Penelope Hobhouse

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 10:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety four, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:28

My castaway this week is a gardener. Now in her sixties she was born in Ulster and brought up steeped in the politics of the province, where her brothers were influential members of the Unionist party.

Presenter0:39

She went to Cambridge and, having married, settled down to look after the garden of the beautiful house in Somerset her marriage had brought with it. Twenty-five years later she wrote her first book all about that garden, and since then she's become one of this country's foremost experts on gardens and their design. Particularly famous for her work at the National Trust Garden at Tintinhull, she is in constant demand as a lecturer and author. She is Penelope Hobhouse. You said, Penny, your work is a constant joy, so presumably you don't mind being in constant demand. Now, is it the gardening that's a joy, or the talking about it? Which is it?

Penelope Hobhouse1:15

Yeah.

Presenter1:16

Uh

Penelope Hobhouse1:16

I think I really probably like the the writing best of all. Because of the writing, of course I do a lot of garden design.

Penelope Hobhouse1:24

And the two things combine in making you continually or in a sort of learning process all the time because

Penelope Hobhouse1:31

When you're designing, you've got to

Penelope Hobhouse1:34

Get your vision across to your clients, so you've really got to know what you're talking about, and of course, writing even more so, really.

Presenter1:43

So

Penelope Hobhouse1:43

But it

Presenter1:43

Oops.

Penelope Hobhouse1:43

It's the planning of it and the thinking about it. It's not the getting your hands dirty. Oh, I I hope you don't think I mean, I love gardening, and if anybody said what is my recreation?

Penelope Hobhouse1:54

And pleasure, that is, gardening, the others' work. I can't imagine getting pleasure from weeding. Yes, I do. I mean, no, no, I really love it. I've I'm

Presenter1:58

Imagine you get a pleasure from

Penelope Hobhouse2:02

Very energetic physically, I've always been, and I love weeding. I mean, it's like cleaning the bath or something, you make it look beautiful. So I love that.

Presenter2:10

I love that. You've obviously got to be a very practical person to be a good gardener, but you've also got to be artistic as well if you're going to create something, haven't you? Which do you think is more important, the practical or the artistic?

Penelope Hobhouse2:21

Uh

Presenter2:21

But I think really

Penelope Hobhouse2:22

Both are terribly important. I just know that I didn't really want to garden till

Penelope Hobhouse2:29

Funnily enough, I went at the end of my twenties to Tintinhall, where I went to live twenty five years later.

Penelope Hobhouse2:36

And it was the first moment when I realized gardening was about beauty, because it was such a wonderful garden. I mean, it was like going to look at pictures in a museum, in a gallery. You came out of it

Penelope Hobhouse2:49

almost exalted, but that was the first moment when I realized that it was

Penelope Hobhouse2:54

A sort of work of art, gardening. So I think that is tremendously important, but I believe that you probably could be a very good designer.

Penelope Hobhouse3:02

without being practical. But I think all my writing and designing depends on the

Penelope Hobhouse3:08

experience I've had as a gardener.

Penelope Hobhouse3:11

It's also a matter of taste, of course. What's your taste in music?

Penelope Hobhouse3:15

Well, my taste of music is

Penelope Hobhouse3:17

I think quite sort of Catholic, really. I don't ever have music on when I'm working. I don't have a walkman when I'm weeding. I never have background music when I'm writing.

Penelope Hobhouse3:29

I do listen to opera and the car, funnily enough, I find that very soothing. What's your first Desert Island disc?

Penelope Hobhouse3:35

Well, I wanted to connect myself, as it were, with America, because my grandmother was American, I'm a quarter-American, therefore, and

Penelope Hobhouse3:44

I spend a huge amount of time there, or have done, in the last seven or eight years, because I lecture there and I now do five or six gardens for Americans over there, which has meant going almost every month in the last two years.

Penelope Hobhouse3:58

I find it's quite emotional for me, especially when I go to somewhere like Chicago, where she came from. I do feel quite American.

Penelope Hobhouse4:07

And

Penelope Hobhouse4:08

I love going, because I think in America it's where I learnt to be much more secure as a person. I used to be socially rather frightened of all sorts of things. And in America, if you've written books and you lecture and you do design, they have this wonderful capacity to treat you like a star.

Penelope Hobhouse4:27

So as you arrive on the tarmac,

Penelope Hobhouse4:30

They suddenly teach you in this amazing way, and then you learn to be like that.

Penelope Hobhouse4:35

And I think America has in many ways transformed me. Now you have to be very careful when you come back to England not to behave in that way, because the English wouldn't like it at all. But it has helped me grow in confidence. So this will remind you of that. Yes. It's America from West Side Story, and I really wanted to have that, because I thought of having

Penelope Hobhouse4:56

Um a song from Shakespeare.

Penelope Hobhouse4:59

in this programme. And then I actually thought that West Side Story, in a way, sums it all up because it's the sort of Romeo and Juliet thing. And it also is the sort of date when I was at Cambridge and we were listening to things like that.

Speaker 25:13

I have to be the medica. Okay, I need a medica

Speaker 25:18

Be the merry cat for us for Real Mary!

Speaker 25:27

I like the city of San Juan. I know, I both get on.

Speaker 15:32

Uh

Presenter5:39

America from Westside Story, orchestrated and conducted by Leonard Bernstein. You nursed and maintained Tintinhall, the National Trust country house and garden in Somerset, for fourteen years. How did you come by it in the first place? Did you apply?

Penelope Hobhouse5:52

Yes, I suppose I did, more or less. What I I knew that I was going to um separate from my first husband, so I wrote to the

Penelope Hobhouse6:01

Gardens advisor of the National Trust, who I knew and said, was there anything I could do working in gardening in some way or other for the Trust?

Penelope Hobhouse6:10

And within a few weeks he wrote back and said that this house the tenant was leaving.

Penelope Hobhouse6:16

And would I be interested? So was it was it a job, or did they pay you rent? It wasn't a job. We actually paid them rent. And of course, luckily by then I knew I was going to get married again and actually

Speaker 16:21

And

Penelope Hobhouse6:28

he would probably be able to pay the rent, because at that stage I was really earning very little. I'd only written one and a half books.

Penelope Hobhouse6:36

And

Penelope Hobhouse6:37

The owner of the garden had died, given it to the Trust, and died in the fifties, and then it had gone through a period which is very difficult for the National Trust. They tried to maintain it exactly as she had had it and made it. But there comes an inevitable moment in a flower garden when you really need to sort it out altogether and take everything out of most beds and redo it.

Penelope Hobhouse6:57

And we coincided with that moment, so it was something that was a great challenge.

Presenter7:02

But you also, as I understand it, um had to have a to be sociable by nature because the access to the gardens was through the house and people walked through your house, all those thousands of people in the

Penelope Hobhouse7:12

Yes, well, that was only four thousand the first f year or so, and then it was twenty thousand by the time we left. And I think we did then. We were beginning to feel in the last year or two that it was too much because of them coming through the house. We liked the visitors very much because it provided you with a social life, but

Penelope Hobhouse7:31

a social life to do with gardening, because they asked questions and often very interesting questions and gave you very good ideas. I think as I got more and more involved in writing

Penelope Hobhouse7:43

I probably tended to do a lot of writing during the four hours of the afternoon rather than go out because I get very impatient when I couldn't actually work in the garden because people talked to me.

Presenter7:55

Did you rush around every morning?'Cause you opened at two, did you? Well, yes. Did you rush around every morning tidying up?

Penelope Hobhouse7:59

Well, yes.

Penelope Hobhouse8:01

More or less. We tried in the end. We didn't really use the drawing room and hall that they walked through during the summer very much. I mean, that was the sort of nuisance if you had people to meals, or if you wanted to use it the evening before, you had to pump up the cushions or

Speaker 28:16

Mm.

Penelope Hobhouse8:16

clean the fireplace, which, as you know, in England we mostly light fires all through the summer. It must also, though, have been very hard work.

Penelope Hobhouse8:23

Yes, it was hard work because

Penelope Hobhouse8:25

The more people we had the more exhausted we got, and the work still had to be done.

Penelope Hobhouse8:32

and it just was very difficult to get it all up to standard all the time, and I think we thought we were getting older, and indeed John died while we were there, so sadly didn't move with me.

Penelope Hobhouse8:42

I mean we did love it, don't I mean I felt

Penelope Hobhouse8:45

Thrilled to be there, really privileged to have the chance to garden there.

Penelope Hobhouse8:50

But, yes, it was really very hard work.

Penelope Hobhouse8:53

Record number two.

Penelope Hobhouse8:55

Now, this is right back to my childhood in Ulster, and it's the Londonderry air. I'm not having the words of Danny Boy, because those aren't the original words, I think, but it was written.

Penelope Hobhouse9:06

in Limoveddi, which isn't very far from my home, so I thought it was very appropriate.

Presenter9:52

The London Derry Air, played by James Galway and the Chieftains. So you were born, Penelope Hobhouse, in the dairy countryside, into this fiercely political family, the Chichester Clarks. And give me the setting first Beautiful House, Lovely Garden.

Penelope Hobhouse10:05

It was a wonderful house, not a great deal of garden, but a beautiful landscape, with a wonderful river.

Penelope Hobhouse10:11

And I think that's probably what I mean, I think if anybody asked me to day what moves me most, I would say that landscape does. And I think that Irish landscape with an eighteenth century house

Penelope Hobhouse10:26

is almost as beautiful as anything you can get. It's close to nature, and yet in fact rather sophisticated architecture. And I think that of course one didn't understand any of that at all as a child, but I'm sure it deeply affected my whole life.

Presenter10:42

And and was your mother a gardener or

Penelope Hobhouse10:43

Um, she was a gardener in a way, but I think.

Penelope Hobhouse10:48

A product of her generation much more than mine is that she didn't do it really very intensely. But it was her mother.

Presenter10:55

Your maternal grandmother, who who was a politician, wasn't it?

Penelope Hobhouse10:59

Yes, my father was originally. He died when I was very young, and then my grandmother took over his seat in what was then Stormont. I think she was Minister of

Penelope Hobhouse11:09

housing and of education at some point, and she was a very important

Penelope Hobhouse11:14

person in my childhood because

Penelope Hobhouse11:17

although seemingly representing the Ulster Unionists and the Orange Order and all that, actually, being an American, she was intensely romantic about Ireland. So we were all brought up on Irish poetry. I mean, she would read us Yeats.

Penelope Hobhouse11:35

And all the sort of southern things. And I don't think at that time I really thought of myself as just Ulster. You know, it's it's quite strange with all the terrible troubles that have happened since is that we were brought up to feel almost it was united Ireland, and yet Ulster wanted to stay just slightly separate. But I still think of myself as Irish rather than English. I married two English husbands. Not Anglo-Irish. Well, I am really Anglo-Irish, but I find that

Penelope Hobhouse12:06

rather an alarming concept because I feel the Irishness of me is very important. And we'd lived there since sixteen hundred, really. And the house was full of politics and politicians, was it?

Presenter12:15

Yeah.

Penelope Hobhouse12:19

Less than you might think, really, because she was a politician, but she lived a sort of twelve miles away or something, and my mother wasn't at all interested in politics. My father was dead, and of course my brothers were both older than me, but, you know, not so very much. And they didn't go into politics till they were in the

Penelope Hobhouse12:36

I think probably late twenties for one and late thirties for the other. So it wasn't really such an intensely political life, I think.

Penelope Hobhouse12:45

You know, in those days you were rarely brought up by servants.

Penelope Hobhouse12:49

and I think there was an undercurrent of politics all the time, and I used to lie in bed at night and I heard the big lambeg drums practising.

Penelope Hobhouse12:59

Which was practising for the Protestant marches on the twelfth of July, and then, of course, you got this extraordinary drumming.

Penelope Hobhouse13:07

In the parades with the flute coming very clearly above it, and I particularly haven't chosen one of those for my records because.

Penelope Hobhouse13:16

I think I'm very ambivalent about my Ulster background, and I would say that my family, my two brothers,

Penelope Hobhouse13:24

Are thought of in Ulster as very liberal, probably anti-Orange Order.

Penelope Hobhouse13:32

Never bigoted against Catholicism.

Penelope Hobhouse13:36

I think that I would much rather be thought of as liberal in my politics.

Penelope Hobhouse13:41

Record number three.

Penelope Hobhouse13:43

This is Kathleen Ferrier singing, and of course when I was at Cambridge she was at the peak of her singing, and I used to go to concerts, and I don't remember if she did sing this particular song, which is I know where I'm going, but she does sing it wonderfully, and it was written in the Glens of Antrim in Northern Ireland.

Penelope Hobhouse14:04

But in fact, the film, I think, where it's much better known, because there was a whole film called I Think I Know Where I'm Going.

Penelope Hobhouse14:11

And it was written about the islands of Colonsea and Oransea off the west coast of Scotland, which is where we went.

Penelope Hobhouse14:19

every summer holiday and where two of my children live now. It's extremely emotive from me and I really love it.

Speaker 214:27

I know where I'm going.

Speaker 214:31

And I know who's going to win.

Speaker 214:36

I know.

Speaker 214:41

Dear those who are mine

Speaker 114:41

Yeah.

Speaker 214:49

I have stockings of seal

Speaker 214:53

Shoes are fine and green and red.

Speaker 214:57

Forms tobacco me

Speaker 215:01

And a ring for everything

Presenter15:06

Kathleen Ferrier singing I Know Where I'm Going.

Presenter15:09

You met your first husband, Paul Hobhouse, at Cambridge, and you married him when you were twenty two, a marriage which eventually brought you access to this lovely garden in Somerset Hadspen. What was it like when you first got to grips with it?

Penelope Hobhouse15:22

Well

Presenter15:22

It luck

Penelope Hobhouse15:22

Luckily for me, Relly, my mother in law, who I adored, was the most amazing, eccentric lady, but she wasn't at all interested in gardening.

Penelope Hobhouse15:30

So the garden had been made by my husband's grandmother in the sort of early nineteen hundreds, before the First War.

Penelope Hobhouse15:38

And then

Penelope Hobhouse15:39

Rather neglected because there was the second war and not very much help, and although there were two full-time gardeners when we moved in.

Penelope Hobhouse15:47

It was full of bindweed and grand aldar and, really frankly, a mess.

Presenter15:52

How big was it?

Penelope Hobhouse15:53

It is about nine acres.

Penelope Hobhouse15:55

So that was a great challenge, and I think it came for me just at the right time, and I realized that I must learn a lot of garden history.

Penelope Hobhouse16:05

I joined the Garden History Society and

Penelope Hobhouse16:08

visited a lot of gardens, and visited particularly Italian gardens, which was a huge hugely important moment in my life. I think what I would say to anybody who wants to be a garden designer, or even a writer, is they must go to Italy.

Penelope Hobhouse16:24

The Italian experience.

Penelope Hobhouse16:26

is very, very important. So I did all those things and then just actually work. My children went to boarding school at about the same time that we moved to Hadsman.

Penelope Hobhouse16:36

So I really devoted myself to

Presenter16:39

For gardening.

Penelope Hobhouse16:39

Uh

Presenter16:40

Was it more than that? Was it also that the garden became your own place, as it were, that you established your identity there? Probably.

Penelope Hobhouse16:47

Probably. I think I was a very late developer as far as growing up was concerned, and I think that I felt up till then I had probably just been an an adjunct to my husband and a mother, of course. And suddenly in gardening I found a whole new means of expressing myself and

Penelope Hobhouse17:08

I think it's rather like being a sort of actor. The garden is a sort of stage. It's theatre, really, and you can have as much imagination.

Penelope Hobhouse17:16

And let it play and do all sorts of things.

Presenter17:19

Was it also in a way an escape, perhaps? An escape from motherhood, from housewiffery, from being a wife?

Penelope Hobhouse17:24

I think that's probably true. My husband

Penelope Hobhouse17:28

loved entertaining, and I think I got really quite bored with that. I mean it wasn't that I didn't like all our friends at all, but I thought there must be something more. I think the other thing that happened to me probably then is that, you know, I went to Cambridge to Girton in nineteen forty eight, forty eight to fifty one, and it was a time when we felt incredibly privileged to have that sort of education, but they certainly, quite rightly, made you feel you ought to use

Penelope Hobhouse17:58

Your education in some way, and I think we all felt guilty if we didn't.

Penelope Hobhouse18:04

So all the time one was bringing up children and just being a housewife, one was sort of looking for something else to do.

Penelope Hobhouse18:11

And again I was incredibly lucky because

Penelope Hobhouse18:14

A publisher that of course I knew asked me to write my first book. You know, life is just full of ep episodic luck.

Penelope Hobhouse18:21

And I seized that chance.

Penelope Hobhouse18:24

Mixed record.

Penelope Hobhouse18:26

Now this is going to be from the marriage of Figaro and my second husband was incredibly musical and he tried to teach me about music and he taught me

Penelope Hobhouse18:35

How to listen, I think.

Penelope Hobhouse18:37

And

Penelope Hobhouse18:38

One of the very first operas he and I went to together was the marriage of Figaro, so I've chosen the Countess singing devisono, which is in a way

Penelope Hobhouse18:49

I think because she's a little bit lost at that moment and wondering what's going to happen, and I think it expresses how one quite often feels oneself that

Penelope Hobhouse18:58

In one's career, if you can call mine a career.

Penelope Hobhouse19:01

You seem to have enormous number of mountains to climb, which you think you can't.

Penelope Hobhouse19:06

And there are moments when, even in gardening, you feel rather discouraged.

Speaker 119:28

What?

Presenter20:13

Lucia Popp singing the Aria Dove Sono from the third act of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, with the Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields conducted by Sir Neville Mariner.

Presenter20:22

Um can we just pursue for a moment, um Penelope Hobhouse, this business of the garden uh as escape, as therapy, as compensation, if you like. Um you do hear people say, you know, the garden saved my life. What what do you think it is? What what does garden

Penelope Hobhouse20:36

Yeah.

Penelope Hobhouse20:38

I think what it does for me, and I suspect it does for other people, is that you are always working

Penelope Hobhouse20:45

Feeling an optimist because

Penelope Hobhouse20:48

You don't get immediate results. You're working for six months ahead. This whole time scale thing that you're working for is what I find the

Penelope Hobhouse20:58

therapeutic thing, not the actual working. I mean, I know that every single August I'm completely fed up with my garden, and I would like to move on till the following spring.

Penelope Hobhouse21:08

You want to redo the whole thing and I'm really quite bored with it.

Penelope Hobhouse21:12

And but I believe it is because you're always thinking of the next year, and you're always incredibly optimistic about it. You think that next year I'm going to have the best blue salvia border in England or in the world, or I'm just going to love it. And I think that's what keeps you going, because you're imagining, you know, you have you conjure up this wonderful visual image.

Presenter21:33

of beauty.

Penelope Hobhouse21:34

Yeah.

Presenter21:34

Well, now you were in your mid forties when you decided I think you've been gardening for some twenty five years by then you decided that you were going to write a book about it. Why did you suddenly decide?

Penelope Hobhouse21:43

Well I didn't really decide I was going to write a book about it. I went to Woolworths.

Penelope Hobhouse21:47

and bought a typewriter, which cost nineteen pounds, a little pale blue typewriter, and went home and said to my husband, Will you give it to me for Christmas? which he very sweetly said he would. And then I said to a publishing friend,

Penelope Hobhouse21:59

I'm now going to write my magnum office. I bought a typewriter, and I had no idea what I was going to write, and he said, Well, actually, I was thinking of writing asking you to write a book about the sort of restoration you've been doing at Hadspon.

Penelope Hobhouse22:13

And I frankly didn't really believe him, so I did nothing about it, and about six weeks later he rang up and said, Are you doing a synopsis for me?

Penelope Hobhouse22:21

And I said I didn't know you were serious.

Penelope Hobhouse22:24

And then sat down and did it. Did you find it very easy when you did come to do it? No, certainly not. I didn't find it at all easy. I had to learn a huge amount because.

Presenter22:25

Yeah.

Penelope Hobhouse22:32

Even if you've learnt how to dig or plant or

Penelope Hobhouse22:36

the sort of plants you want to use. It's very different when you come to write. So you actually write a book surrounded by reference books because you need to check every single thing. And I think because I wasn't trained as a gardener,

Penelope Hobhouse22:48

One is very aware of being in a way an amateur breaking into a professional world, so you've got to be ahead to be particularly careful. Next record, number five. This is something really very nice to have because Mark

Penelope Hobhouse23:03

Judas Clarke is my nephew and my godson, and he is extremely musical and he composes, he does quite a lot for films.

Penelope Hobhouse23:12

And he helped me choose all my records for this programme, and this is something he's written. I think it's seven cellos playing in this piece.

Presenter24:06

Jacqueline Johnson and the Oxford Cello Ensemble playing variation number three from Mark Chichester Clarke's Cello Suite.

Presenter24:14

Every professional gardener ha has a style, Penny, and inevitably yours is is the Tintenhall style, I think you call it. Can you describe it?

Presenter24:21

Yeah.

Penelope Hobhouse24:21

It's basically a sort of Edwardian style in that you like a very strong structure as a background to all your flower planting, so you have hedges and walls, gateways that you can frame with plants. But having done the bones of the garden, which can be

Penelope Hobhouse24:38

Hardscape, but can also just really be done by plants. Then I like to plant in a very, very naturalistic way. But the the essential lines of the

Presenter24:47

structure are very straight, they're right angles.

Penelope Hobhouse24:47

Yes, for me they are, although of course I do have to do designs.

Penelope Hobhouse24:53

when I'm working in completely naturalistic landscape, and it would be quite wrong because of the contours to use right angles.

Presenter25:01

And then part of the style is also that there are lots of interconnecting rooms, as it were, in your garden.

Penelope Hobhouse25:05

That was very much Tintenhall, and Tintenhull is obviously a style that a lot of my clients expect from me.

Penelope Hobhouse25:12

And yes.

Penelope Hobhouse25:14

I would say that is my favorite style. I wouldn't like to be completely stereotyped as that, because I love doing woodland planting as well. I love plants to seed naturally.

Penelope Hobhouse25:25

Yeah.

Presenter25:25

But I can imagine that a lot of people might look at pictures of Tintenhull and think that's the sort of garden I want. Send for Penelope Hobhouse. She will create it. I mean, is that very disagreeing?

Penelope Hobhouse25:34

That is really how my garden designing happened. They either looked at pictures of Tentinal or looked at pictures in my books, and then they would went to the telephone and said, Will you come and do it?

Penelope Hobhouse25:44

But they expect you to wave a magic wand, really, then.

Presenter25:44

They expect you to wave a magic wand, really, then.

Penelope Hobhouse25:47

Yes, but you know they're they're also quite sensible people and you explain that it takes a few years and

Penelope Hobhouse25:53

In fact, of course, you can do much more instant gardens than you might think. I mean, you can buy hedges that are six feet high and you can do it. But you can't buy wonderful herbaceous borders that snill and billow over and over. You have to wait for a few years. You have to wait for a few years. And they

Presenter26:03

You have to wait for the

Penelope Hobhouse26:08

I think that one can quite quickly persuade people that that it's worth it, and that part of the enjoyment of gardening is of course the waiting period and watching it develop and grow.

Penelope Hobhouse26:19

I mean, I'm planting a few trees now in my new garden, and I'm ready.

Penelope Hobhouse26:23

As I'm sixty five, I'm not really going to see them.

Penelope Hobhouse26:26

You know, it's twenty years. I might, I might, if I'm lucky, see a decent tree, but it shouldn't stop you doing it.

Penelope Hobhouse26:34

More music.

Penelope Hobhouse26:35

Well, the the the next Elgar, from the dream of Grantius, I've chosen because of my husband John. He really loved Elgar, because Elgar came from Worcestershire, which is where he was born too, and he felt that Elgar really was a sort of landscape, almost pastoral musician. So I've chosen this that I think he would like as well.

Presenter27:43

Praise to the Holiest in the Heights from Elgar's The Dream of Garantius, with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Simon Rattle.

Presenter27:51

You left Tintinhall just over a year ago, Penny, and now you're living in Dorset and establishing this garden. What are your your favourite plants? What are you putting in there?'Cause I'm delighted to see from some of the pictures I've seen uh of your gardens that you're fond of of of cat mint and euphobias and all the things we can all grow.

Presenter28:06

I

Penelope Hobhouse28:06

I think although I love collecting things, ordinary plants.

Penelope Hobhouse28:12

are very important. I love Alcamilla.

Penelope Hobhouse28:15

um plants that twine into each other and roses and I really love all plants. I particularly love things like blue salvias because they've really only become available in such quantity in the last ten or twenty years and I love them and they're mostly rather tender, so one grows them from seed or cuttings every year and I love greenhouse work.

Penelope Hobhouse28:36

And of course what I have loved was having the chance to make something that is my own, because much as I love Tintenhall, we worked very much to the design that

Penelope Hobhouse28:47

Phyllis Rice had done, and I admired

Penelope Hobhouse28:50

What she had chosen. I slept in her bedroom, and I felt she would be pleased with what I was doing in the garden, but

Penelope Hobhouse28:58

You know, I've done that now, so now I'm doing what I want.

Presenter29:01

Front.

Penelope Hobhouse29:01

Yeah.

Presenter29:01

And when you think back to Tintinhall, what's the abiding image in your mind's eye when you drift back there?

Penelope Hobhouse29:07

Yeah.

Penelope Hobhouse29:08

I think it's probably the things I miss now with a new garden, because there we had.

Penelope Hobhouse29:14

You perpetually moved from shadow out into sunlight because you had mature trees and big shrubs. I believe in making a garden for anybody from scratch you must put in a few big trees if you can possibly afford it, so you get this feeling of light and shadow, otherwise build a pergola so you can walk from sun into shade and out again. Because those are all the sort of sensations of gardening which are tremendously important to me.

Penelope Hobhouse29:43

Record number seven.

Penelope Hobhouse29:45

This is really it's the words in a way which I love most about this, about the Skylark. It's really a love poem written to music, but it gives one I think the music gives one a sort of feeling of the country and landscape.

Penelope Hobhouse30:00

It ends when I hear the sweet lark sing in the clear air of the day, and he's talking about his love affair and joy, and I think that's very wonderful.

Speaker 230:10

Which you are tired.

Speaker 230:17

Oh my soul

Speaker 230:19

Cause I raised all my faith ye will.

Speaker 230:37

Is that this was

Speaker 230:41

God is joyous in vision as I hear the sweet noxi.

Presenter31:11

The Lark in the Clear Air, sung by Andrew Wicks. I know you've designed gardens for some fairly d drought stricken parts of Europe, Greece and so on, Penny. Can can you grow anything on a desert island? Have you planned it?

Penelope Hobhouse31:23

Yeah.

Presenter31:24

Yeah.

Penelope Hobhouse31:24

I think what I imagine I would be doing is scuffling around to see if any seeds had been washed up by the sea and trying to grow things.

Presenter31:32

Yeah.

Penelope Hobhouse31:32

But you don't mind getting

Presenter31:34

Your hands dirty, as you said, you don't mind being a bit uncomfortable.

Penelope Hobhouse31:37

Yeah.

Presenter31:37

Well, I'm not near

Penelope Hobhouse31:38

nearly as good at being uncomfortable as I used to be. But you're good at weather, you like weather. Yes, I don't mind bad weather. I'm not at all good at do it yourself, although I think under pressure I could probably

Penelope Hobhouse31:51

Marriage. And you're obviously used to being on your own. That's not a problem.

Penelope Hobhouse31:56

Yeah, I don't suppose one likes it all that much. But I'm quite self sufficient, I think, I think. I mean, it's very different being cast away on a desert island to just being alone for

Penelope Hobhouse32:07

you know, short periods of one's life at home. I think this would be rather a different sort of aloneness, wouldn't it? And I hope I would be sufficiently philosophical to cope with it.

Penelope Hobhouse32:18

I think again, it's rather like gardening. I mean, I would be optimistic about being rescued. I don't know that you would survive if you thought it was forever. I think you would feel there was going to be a ship.

Penelope Hobhouse32:28

Hoving into sight quite soon.

Penelope Hobhouse32:31

Last record.

Penelope Hobhouse32:33

The last record is The Heavens Are Telling from Haydn's Creation, and really I'm just having it because I love it and it seems a fitting end.

Penelope Hobhouse32:42

to our discussion.

Speaker 233:11

Run up the sea. We won't understand.

Speaker 233:16

Hey, what?

Speaker 233:17

Never, never

Speaker 233:30

They roll up the sail, they all understood.

Presenter33:44

The heavens are telling from Haydn's creation with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Chorus again conducted by Simon Rattle. If you could only hang on to one of those records, Penny, to take to this island.

Penelope Hobhouse33:55

Well, I think I'd take the Mozart.

Penelope Hobhouse33:58

I think I would find it the most peaceful and the one that would bear the most repetition. Dove sono from the Manager Figaro. What about your book?

Presenter34:04

Nice.

Penelope Hobhouse34:07

Really, the passion of my life is Henry James. I admire his.

Penelope Hobhouse34:12

Writing more than anybody else's, and I thought I would take the one that I think is the most difficult, which is the Golden Bowl.

Penelope Hobhouse34:22

Um because in a way it's a sort of detective story, and I think that you can read it again and again and find different meanings to Henry James's extraordinary sentences. And what about a luxury?

Penelope Hobhouse34:34

I really want to take my laptop computer with me because I would like to try and write a novel. I think if you are a writer who depends on writing very factual things, I think we all have the idea that we would love to write fiction, and I'd like to prove that I have the imagination to do that, so it would seem like a good occupation.

Penelope Hobhouse34:57

Yeah.

Presenter34:57

Penelope Hobhouse, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Speaker 135:08

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Dists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.