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. (Sadly now over) Both Poppy and Adam have recently published books about their own gardens. Poppy's is called A Wilder Way - How Gardens Grow Us and Adam's is called For the Love of Plants.

With thanks to the British Library for allowing me to share this with you as a podcast episode.

I'll put links to Poppy and Adam's books on the podcast website.

Independent podcasts like Our Plant Stories depend on their listeners for help with the costs of making the podcast such as the hosting platform and the editing programme.

Using the Buy Me A Coffee platform you can make a one off online donation of £5 and that money will go towards making more episodes. Everyone who buys a 'virtual coffee' will get a shout out on the podcast.

The support of listeners means a lot to me.

Buy Me A Coffee

Every month I will make a plant story but stories often lead to more stories and I end up publishing Offshoot episodes. So if you 'Follow' the podcast on your podcast app you will never miss an episode.

It also makes a real difference if you can spare the time to rate and/or review an episode after you have listened. Spotify and Apple look at these ratings and it helps to get the podcast promoted to other plant lovers.

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 people and compost.

I learned so much both from reading their books and sharing this conversation and thanks to the British Library, I am excited to be able to share it with you next week as a podcast episode.

Our Plant Stories is presented and produced by Sally Flatman

The music is Fade to Black by Howard Levy

Every month I will make a plant story but stories often lead to more stories and I end up publishing Offshoot episodes. So if you 'Follow' the podcast on your podcast app you will never miss an episode.

It also makes a real difference if you can spare the time to rate and/or review an episode after you have listened. Spotify and Apple look at these ratings and it helps to get the podcast promoted to other plant lovers.

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, the very patient Marketing Manager of Taylors Bulbs who answered all my questions so you too can discover how the bulbs are grown and harvested, how to store them, where to plant them and how to choose them for a long lasting 5 month display in 2026!

Independent podcasts like Our Plant Stories depend on their listeners for help with the costs of making the podcast such as the hosting platform and the editing programme.

Using the Buy Me A Coffee platform you can make a one off online donation of £5 and that money will go towards making more episodes. Everyone who buys a 'virtual coffee' will get a shout out on the podcast.

The support of listeners means a lot to me.

Buy Me A Coffee

Every month I will make a plant story but stories often lead to more stories and I end up publishing Offshoot episodes. So if you 'Follow' the podcast on your podcast app you will never miss an episode.

It also makes a real difference if you can spare the time to rate and/or review an episode after you have listened. Spotify and Apple look at these ratings and it helps to get the podcast promoted to other plant lovers.

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 the 70's and 80's Marks and Spencer had shelves full of them. But why?

And along with the story of Fay's Yucca and the answer to the question why M&S were selling them, we have Colin Smith, who holds a National Collection of Yuccas. He knows so much about these plants and shares with us how to grow them.

Every month I will make a plant story but stories often lead to more stories and I end up publishing Offshoot episodes. So if you 'Follow' the podcast on your podcast app you will never miss an episode.

It also makes a real difference if you can spare the time to rate and/or review an episode after you have listened. Spotify and Apple look at these ratings and it helps to get the podcast promoted to other plant lovers.

Independent podcasts like Our Plant Stories depend on their listeners for help with the costs of making the podcast such as the hosting platform and the editing programme.

Using the Buy Me A Coffee platform you can make a one off online donation of £5 and that money will go towards making more episodes. Everyone who buys a 'virtual coffee' will get a shout out on the podcast.

The support of listeners means a lot to me.

Buy Me A Coffee

Can I dig into more plant stories?

YES! You can check out the website where there are lots of photographs of plants and how to grow instructions. Our Plant Stories website

You can also follow the weekly blog where you will get the behind the scenes lowdown on making the podcast and you could also contribute - readers have suggested gardens to visit, plants to feature, experts to contact.

Our Plant Stories blog

And you can follow more plants over on my Instagram account Instagram

Our Plant Stories is presented and produced by Sally Flatman

The music is Fade to Black by Howard Levy

Mentioned in this episode:

Buy Me A Coffee

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 there are over 50 plant stories from the first three series of Our Plant Stories podcast for you to listen to. From fig tree cuttings sewn into the hems of skirts in preparation for the journey to America to passion flower cuttings, in South London, secreted in a handbag. There are stories of passions for dahlias, hostas, snowdrops and peonies. There are walks along viaducts and hoped for highlines. Stories from Australia, New Zealand, America and France.

And with every plant story we learn how to grow the plant from generous gardeners who share their knowledge.

If you have a plant story you would like to share you can contact me:

[email protected]

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 flat pack plant pots by Potr.

Our Plant Stories is presented and produced by Sally Flatman

The music is Fade to Black by Howard Levy

Every month I will make a plant story but stories often lead to more stories and I end up publishing Offshoot episodes. So if you 'Follow' the podcast on your podcast app you will never miss an episode.

It also makes a real difference if you can spare the time to rate and/or review an episode after you have listened. Spotify and Apple look at these ratings and it helps to get the podcast promoted to other plant lovers.

Independent podcasts like Our Plant Stories depend on their listeners for help with the costs of making the podcast such as the hosting platform and the editing programme.

Using the Buy Me A Coffee platform you can make a one off online donation of £5 and that money will go towards making more episodes. Everyone who buys a 'virtual coffee' will get a shout out on the podcast.

The support of listeners means a lot to me.

Buy Me A Coffee

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 Bald Cypress, we bring together two countries, and a moment in history in 1803, remembered by one nation, perhaps forgotten by the other as Napoleon sells Louisiana to the Americans.

You can see photographs of the tree and find links to the chateau on the Our Plant Stories website www.ourplantstories.com

Our Plant Stories is presented and produced by Sally Flatman

The music is Fade to Black by Howard Levy

Every month I will make a plant story but stories often lead to more stories and I end up publishing Offshoot episodes. So if you 'Follow' the podcast on your podcast app you will never miss an episode.

It also makes a real difference if you can spare the time to rate and/or review an episode after you have listened. Spotify and Apple look at these ratings and it helps to get the podcast promoted to other plant lovers.

Mentioned in this episode:

Buy Me A Coffee

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 these gardens go when the show ends on Saturday?

This episode tells the story of one garden - Hospitalfield Arts Garden. We visit a beautiful walled garden in Arbroath and a school that must be one of the closest to the sea in the UK. The children aren't allowed to eat snacks in the playground because of the swooping seagulls! And they are linked by a Nigel Dunnett designed sand garden, funded by Project Giving back which is on show this week at RHS Chelsea.

I hope you enjoy this story.

Independent podcasts like Our Plant Stories depend on their listeners for help with the costs of making the podcast such as the hosting platform and the editing programme.

Using the Buy Me A Coffee platform you can make a one off online donation of £5 and that money will go towards making more episodes. Everyone who buys a 'virtual coffee' will get a shout out on the podcast.

The support of listeners means a lot to me.

Buy Me A Coffee

Our Plant Stories is presented and produced by Sally Flatman

The music is Fade to Black by Howard Levy

Mentioned in this episode:

Buy Me A Coffee

Jerry Spencer's mum worked at Kew Gardens. As a child he would go there to meet her at lunchtime. Leaving school he trained as a gardener. However a period of living on the streets after he lost his mum and his home, erased his gardening memories.

This is a beautiful and very personal plant story of the journey back to Kew and one special tree that played an important role in that journey.

Plants can trigger even the deepest most forgotten memories so join us as Jerry and I sit beneath the tree as he tells his plant story and then together we find out more about that tree from Simon Toomer Curator of Living Collections at Kew.

I love that Simon as a forester has a totally different time scale to many of us, thinking in tree years is perhaps a skill we should all cultivate.

Independent podcasts like Our Plant Stories depend on their listeners for help with the costs of making the podcast such as the hosting platform and the editing programme.

Using the Buy Me A Coffee platform you can make a one off online donation of £5 and that money will go towards making more episodes. Everyone who buys a 'virtual coffee' will get a shout out on the podcast.

The support of listeners means a lot to me.

Buy Me A Coffee

Every month I will make a plant story but stories often lead to more stories and I end up publishing Offshoot episodes. So if you 'Follow' the podcast on your podcast app you will never miss an episode.

It also makes a real difference if you can spare the time to rate and/or review an episode after you have listened. Spotify and Apple look at these ratings and it helps to get the podcast promoted to other plant lovers.

Can I share my plant story with you?

YES PLEASE! I called this OUR Plant Stories for a reason and that is that I love to hear from listeners wherever you are in the world!

You can email me [email protected] and tell me your plant story. That's all you need to do - I'll do the rest. I'll work out who we can talk to. Can we find someone who shares your passion for the plant, they maybe in the same country as you or the other side of the world.

Our Plant Stories is presented and produced by Sally Flatman

The music is Fade to Black by Howard Levy

Mentioned in this episode:

Buy Me A Coffee

I think this Offshoot episode will make you pause next time you find yourself in front of a colourful wall of seed packets. As with many seemingly simple things, the story of a small seed, can in fact be a lot more fascinating and complicated than it might at first appear.

So take a journey into the history and science of seeds. We'll ponder the Portuguese, spreading pepper seeds around the world and seed banks in St Petersburg, Syria and the Arctic Circle. We'll hear about the skills of Ethiopian farmers.

Adam Alexander, also known as the seed detective and a self confessed vegetable anorak is endlessly curious about seeds and in his new book The Accidental Seed Heroes he is on the trail of the growers who are championing traditional varieties and breeding new ones that will adapt to our changing climate.

What can these seed heroes teach us, as we think about what to grow this April?

.Takeaways:

• The inception of plant breeding can be traced back to our Neolithic ancestors, who began selecting wild relatives for cultivation approximately 12,000 years ago, primarily focusing on cereals.
• Adam Alexander, the author of The Accidental Seed Heroes, emphasises the significance of traditional plant breeding and the critical need to preserve genetic diversity in crops for future food security.
• The podcast highlights the remarkable adaptive capabilities of open-pollinated crops, which are essential for resilience against climate change and environmental fluctuations.
• The discussion reveals the importance of seed banks and living collections, such as the Vavilov Institute, in maintaining genetic diversity and supporting agro-biodiversity.
• Adam Alexander describes his travels to Ethiopia and Albania, where he learned from indigenous farmers who practice sustainable agriculture and maintain a rich diversity of crops.
• The episode sheds light on the necessity of evolving our agricultural practices to ensure food security in the face of climate change, advocating for the cultivation of diverse and adaptive crop varieties.

Mentioned in this episode:

Buy Me A Coffee