Curious About Plants

We’ll come back to the trumpet vine in the photograph below…

Campsis radicans - the trumpet vine

But firstly I am very excited about Tuesdays episode of the podcast and I wanted to share a trailer here:

This week, listening back to the British library recording, of the conversation I had in July with Poppy Okotcha and Adam Frost, I realised that what made it so lovely was that they were so interested in each other’s stories.  Adam wanted to know ‘what was the moment’ when Poppy knew that this was going to be the thing that she was going to do. Poppy picked up on Adam’s experience of gardens as safe spaces sharing that for her these are: “places where we get to feel the freedom of wildness, but the safety of the human touch.” And they both bonded over tomatoes!

You will know that most episodes of Our Plant Stories are ‘around’ 30 minutes long. To be honest that is a freedom from my Radio 4 days when if a programme was in a 28.30 slot then that’s what it had to be. You certainly couldn’t go over and it was bad form to be too short - making the work of those in trails and presentation, who were filling the slots between programmes, more difficult.

Realising that this episode of the podcast would be an hour and a half long, I found myself thinking of making it into two parts and I even found an edit point. But then I thought - episodes on other podcasts are often much longer and it really doesn’t work to chop it in half. So if you have a long car journey coming up or are thinking of going on a walk or just want to sit in a comfy chair in the garden - I hope you will enjoy listening to a longer episode - featuring this conversation between two lovely gardeners.

Vermont

This time last week I was lucky enough to be staying in a tree house in Vermont. (It is amazing what you can find on Air B&B!) I posted a picture on Instagram of a very interesting looking caterpillar that was walking along the veranda. Thanks to those of you who did some digging and came up with its name the Hickory Tussock moth. Karen described it as ‘the fluffiest thing I’ve ever seen’ but Liz warned us: ‘can cause irritation but can’t we all…’

I think that thanks to that Instagram post in which I tagged Vermont, the platform algorithm offered me a post from the podcast: Sing for Science. It was an episode recorded live at the Museum of Science in Boston and featured a singer-songwriter Neko Case, sharing how ‘letting her Vermont Fields grow wild brought monarch butterflies by the hundreds, all drawn to milkweek, the only plant their caterpillars can eat’. She was in conversation with an ecological horticulturalist Rebecca McMeekin and they talked about the importance of native plants and the small changes you can make to support biodiversity. (A little aside - Neko’s ‘gateway drug’ into gardening was tomatoes!)

If you want to watch Neko and Rebecca’s episode on Sing for Science, here’s the link.

The thing that Rebecca is most passionate about is ‘taking care of the land…when I look at native plants, plants that evolved on the land, I consider this to be their land, right? And I’m just trying to make space for them and for these ancient relationships that have been here for thousands and thousands of years.' She talked about the eastern columbine, Aquilegia canadensis, one of her favourite flowers. (And one I grew for a few seasons before losing it one Winter) She knows it is hummingbird pollinated just by looking at the colour red and if you look at the shape of the flower it is perfectly formed for the beak of the ruby-throated hummingbird which is the regions only hummingbird.

Of course people have moved plants all over the world, we know some of those stories from this podcast, but I think one of her key points was that we need to educate ourselves, to be curious about the plants we buy, to understand where they come from and whether on balance they are going to add to the biodiversity in our gardens. Adam Frost’s advice to us all, in the British Library talk was…be curious…be curious.

Curious About Plants

I have been looking for a shorter description for Our Plant Stories, one that explains in just a few words what this podcast is all about, so listeners know what to expect and I think ‘curious about plants’ sums it up.

Which this brings me to the photograph which is of a trumpet flower in my garden, well actually it is technically ‘in’ my neighbours garden but scrambles into mine too. Looking at the red flowers and the trumpet shape and inspired by Rebecca, I did a bit of research. Campsis radicans, the trumpet vine, also known in North America as the hummingbird vine. It is native to eastern North America, is a vigorous (definitely) deciduous woody vine and is very attractive to the ruby-throated hummingbird. There are not many of those to be found in my central London garden!

I do hope that you enjoy Poppy Okotcha and Adam Frost’s conversation - it will go live on Tuesday. If you want to take a look at the books they have both recently published then Poppy’s is called ‘A Wilder Way - How Gardens Grow Us’ and Adam’s is called ‘For the Love of Plants’.

And if you enjoy the conversation please do think of taking a moment to rate and review it on your podcast app because algorithms are, as you can see, powerful things.

Have a lovely weekend.

Sally

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