Geoffrey Smith

Speaker 30:00

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 30:08

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

Presenter0:30

My castaway this week is a gardener. He grew up in a Yorkshire village. His parents saved hard to send him to a nearby boarding school, but he didn't enjoy it much and left to pursue a career out of doors. In the mid-fifties, he went to work in and masterminded the Harlow Carr Gardens near Harrogate, and it was here over the next twenty years that he made his home, making things grow where not much had grown before. He moved into broadcasting and writing, became a stalwart of Radio 4's gardeners Question Time, and a popular presenter of many television programmes, all of them concerning the living, growing things that he's loved all his life. If I'm depressed, he says, I just go and look at a flower. He is Geoffrey Smith. What does it do for you, Geoffrey, in that moment? The flower.

Geoffrey Smith1:16

I think it makes you realize that that we live in an artificial world.

Geoffrey Smith1:20

And uh the real world is the natural world, the world of nature. And you just need to look at a primrose and and it puts everything in perspective. I was looking at primroses last Saturday night. I stopped at a little valley that I've loved since I was a youngster, where I used to go and watch the badgers. And the bluebells were in flower, and the primroses, and the ransoms, you know, the wild garlic, and the quiet the only sound you could hear was birdsong and the noise of the stream. And I thought I don't need paradise, the Yorkshire Dales'll do for me.

Presenter1:55

And has it always been the same? You were born and brought up in Swaledale, weren't you? Has it always been the same, even when you were a little boy, did it teach you?

Geoffrey Smith2:01

Oh yes. One of the things I can remember plainly is the smell of of the moor after rain.

Geoffrey Smith2:09

Have you ever smelt it the after a dry spell?

Presenter2:12

That sort of peaty smell.

Geoffrey Smith2:12

Sort of peachy smell. That's right, the rain on on dry earth, and it's the smell of growing things. And yes, my mother used to call me a wild animal. I had an intense love of nature, and I can remember her telling the vicar what child would miss his dinner to watch red squirrels playing. And I'd I'd realized that these red squirrels had a a peculiar territorial instinct. And and they would come down it was a beech grove, and there were sphagnum moss mounds of it, and one squirrel would come down when the one from another tree entered his territory, chase him like mad, and the one running away would run fast to begin with, and then realize that it was getting back into its own territory again, and it would turn round and the other one would run away. The chasing would become the chase.

Presenter3:00

What about your garden at home? I mean, did your f your father or your mother tend the garden, and what was in it?

Geoffrey Smith3:05

Oh, my mother was no gardener at all. Can I tell you a story about my mother? There was a dry stone wall round the garden, a big tall one, and I very carefully planted antirhinums into that. And antirhinams grow in nature in very dry places. And they just got established. They were just going to start the flower. And it's the only time I've ever known my mother do any gardening. The only time she took an interest in gardening was when it was on a plate and she had a knife and fork in her hand. And she went and weeded all the antirhinums out. But my memory of home is an abiding memory. Always there were wall flowers under the sitting room windows.

Geoffrey Smith3:46

And when they were in flower in May, my mother used to open the windows, and the perfume from those wall flowers

Geoffrey Smith3:53

Fill the house. And scent is quicker than sight to sound. Just make your memory go click. It really is. Quicker than anything else.

Presenter3:54

Yeah.

Presenter4:00

Quicker than

Presenter4:02

To all in the fragrance.

Geoffrey Smith4:03

Mm.

Presenter4:03

So your mother was a wonderful cook, your dad was head gardener at the big house, it all sounds very story book, very idyllic, and I want to hear more. But um let's hear about your first record.

Geoffrey Smith4:14

And that is Moira Anderson singing the Rowan Tree. It reminds me of my grandmother, who liked to have a Rowan tree and an elder, because she used to say, What is it? The Rowan, the Elder, and Red Thread, they hold the witches all in red.

Speaker 44:33

World Tree, O Tree.

Speaker 44:49

I know my e to

Speaker 45:01

Infants.

Presenter5:03

Moira Anderson singing Rowan Tree. Tell me, uh, Geoffrey Smith, about the garden your father ran at Barningham Park, which was a sort of local stately home, really.

Geoffrey Smith5:11

That's right, yes, the Millbanks Garden. That was a great place to grow up, and it was a great place to to be educated in the fundamentals of gardening, because it was totally organic. The the Lord of the Manor didn't want his I can remember Sir Frederick saying, I don't want my vegetables dowsing with chemicals.

Presenter5:32

How big was it?

Geoffrey Smith5:33

The well, the the parkland where the rhododendrons and and lilies and daffodils and things like that grew, would be about, I should think, thirty acres. There was an enormous walled vegetable garden, fruit all round the walls, peaches, figs, nectarins, nectro peaches, grapes in the greenhouses.

Presenter5:52

Did you get to eat all this?

Geoffrey Smith5:53

Oh yes, because that was part of my father's remuneration, uh which he never abused, that he got fresh vegetables.

Presenter6:00

But did he tell your father what to do in the garden, or did your father tell him what he was doing?

Geoffrey Smith6:02

Or did your father tell

Geoffrey Smith6:04

No Sir Frederick would probably have told the people on the farm what to do, because he was a a very keen farmer, but the head gardener was in charge, no question. Unless the garden is his, Sue, then don't put the man in charge.

Presenter6:19

So there'd be no resentment on his part, the part of your father, that that he was putting his heart and soul into this garden, but it wasn't his.

Geoffrey Smith6:27

It is while you're in charge of it. Harlow Carr was mine. I got to be awfully autocratic there. I took no notice of the of the committee. If if you're paying a professional to do a do a job and you've got to tell him what to do, sack him, lass. Don't don't encourage him, because he if he's dependent on you for his knowledge of what to do, uh, then he's not worth paying. That is true.

Presenter6:52

And and did you, in your relationship with the big house, as it were, do, as was the custom in so many English villages in I think the first half of this century and and longer, have that sort of annual cricket match?

Geoffrey Smith7:04

Oh, that was when you could let the venom go. Not that there was any venom, but th there was always the feeling that uh they thought they could do things better. The one thing they couldn't do was play cricket better than we could. You could fix the pitch, I said. No, we we had a good cricket pitch. They've got a super cricket team still at Barningham. I watched a young fast bowler there last Saturday. Oh, if he doesn't play for Yorkshire I'll give up. But they were splendid games. They smell of linseed oil and and new cut grass and that piece of the parkland. It's a gorgeous setting for a cricket pitch.

Presenter7:18

You could fix the pitch, I suppose.

Presenter7:41

But you'd give them what for, would you?

Geoffrey Smith7:42

Oh, my goodness, yes. Send for the stretcher-bearers, quickly.

Presenter7:47

Record number two.

Geoffrey Smith7:49

That's the Dawn Chorus. That is the only thing uh because the music I've chosen isn't my favourite, it's all evocative, but the dawn chorus is. It's the only tune you never get tired of. Listen to this, switch it on, first thing in the morning on the desert island, wake to blackbird song, if that doesn't bring a tear to your eye, nothing will.

Presenter8:42

The dawn chorus, and there was a cuckoo in there too that I haven't heard so many of those this year.

Geoffrey Smith8:46

No, they I think soon there'll be birds that'll go on the endangered list. There have been co oh, I think green plovers and I think cuckoos. Certainly the I went walking on the moors yesterday afternoon. I do every chance I get. And where in the past, even three years ago, I'd have been mobbed by twenty nesting plovers one. I found one little wee chick, the sound size of a ping pong ball, and I looked at that wee thing. It was totally motionless, except the wind was ruffling its its down. And I thought of that wee scrap of life in the middle of the vastness of the moors.

Presenter8:52

To do ping.

Geoffrey Smith9:25

And it will be sad when we lose them.

Speaker 49:28

Hmm.

Geoffrey Smith9:28

But it's funny, Sue, if ever I want uh suffer from sleeplessness, which God forbid I never will, I will make a recording of hens going to roost, you know, that lovely crooning noise, and a wood pigeon cooing in the background. And if that doesn't make you want to sleep, nothing will.

Presenter9:44

It's all about smells and noises, isn't it, your life? You've obviously you've obviously always been a a free spirit. It's no wonder you hated boarding school. Why was it so awful for you?

Geoffrey Smith9:46

It is, isn't it your lab?

Presenter10:35

And longing to be out.

Geoffrey Smith10:36

And longing to be out there.

Presenter10:37

Did you ever try to run away?

Geoffrey Smith10:39

Oh, no, except at at Wednesday afternoons and Saturday afternoons when I wasn't playing cricket or or rugby football. I walked the length and breadth of Teesdale. And it was only six miles from home because and and if I set off straight after lunch on a Sunday by running very hard I could get home and then I could run very hard back again. That's how I got to be reasonably fit. And my mother used to make a sandwich tin size Yorkshire have you ever had a cold Yorkshire pudding sandwich?

Presenter11:11

No.

Geoffrey Smith11:11

Eatening oh, Sue, you haven't lived and she used to make these, cut them in two, and put slices of whatever meat they'd had for lunch in.

Presenter11:20

Between Yorkshire putting like the bread slices of bread.

Geoffrey Smith11:22

Yeah.

Geoffrey Smith11:23

Uh

Presenter11:23

Slide

Presenter11:24

So was it then really that you decided you just you got to spend your life outdoors? Was that when you decided gardening is what I want to do?

Geoffrey Smith11:31

At fourteen. Now I decided that I would be a a forester, a farmer, or a gardener. And I went into forestry immediately I left. I was asked at fourteen by the my housemaster, Bentley Beatham, what I wanted to be, and I said, As long as I never have to work inside, that will do. I went into forestry commission. I cycled uh on the Stang, which is about oh two and a half, three miles from the village. What's that forest? The um great sweep right up on the Pennines. Those cycle rides to work.

Presenter11:56

What's that? A forest?

Geoffrey Smith12:04

How I cursed having to get up at five o'clock in the morning But those cycle rides live in memory because sometimes the mist had be swimming in the in the valley and the tree tops sticking above it as you climbed up, to see herons standing grey and motionless on the edges of the becks, to hear the curlew call and plover in the springtime, see the lambs coming on the fells in April, see here blackcock lecking, which there were on the Stang in those days and to watch the slow evolution of the seasons.

Presenter12:37

Tell me about record number three.

Geoffrey Smith12:39

Or Harry James, when you're in boarding school.

Geoffrey Smith12:42

The only thing that speaks to you.

Geoffrey Smith12:45

Are the the blues?

Geoffrey Smith12:47

Harry James, Tommy Dorsey, Jeannie Cruper, Fatz Waller, they were the great men of of music of my particular time. I needed uh the expression that the the blues music gives, because that is haunting. Even when it's played at its jazziest, it's expressing uh a lust for freedom that no other music does. You listen to it.

Presenter13:44

Harry James and his music makers playing St. Louis blues. Tell me about long netting, Geoffrey,'cause I think that's something you learned that first summer after leaving school. Just at the end of the war, this would have been, wouldn't it?

Geoffrey Smith13:53

And yet it's still vivid, because I can remember the first night that we went out. I don't know whose terriers there were, but we used to take two terriers and the net would be must have been about a hundred yards long. And you set it up on pegs down a forest ride, and then you put the terriers in, and they're supposed to go round and chase the rabbits into the net. But the first thing into the net always is one of these confounded terriers. I don't know. It never learned sense. And by the time you'd untangled that, of course, fifty percent of the rabbits had gone. But uh we used to long net and and catch rabbits because they were a pestiferous nuisance with the trees. They didn't eat them, they bit the tops out, you know, nipped them.

Presenter14:44

Then you went to work for your dad on a temporary basis, but then you stayed for six years and he kind of trained you really. That was your gardening apprenticeship.

Presenter14:53

It seems odd that you didn't take over from him in the end.

Geoffrey Smith14:55

Oh no um no I he would have been heartbroken if I had.

Presenter15:00

Why?

Presenter15:41

This is horticultural colour.

Geoffrey Smith15:42

That's right, yes. Ask and Brian, yes. The greatest horticultural college, undoubtedly,'cause it's in Yorkshire.

Geoffrey Smith15:50

That's right. And I applied and um

Geoffrey Smith15:54

Loved college. They pressed all the right buttons. Whereas my father had told me to put potash on on fruit trees, he didn't give me a reason why. He told me how taught me how to graft. He didn't tell me about the cambium layers interlocking. And college told me about the chemistry of soils, about the reasons for things growing, about photosynthesis. And suddenly gardening became not just a a pursuit, but a thing that was an ever expanding horizon. And I have never been bored. So not with my job ever.

Presenter16:30

And you passed out with flying colours, all sorts of medals and awards. What did your dad have to say about that?

Geoffrey Smith16:36

Oh, his face lit up. He walked on clouds for about a fortnight. My mother used to keep saying to him, You can come down now, Fred. It's the home

Presenter16:45

Record number four.

Geoffrey Smith16:46

Oh, that is Glenmiller. This is just Sue when the the the last dance of the evening at the village dance, and the girl in question had said yes, you could take her home, and they put moonlight serenade on. If that didn't make your eyes shine, nothing would.

Presenter17:34

The Glen Miller Orchestra and Moonlight Serenade. So dancing with and eventually marriage to Margery. Is she as good a cook as your mother?

Geoffrey Smith17:41

Mm-hmm.

Geoffrey Smith17:44

What was it John Salvey said, Get fate on the table, lad, and if she can coke you right.

Presenter17:50

So you tested her cooking first.

Geoffrey Smith17:51

Oh yes, she used to come out to our house and I used to go to hers, of course. And uh all the home made bread and Yorkshire puddings that float. You don't have to lift them out of the tin. They float onto the plate. Yes, she's a good cook.

Presenter18:04

And what about the gardening? Does she help you?

Geoffrey Smith18:06

No, no, she's not interested in the slightest. Or is she not allowed? No, I would encourage her. I mean, the weeding and the pricking out. I I'd gladly uh leave someone else to do that.

Presenter18:09

Or is she not allowed?

Presenter18:19

I know you believe in organic gardening, and you've mentioned it several times. A lot of people would say they'd like to to grow organically, but they just can't. You know, the slugs will eat your spinach or your hostas, the green fly and the black fly and the white fly smother your petunias or your roses, and the red ants ruin the lawn. You can't do it.

Geoffrey Smith18:38

That if you get the balance right, you can. You see, how I would ask those people that say you can't do it how we did it at Barningham. There was no poison. The only spray we used was a tar oil winter watch, which is accepted as being organically based by the Soil Association. Everything else had to be grown on farm manure and compost. It was all

Presenter19:05

So how did you keep those pests at bay, then?

Geoffrey Smith19:07

We'd had no problems. Harlow Carr was the same way. I did trials for the Royal National Rose Society for the whole of the time I was there. And people used to say you've got green fly on the roses. And I would say not for long and they were judged by people like Miller Galt.

Presenter19:23

What, it just went away by itself?

Geoffrey Smith19:25

No, the natural predators came, you see. You've got l if you start spraying, then you're going to kill the predators. You're going to kill the ladybirds, you're going to kill the lacewings, you're going to kill the hoverflies. In an organic world, there's a balance. You get a build-up of pests, you get a build-up of predators, and it all works. But once you start spraying, you kick and when you kick the greenfly and the caterpillars out of the food chain, you're depriving blue tits, for example, of the food, the high-protein diet for the young. And once you do that, you've you've shattered a very, very carefully balanced ecological system.

Presenter20:03

So you would say to people, put up with the pests because eventually they'll take care of you.

Geoffrey Smith20:07

It'll be a buildup. It'll take about three years to get your garden into balance, then your home and dry. And your garden will be a lot more fun.

Presenter20:15

Next piece of music.

Geoffrey Smith20:15

Yeah.

Presenter20:15

Yeah.

Geoffrey Smith20:15

Yeah.

Geoffrey Smith20:16

Oh, this is uh uh the Royal Regiment playing Distant Hills. One of my favourite walks is from Barnard Castle, Lartington, Cuddherston. Stop at the Wee Pub in Cutherston, have Whitby cod and chips, and the cod is so big that the North Sea goes down two inches when they pull it out, and then walk up to Rummelkirk. And I was about a mile and a half out of Barney, and I heard the bagpipes, and there across the river, there was a man, there's a a house that used to be a gamekeeper's cottage, and he was playing the pipes in full regalia there, and he was playing the distant hills, and the river tees in the foreground, the great vista of Teesdale in the in the distant view, and the bagpipes, ya.

Presenter22:01

The Royal Regiment playing distant hills. Now, Geoffrey Smith, Harlowe Carr Gardens, the Wisley of the North, it's been called, and that was where you eventually settled and stayed for twenty years, sixty eight acres on the edge of Harrogate.

Geoffrey Smith22:11

Yeah.

Presenter22:13

It had to be built, I think, for the Northern Horticultural Society, and not to put too fine a point on it, you were the man who built it, really, weren't you?

Geoffrey Smith22:20

Yes, I there was nothing there really when I went. It was just rough pasture. I'll tell you a story about the farmer leaning over the wall and uh saying to me, Neh, lad, you'll not grow anything. He said, My cow stand up to the tits in mud in that lot. You'll not grow anything there. But he was wrong.

Presenter22:39

'Cause it was windswept stony. Car means stony, doesn't it?

Geoffrey Smith22:43

That's right, and or a boggy piece of ground. And what we had to do was blanket the the window. We sold scrap metal a lads and I the Ukrainians want to pack in gardening and go in for scrap metal dealing to get enough These were the workers, Ukrainians. Oh yes, without those two Ukrainians, Harlow Carr wouldn't have been.

Presenter22:56

These were the workers you grew up.

Geoffrey Smith23:02

They were the most ingenious, likable lads you could possibly have worked with. They got me into more mischief than I care to think about.

Presenter23:02

Yeah.

Presenter23:09

But they sold scrap metal to raise money.

Geoffrey Smith23:10

I missed

Presenter23:11

To create the garden.

Geoffrey Smith23:11

To create

Geoffrey Smith23:12

to get the trees to plant the arboretum. And one of the committee members, a man called Seekson Thompson, a splendid man uh found out and he said, How much did you raise? and I said, a hundred and fifty pounds. He said, I'll double it. And that's how the arboretum, the the ten acres at the far end of the garden

Presenter23:31

Mm.

Geoffrey Smith23:31

The west side where the wind comes from was planted.

Presenter23:34

But a lot of people thought you were on a hiding to nothing, didn't they? A lot of people gave you seeds'cause they thought, you know, you'll never grow this.

Geoffrey Smith23:37

Oh yeah, the

Geoffrey Smith23:38

That's right.

Geoffrey Smith23:40

I can remember the man from Downlands Nursery giving me immense support. Sam McCrady from Ireland, Billy Douglas, God bless Billy Douglas if ever uh sent me enormous quantities of roses. And uh Dick Milne Redhead from Holden Clough Nursery gave me a thousand pounds worth of alpines over the years. Now this sort of support you you can't buy.

Presenter24:03

So all these experts were were trying to help you. They weren't just they were challenging you, but they were encouraging you as well.

Geoffrey Smith24:06

challenging you but they

Geoffrey Smith24:09

I bathed in a rich soup of horticulture. The best brains in gardening came to Harlow Car. Willie Laycock on North American things like shortiers and schizoccordons and and epigee repens, all these things that are difficult to grow. I grew short years at Harlowe out of ignorance. I had them in a bed in what we call birchwood too. And they grew like the green bay tree. Difficult, rare plants. I didn't know about it. I just grew them like anything else. And then the Scottish Rock Garden Club came round. And they were down on the hands and knees. How do you do it? And I started taking care of them and they all died, which which proved something.

Presenter24:48

Uh So it was your creation, though, this really. I mean, obviously, with help, but.

Geoffrey Smith24:52

Oh, with guarding hands from from real gardeners.

Presenter24:55

But basically you grew it, and as you've said yourself, it grew you.

Geoffrey Smith24:58

Yourself

Geoffrey Smith24:59

And we built it, yes, with stone pulled off the moor, you see.

Presenter25:02

But you became, as you've said, autocratic about it. Do you think you overstepped the mark? You fell out with the committee and

Geoffrey Smith25:05

Oh you do.

Geoffrey Smith25:09

No, that wasn't over the the making of the garden. That was over putting a motel on the edge of the garden and giving part of the garden away to the hoteliers. It fell through, but oh, no, that was the sad part. I should have left immediately, instead of waiting two years to give my notice in.

Presenter25:19

Fells

Presenter25:27

But you did go in the end. It must have broken your heart.

Geoffrey Smith25:28

It must have been

Geoffrey Smith25:30

Not really. I it was getting I was having to work too much in an office.

Presenter25:35

Hmm.

Presenter25:36

Next piece of music.

Geoffrey Smith25:38

Motherfucker.

Geoffrey Smith25:40

Yes, they've all got we must have that. The Ukrainians again. We did a lot of hard work. We had to lift big stones on a block and tackle.

Geoffrey Smith25:52

And the Ukrainians thought the vulgar boatman was just right when you're heaving on a train, you know on a chain rather. The rhythm is just right. And they taught us the words, as they told me, and it was DOBRCE

Geoffrey Smith26:09

And this went on for I think eighteen months, two years, until one day we were hauling a big stone upon the streamside, and a woman walking across the other side of the t stream suddenly stopped, looked absolutely startled out of her wits, came back, said something to me I didn't understand, and I pau pointed to Johnny, and a great flood of, I presume, Polish or Ukrainian, and Johnny didn't look up. His ears went bright red under his cap.

Geoffrey Smith26:35

And when she'd gone, I said what was all that about. He said, Well, she was saying that she'd never heard six men complimenting her on the quality of her breast at the top of her voice as before.

Geoffrey Smith26:48

And apparently Dobracetta doesn't mean what I thought it meant. After that we stuck to Yoho He Ho. I thought that's safer.

Speaker 426:54

Well, I thought that's it.

Presenter27:28

The Vulgar Boatman Song. You've um done so much broadcasting, Geoffrey, radio and television, food for thought, gardener's question time, of course, mister Smith's Vegetable Garden, Geoffrey Smith's World of Flowers, and so on.

Presenter27:40

You've done, particularly on television, I think, some of the longest and most fluent pieces to camera I've ever seen. I saw you, for example, describe about how the Peony got its name. Would you learn it? Would you write it first? How would you do it?

Geoffrey Smith27:51

No, no. I tell you about that, Peony, at the Temple of Apollo. Um I got up very early in the morning to get the mood of the thing, and I walked up on the hills. I felt history seeping through my very pores, and I was more, uh, I think, of that era than I was myself. And talking about how Apollo he needed an assistant, and this lad, uh, Peon, came to to help him. Got to be so good that the old boy got jealous. But Peon, fortunately, had healed Pluto, the big chief in the underworld, of a mortal wound, and uh Pluto discovered that that the lad was going to be murdered, and he changed him into a flower.

Presenter28:12

Uh

Speaker 428:12

Uh

Geoffrey Smith28:34

And that flower was the peony, and that's why peonies have healing in all the parts, you see.

Presenter28:38

You say you felt history.

Presenter28:40

You know, in within you, it's true, isn't it, that people have been gardening since I don't know, Florida.

Geoffrey Smith28:47

Since Adam was a lad. Yeah. Mhm. And uh that we are part. And particularly when you're cultivating certain flowers, peonies are one. But I think more than anything else, grapes and figs are the two things that speak to me and as if I'm holding hands with uh sort of Pliny the Elder and all the other ancient gardeners.

Presenter28:48

Yeah, mm-hmm.

Presenter29:08

Record number seven.

Geoffrey Smith29:10

Oh, this is Piper in the Meadow.

Geoffrey Smith29:13

That was the signature tune for the Mr. Smith programme. And ah, the memories that that conjures up. Do you know when I first heard it? I was playing cricket for Troon down in Cornwall and uh the lads had gone off uh to have a couple of beers and I walked up over the the sward above Falmouth and there was a I think it was the Truro Silver Band, Youth Orchestra playing and I was watching the Red Wings, you know, the sailing dinghies come in across the bay. And I suddenly heard this music and I thought that's magic.

Geoffrey Smith29:45

And then we were down at Charston and they were cutting the programmes together because there were ten programmes in each of the series. And I was lacking about and I thought Arthur Smith, the cameraman, had put his camera away. I had a marrow over my shoulder and I was swaggering down the path and whistling Piper in the Meadow. And Brian Davis said, It fits your footsteps. We'll use it.

Presenter31:11

Piper in the Meadow, played by the Yorkshire Imperial Band conducted by Major Peter Parkes. Now here's some desert island questions for you, Geoffrey. What's the most important tool or aid that a gardener has?

Geoffrey Smith31:23

It's got to be a knife, hasn't it? You could make everything else except a really good knife, and it's astonishing. People say spades and push holes, but you could carve a spade out of wood, couldn't you? or chip one out of flint. But a knife to me would be the indispensable tool.

Presenter31:41

And if you could only garden vegetables, which would you choose?

Geoffrey Smith31:45

I would have to have no, I would grow brassicas. Yes, I would grow cabbages and cauliflowers, because when they flower they're beautiful, they're good to eat, and out of one

Presenter31:51

Uh

Geoffrey Smith31:56

Prassica oloresia I could propagate cauliflowers, sprouting broccoli, second only in quality to to asparagus cabbages, you could get the whole lot out of one. And think of the fun of hybridizing, playing with the butterflies.

Presenter32:12

And if you could only grow one flower.

Geoffrey Smith32:14

Primrose.

Presenter32:15

Mm.

Geoffrey Smith32:16

That's the thread right through. John Clare had it, you know, uh when he said it's the flowers that we plucked as we sat on the doorstep that remain our love right through the rest of our lives. And he was talking about daisies or daisies. But primroses, I've known primroses, they are so complete. The quality of the flower, the gentle loveliness, the perfume, that marriage between green of leaf and soft yellow of flower. Yeah. And they're so uh optimistic primroses, aren't they?

Presenter32:47

Last record.

Geoffrey Smith32:49

Trioche, the the male voice choir, I wish I could sing. I remember going to listen to the triochi in the in the royal hall in Harrogate, and they sang and they sang, and then the caretakers wanted to shut the shop up and go home, and the master of ceremonies came to the front of the stage and he said, We've got to go now. But he said, If you all come to the pub across the road, he said, We'll go on singing there.

Speaker 433:33

His shall love.

Speaker 434:03

So I see the world does

Presenter34:14

The Triorkie Male Choir singing Psalm twenty three, The Lord is My Shepherd, conducted by John Cunnan Jones. If you could only take one of those eight records, Geoffrey, which one would you take?

Geoffrey Smith34:24

Dawn Chorus. It's the only one you wouldn't get tired of.

Presenter34:25

Magic.

Presenter34:28

What about your book as well as the Bible and Shakespeare?

Geoffrey Smith34:31

I want the history of viticulture, of vine growing, with instructions on how to make the wine.

Presenter34:39

Is that connected then with your luxury?

Geoffrey Smith34:41

I want you to go out to the best vineyard you can find, and bring me back a bundle of the prunings.

Geoffrey Smith34:48

And then I would spend the years learning a whole new skill.

Geoffrey Smith34:53

Planting a vineyard

Geoffrey Smith34:54

I know how to prune grapes, harvesting the grapes, making the wine, and then in the evening, so I would sit on the beach on a comfortable chair made by myself, and I'd watch the sun go down, and I'd sip a glass of my own wine, and uh I would think of all the people rushing around in the world, sucking in traffic fumes, busied to death, stressed out of the mind.

Geoffrey Smith35:20

Now thank you for dropping me on the desert island.

Presenter35:23

Geoffrey Smith, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Speaker 335:35

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