BBC Gardeners' World couple transformed bland bungalow garden into subtropical paradise

Gardeners' World featured a couple who have transformed their bland and rundown garden into a subtropical paradise - with unique praise from Monty Don.

A new episode of Gardeners' World aired on Friday evening (October 25) and shared a plantsman's paradise at Fullers Mill in Suffolk and explored history of Britain's enduring love affair with houseplants.

Presenter Monty Don shared a segement about couple Dawn and Steve, who live in Yelland in North Devon, and their subtropical paradise in their bungalow's garden.

The couple, who met at University, explained they moved to North Devon 27 years ago and quickly set their sights on creating a stunning floral garden. The segment showed the basic and flat garden before its transation, which featured multiple sheds, some shubbery and trees.

Gardening enthuastist Dawn said: "We moved to North Devon, 27 years ago, and started our garden. We basically said, that's the size garden we want, and the bungalow is fine.

"When we moved in, we had grass on about a third of the garden. We had municipal concrete slabs, six sheds. We had a dog house. We dug all sorts of things up."

Exploring their garden, the garden features numerous passion flowers, beautiful plants and ones that gave off alluring aromas. Steve quipped: "If passion flowers had an Interpol, we'd be on the Most Wanted list".

Explaining the sort of flowers in their garden, Steve said: "The sort of plants we grow in our garden are sort of bold, tropical things with big leaves, lots of colour, high scent.

"I'm a sucker for big and exciting and rapidly expanding things. That's the backbone of the garden, bananas and cannas and gingers.

"Our favourite time is really from July onwards. Just the energy coming off the garden as things get bigger and grow up is just amazing."

Steve and Dawn added they prune and maintain all of their flowers and ensure they can grow more. Steve showed how he clips off parts of existing passion flowers with coir plugs inside jam jars to grow more plants for their exotic garden.

After nearly 30 years of love, the couple are not stopping anytime soon. But they are glad they don't need to move again.

Dawn said: "It was quite fortunate that when we bought the garden with the bungalow attached, it meant it future proofed it.

"So in our dotage and retirement, we've got a bungalow so we haven't got to move again and change into another garden."

Steve added: "After 27 years of gardening here, this has become part of us, part of our garden, and I can't imagine living anywhere else because this is so nice."

Following the segment, Monty Don praised the couple's stunning garden and was taken aback by Steve's gardening tricks. He said: "I think it's a very group tip about the cuttings - I use those coir plugs often but I've never used the jam jar techinque.

"It's a good idea."