For the love of plants

Regular listeners will know that “for the love of plants” could be a line in the script of many of the episodes of Our Plant Stories. It’s also the title of Adam Frost’s new book and a conversation taking place between Adam and Poppy Okotcha at the British Library as part of the current exhibition ‘Unearthed: The Power of Gardening’. There is a connection with the podcast too - you’ll have to click on this link to spot it!

The flyer for the conversation taking place at the British library.

In so many of the episodes people have shared how growing a particular plant links them back to a place or a person. They have described how a garden saved them at a difficult moment in their life or a plant gave solace in a moment of sadness or a tree reminded them of a life they thought they had lost. Over and over again the plants connect us back to nature.

Finding stories

In a couple of weeks time I am doing a session for a friend who runs the West Midlands Podcast Club. She asked me to talk about ‘producing’. I think like any job, over time there are things that just become a part of the way you work and you don’t really think about them or break them down. However as we talked about what might be helpful for other podcasters in the session, I found myself remembering how every radio office in the BBC had a large whiteboard on the wall with the whole week or series marked out. At a glance you could see how many programmes were sorted and how many blanks there were, as well as who was doing what. No I don’t have a whiteboard though I do have large pieces of white paper that magically stick to your wall and yes the series is mapped out!

I am currently editing June’s plant story which I first stumbled across last August. I didn’t have any recording equipment on me but I can always record on my phone. I think the owner of the French chateau where we were staying probably thought I was slightly eccentric when I told him after breakfast on the last morning of our stay that I really did want to talk to him about the fallen bald cypress in his garden. But it’s not just any fallen bald cypress, there’s a link to Napoleon! You can probably imagine my excitement, look out for this episode on Tuesday.

July’s plant story is also in hand. If you are reading this on Friday morning, I am hopefully chatting to Lord Stuart Rose about Yucca plants. Quick question, did you or any of your friends or family buy a yucca as a house plant in the 1970’s or 80’s from M&S? Colin who holds a national collection of Yuccas told me his first one came from Marks and Spencers as does the one in the plant story, belonging to the author J.G. Ballard. Back in the early eighties, Lord Rose, who went onto become Executive Chairman of M&S, was a management trainee at the store and spent some time in the horticulture department which gives me hope that he will be able to shed some light on why this suddenly became such a popular house plant. If you look around you may start to see that there are a lot of very large yucca plants lurking in front gardens. Could they be over grown house plants from the 70 and 80s?

I came across another beautiful story a couple of weeks ago when in Norfolk we visited a garden, well more like 18 gardens, that have been there for over 30 years. We have stayed nearby countless times but never realised it was there. Right back at the beginning, the inspiration for the garden came from another gardener who clearly managed to convey their passion with astonishing results even though the two gardeners at the heart of this story have never met. I am hoping to change that so watch this space.

I have also been in touch with the Castlefield viaduct. You may remember the episode about this Manchester ‘garden in the sky’ from last November. I thought then that I would really like to return to this story, one year on, to see what progress they have made with their expansion plans. The Water Aid garden from Chelsea 2024 was due to be relocated to the viaduct. So that episode is in the planning pile too.

So to the Love of Plants conversation billed above which I am hoping I will also be able to share with you as an episode. This may not make sense if you haven’t yet clicked the link! It is both exciting and a little scary but I have received Poppy’s book and will be reading it this weekend. I guess the joy of being able to follow a passion is you never know where it will lead you.

Have a lovely weekend

Sally

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