The Independent Podcast Awards
I mentioned at the end of last week, the exciting news that Our Plant Stories is a finalist in the Environment & Natural World category of this year’s Independent Podcast Awards. This is very exciting, not least because you get to meet lots of other independent podcast makers.
We’re a Finalist!
I said I would tell you more about it and I thought that perhaps the easiest way to do that would be to share the submission. For these awards you get to put in 3 x 15 min clips from episodes of your podcast - I’ll put in some links to the episodes in case you missed them. To be honest when you are looking at award categories it can be hard to find one that fits plants! But this new category Environment and Natural World was definitely the best fit.
Submission for the Independent Podcast Awards
WHY SHOULD YOU WIN. 498/500
This is your chance to tell the judges why your podcast deserves to win in this category. What makes it different from other podcasts? How does it serve its audience? Are you a solo podcaster that has to write, produce, edit and market your show?
There are podcasts about gardening, and podcasts about nature and podcasts about climate change and all are really important. I hope that through Our Plant Stories I can connect these themes and through the passion of the storytellers show how we are all connected through nature and we can all do something to support nature and wildlife, be it a plant on a windowsill or a tree in a garden.
The theme that has emerged for me over the past year is that plant knowledge is not being passed down through the generations. This matters because it is the next generation who are going to have to solve the problems of climate change and as one of my interviewees says: “if you don't recognise it, how are you going to know when it’s gone”. Winning this award would amplify these voices. Plants are our friends and I think people who are passionate about them can be the best teachers, drawing us in with stories that require no previous knowledge, building connections between people.
I am a solo podcast who finds the stories, researches them, records , edits and presents the podcast. I also do all the marketing.
I have included 3 x15 min clips:
Lucy and the Weed Trust - I think this episode illustrates what can happen when a child is entranced by nature. Lucy sets up 'The Weed Trust' aged 6, to show some love for the unloved weeds, she designs a logo and a newsletter and two people join; her mum and her mum's best friend. She is now an urban ecologist and I join her and Benny Hawkesbee to talk about how we can all create wild spaces, nurturing wildlife, in urban areas.
Mary Colwell and a GCSE in Natural History
Mary Colwell has been campaigning for a GCSE in Natural History since 2011. She argues passionately for this qualification, knowing the subject matter is not covered in geography or biology and that we are losing a generation of young people who are not being offered any formal way of learning about the natural world. As she says if you don't know what a robin looks like, how will you know when its gone? When I recorded this episode she was still campaigning, just in March the government announced that they would support this new GCSE. I hope this episode will share the news of a GCSE.
The final episode was recorded around the most iconic British garden show RHS Chelsea. I wanted to know what happens to the gardens after the show and so I followed the story of Nigel Dunnett's sand dune garden all the way to Arbroath in Scotland. He designed a garden to draw attention to coastal erosion and that garden will now live in a playground of a school just a stones throw from the sea. I sat in the playground with the most inspiring teacher Rachel who wants to bring creativity and nature into her pupil's curriculum.
In Other News - Meadows!
Jess with our strewings from the Inner Temple garden
These days ‘meadows’ crop up in the most un-meadow like places. I saw a beautiful spiral of meadow flowers in a rectangular lawn in Helmingham Hall in Suffolk at the weekend. There are beautiful meadow plantings in the once more formal Inner Temple gardens in central London where I volunteered for a couple of years and they are being extended to other corners of the gardens. Soon there will be, well fingers crossed, a meadow in Finsbury Park!
First step towards this - acquire some strewings from someone who already has a meadow. Last month I got an email from Great Dixter offering me some meadow strewings but unfortunately I was out of the country and not able to drive down with a tonne bag to collect them. You can never predict the date of such offerings. It is all dependent of course on the weather and when the gardeners get the scythes out!
Christopher Lloyd wrote the most fascinating book about the meadows at Great Dixter and I remember when I was doing a course there Fergus Garrett gave a wonderful talk about how you manage and maintain these areas. It’s not quite as easy as skilled gardeners make it look.
The Museum of Homelessness has now acquired some strewings - thanks to Sean and his team at the Inner Temple gardens. Jess, Matt and I went down there last Friday and he talked us through the plants in the meadow areas and showed us how, having cut the grass very short and scarified it so there are bare patches, they spread the strewings which are the seed bank of all those plants, onto new areas. Then they net those areas and wait.
It was pouring with rain as we came to leave with our big tonne bag of strewings but nothing deters Jess! She strapped the bag on her back and headed off to the tube. As you read this we will be spreading our bounty across a little corner of Finsbury Park in North London. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Have a lovely weekend.
Sally
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