their bit to help.

Will be shown in Scotland on 30.12.08 at 18.30

Wild About Your Garden: Code Red

Wednesday 3 December, 8.30pm BBC ONE, Episode 3

In the third programme in the series, the Wild About Your Garden team face their toughest challenge yet: to attract the rare red squirrel to a barren garden in Dundee. The garden belongs to Donna, Kerry and their two children, Jake and Millana. The McLoughins run a massage therapy business, but there's little time for meditation on this job.

Wildlife specialist Ellie seeks refuge from the chaos of the garden, so takes Donna and Millana to the magnificent Cairngorms, one of the last strongholds of the red squirrel, to try and catch a glimpse of this extraordinary animal.

As usual, designer Chris has big plans. With a huge pond and sculpted earthwork to build, he has also ordered in truck loads of plants. On top of this, the project is beset by problems on a massive scale as the team contend with broken diggers and a lethal 1000 watt cable just inches under the soil, which brings work to a shuddering halt. Undeterred, Nick tries to convince the locals to plant trees in every garden to create a red squirrel runway, straight from the local woods into the family's garden.

Wild About Your Garden: Bristol

Wednesday 26 November, 8.30pm BBC ONE
Episode: 2 of 6

The Wild About Your Garden trio are in the city of Bristol, taking on a garden belonging to Mark and Fiona, who is heavily pregnant. Even though they live on the edge of a city, they're desperate for their baby to grow up with wildlife close at hand. It may sound simple, but the team has just four days and their neglected plot hasn't been touched in over 20 years.

Enter Nick Knowles, along with award winning garden designer Chris Beardshaw and wildlife specialist Ellie Harrison. But there's a storm brewing. Ellie wants to entice badgers into the garden, an idea that Chris thinks is horticultural suicide, leaving Nick to referee between the two camps.

The clock is ticking, so the team bury their differences and get stuck in for four gruelling days of digging, building and planting. Chris, ambitious as ever, designs a pond so vast that the local fire brigade are needed to fill it! Nick's brawn is called upon to construct a huge wooden hide, and Ellie builds an impressive badger sett. But the big question is, after all their hard graft, will badgers or any other wildlife start calling this place home?

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