Our Plant Stories

In 2017 Paul Oldroyd bought a Japanese banana plant. He got it home in the passenger seat of his car. He didn't have a lot of money to spend on plants but he had a very large space to fill. He had taken on a one acre former commercial greenhouse that was six foot deep in thistles. Find out in this episode why that first banana plant has been so important to creating a community space - Oldroyd's C...

Try saying "compost" to gardeners and see what happens. Inspired by a recent episode - Compost Tales - that's what I did for this short 'Just Say Compost' bonus listen. I hope these stories of waste and worms will inspire you to share with us, your compost story. Old hands or newbies, head gardeners or renters, bins or heaps, we'd love to see your photos and hear your tales. How to take part: Post...

The RHS Chelsea Flower Show, opens its doors to the public today - this is one of the gardening world's great horticultural moments - drawing around 157,000 visitors to the 23 acre grounds of the Royal Hospital. First held in 1913, Chelsea has spent over a century inspiring gardeners and growers to showcase the very best in horticulture, all competing for the coveted Chelsea Gold Medal. This year,...

In this episode we are focused on compost and listen out because there will be a chance for you to get involved and tell us about your compost journey. Liz Elton is an artist whose work looks at waste and the recycling of matter. She sometimes thinks she "sees the world through her compost bin". For the past few years she has been photographing the compost caddy in her kitchen. The images are beau...

Gavin Munro describes himself as a chair farmer. In his orchard he grows trees and meticulously shapes them into chairs. As the trees grow, their branches are carefully trained, pruned and grafted, gently guided to form a back, seat and four legs. Fullgrown is the project and passion of Gavin and his wife Alice and he takes us on a tour of the orchard and explains how not every tree wants to be a...

Buddleja davidii is Jess's 'spirit' plant and I think if you listen to this episode it will be obvious why. Also known as the Butterfly Bush it's the purple buddleja that you see growing in the cracks of pavements and walls, along the railway sidings. It comes from China and the first seeds arrived at Kew gardens, 130 years ago. Jess Turtle is the co-founder and director of the Museum Of Homelessn...

We're following the charity Plant Heritage as they take their first show garden to the RHS Chelsea flower show. This charity was formed almost 50 years ago and for those of us who are plant lovers, it is as important today, if not more important, than when it started. Plants go in and out of fashion, but how do we ensure that those garden plants that we love will still be available for future gene...

For this episode we are in New Zealand. Luke Gardner wrote to me saying he had been listening to Our Plant Stories since day one and he had a plant story he wanted to share. Luke's childhood memories are of a cottage garden with roses and peonies and tulips - 'exotics' and in the garden there were blackbirds and thrushes. He has now created his own cottage garden and plants thousands of tulip bulb...

Our Plant Stories has its first mini series. I love following journeys - a venture undertaken over months even years. If you are a regular listener you will know this from my return visits to the Castlefield Viaduct and the proposed Camden Highline each season. The Offshoots for the next few months will follow the journey of the Plant Heritage Missing Collector Garden from sketches on paper to a s...

In this first episode of a new series of Our Plant Stories we are searching for Miriam. To be a bit more precise since this is a podcast filled with plant stories, we are searching for Clematis 'Miriam Markham'. Our search will take us from a graveyard in Sussex to a gardener's cottage on the Gravetye estate where once thousands of clematis were being propagated by Miriam Markham's husband Ernest...

Happy New Year. The Royal Horticultural Society have just announced that this year in the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2026 - the charity Plant Heritage has an All About Plants garden. It is sponsored by Project Giving Back and supported by the Shanly Foundation. Plant Heritage is the home of the National Plant Collections and plant conservation is going to be taking centre stage in this Missing Collec...

I know it is a bit of a strange title. But bear with me this is the last episode of Series 3 (Series 4 will start in February 2026) and we have a couple of loose ends to tie up and an amazing idea to share. Back in November 2024, I visited the Castlefield Viaduct in Manchester and the route of the proposed Camden Highline in London. Now regular listeners will know that I love high lines and I have...

If you find yourself in a gathering of gardeners today they are unlikely to break into a glee...a song, as their predecessors might have done. I think its a bit of a shame! As part of the Being Human Festival - the UK's national festival of the humanities , historian Francesca Murray and musician Osnat Schmool gathered a group of people to explore these glees. A chance to be transported back to a...

Sal Demain has her dream job and in this Offshoot episode she shares why she loves it so much. Working as the Supervisor of the Arboretum Nursery at Kew Gardens, she has many plants to look after though she does have her favourites! Her curiosity about how plants spread goes back to childhood. And she would love everyone to have a go at propagating. Just: "don't come after my job" . In this episod...

"If you grow plants you are inherently an optimist". I love this thought from Richard Hayden, shared as we wandered along the New York High Line, this summer. Richard is the Senior Director of Horticulture on the High Line. We talk about the magic of this garden in the sky, it's history - the trains that were once delivering the ingredients for oreo cookies to Nabisco and the plants - of course th...

In the last episode Anne Harrap told us the story of how she came to build a series of wildlife friendly gardens on a field in Norfolk. At the heart of the plant story was a book - How to Make a Wildlife Garden by Chris Baines. In the episode she met the author for the first time and they talked about their approaches to wildlife garden. In this Offshoot episode, I wander around the gardens with A...

Sometimes in life you come across a book that just speaks to you - you and the author are on the same page and they have articulated all the things you have been thinking. This plant story is about such a book and the influence it had on a young woman who was just starting out in business in Norfolk. The book is called How To Make A Wildlife Garden and it was written by Chris Baines. It has been r...

I think we're in for a real treat. Listening to Poppy Okotcha and Adam Frost talking about their gardens, their 'safe spaces', their connections to nature. And in the best traditions of the podcast - the stories of plants and people are entwined. This conversation was recorded at the British Library in July as part of the events programme for an exhibition called Unearthed - The Power of Gardening...

Back in July I was lucky enough to host a conversation at the British Library between Poppy Okotcha and Adam Frost. Hear a trailer for the episode which will be out next Tuesday. Poppy's new book is called A Wilder Way and Adam's is called For the Love of Plants and over the course of an hour and a half they discussed how they came to be gardeners, safe spaces, foraging, special plants, special pe...

The joy of making this podcast is that sometimes I just get to be curious which Adam Frost says is key to our enjoyment of gardening. I know that any day now Autumn bulb catalogues will start to drop through my letterbox and garden centres will soon start to sell daffodil bulbs again but I wanted to know where are those bulbs in July? And how do you grow them commercially? My thanks to Ian Clark,...

In 1976 Fay Ballard had just finished her first term at university and heading home for Christmas she was looking for a gift for her father who was the author J.G. Ballard. This episode is the story of that gift! It may have started as a small Yucca pot plant but almost 50 years on - it has a great story to tell. For those of us of a certain generation, the Yucca plant will be familiar. Back in th...

Did you buy a Yucca from Marks and Spencer in the 1970s or 80s...many of us did! If you still have it, it could by now be very large. This months plant story is a beautiful one about a Yucca plant that Fay bought in 1976, for her dad, who was the writer J.G. Ballard. She wasn't sure if he would manage to keep it alive - he didn't have any other pot plants. If you can't wait for this story remember...

In this offshoot episode of Our Plant Stories , we step into Garden Futures - Designing with Nature — an imaginative new exhibition at the V&A Dundee . With help from one of the curators, Francesca Bibby, and one of the exhibitors. Andrew Flynn, we hear about garden design from both historical and futuristic perspectives; from knitted sculptures embedded with seeds by Alice Marie Archer to fla...

This episode features the State Tree of Louisiana, the Bald Cypress. (Taxodium distichum). But the Bald Cypress in the plant story is not in the USA but in the Loire in France, in the grounds of a beautiful chateau. How it got there is part of the story, a gift from Napoleon Bonaparte to the chateau owner, bought back from his last expedition to Louisiana in 1802! So through a plant story about a...

This is a special week in the horticultural calendar. It is the RHS Chelsea Flower show and over the course of the week thousands of people will visit the show and millions will watch the BBC coverage of it on television. There will be incredible show gardens, conceived months and months ago with designers and growers and build teams coming together to create something beautiful. But where do thes...