The Seasons with Alan Titchmarsh

Summer (1x2)

Air date: May 16, 2010

Episode Two - Summer In this brand new four part series for ITV1, everyone’s favourite gardener, Alan Titchmarsh goes back to his roots to find out how our changing seasons affect everything around us. The series reveals the profound and far-reaching impact that each season has on our wildlife and landscape, and how they shape the way we all live. In the second programme Alan takes us through the great British summer, the season many of us look forward to the most. Alan tells the programme that in the summer he feels “more relaxed, more expansive”. He says: “It’s not just plants that flower, we humans flower then too.” The programme reveals that summer means so much more to our lives than seaside holidays, messing about in boats, or hoping rain doesn’t stop play. Alongside stunning photography, Alan shows how our countryside dramatically changes throughout the summer months, with a rich profusion of colour carpeting the landscape, wildlife producing, and protecting, their young, at a time when we all enjoy a myriad of outdoor activities. Alan says that one word in particular sums up summer for him: “flowers”. He explains why it is no accident that flowers are so many different colours and so many different shapes; as with everything in nature, it is to ensure their very survival. This is a time of abundance, the best time for animals to produce their young, but the programme shows this is also a time of danger as predators take full advantage of any youngsters that stray too far from their parents. One creature that doesn’t take any responsibly for its young is the cuckoo, well known for laying its eggs in other bird’s nests. The programme features rare footage of a cuckoo chick pushing eggs out of a reed warbler’s nest it has been hatched in, while the reed warbler looks on. *Summer is a time when we love messing about with water, we see schoolchildren investigating the wildlife found in our streams, the joy of dis