Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Desert Island Discs
Presented by Kirsty Young
A garden designer known for creating gardens from Scotland to Israel to Japan and for museum exhibitions of his work.
Eight records
Marvin Gaye Got to Give It Up and it's always a trap whenever it comes on that makes me want to dance and I love to dance and I'm imagining that I might have just eaten, I've got sand between my toes on the island and what's beautiful about this piece is that it's got a built-in audience so I've got all these people who are in that flickering light of the bonfire helping me enjoy this piece too.
Fela Kuti, one of the things I love about his music is it always takes a very long and slow time to build. And I see it very graphically as it's building and evolving. And it's very much like the way I put my planting plans together. So you get one thing providing you with a bass note that may continue or drop off. You get something else coming in to allow a contrast. There's a tremendous energy in this music that always sweeps me along. So I'd be really very happy to have this wonderful long 12 minute track with me on the island.
Cape Bush Under the Ivy is just a very simple song. It's a story about going into a garden which is overgrown with ivy and it always reminds me of Hill Cottage, this wonderful place that we were brought up in, the place that was my place of discovery.
I love Jeff Buckley's music. I think he has a tremendous capacity to sweep you into a piece. And this piece, the Corpus Christi Carol, is set to a Benjamin Britton version. It's an exquisitely sung, perfectly beautiful piece that always teeters me on the edge of tears every time I hear it. And I'll be very, very happy to be sitting there enjoying that as part of my experience of being alone.
This is David Bowie Wild as the Wind. When I was trying to select my music, I was looking at the Nina Simone version of Wild as the Wind. And I'd been torn because I've listened to so much David Bowie over the years. And when I alighted upon Wild as the Wind, it kind of knocked Nina out. And I was very interested when I started reading up about why he recorded it. And he'd been to see her in Los Angeles and have met her and been so inspired by her that he'd recorded it for himself. And I just think this is the most beautiful, beautiful love song. You know, one line in it, you're spring to me, you're all things to me, your life itself. It's just such an amazing thing.
Nick Drake is an artist I wished had lived longer. I know all his music and listen to it a lot, but Riverman always comes back as being a central piece. I think it has a lovely languid quality, his voice is so strong, the guitar is powerful and there's this wonderful string sequence that sweeps you away and allows you to be lost in this beautiful song.
Vespro della Beata Vergine (Gloria Patri)Favourite
La Petite Bande / Les Arts Florissants (members)
The Monteverdi Vespers are a magical, absolutely magical piece of music. And I lost my lovely dad in March last year. And when we were selecting music for his funeral, I went through his music collection and found the Vespers, which I'd remembered and must have been deep inside me. And I love the fact that you've got these two voices calling to each other and responding. And I imagine myself maybe sat on the edge of a lagoon with this sound calling from one side of the bay to the other, feeling very happy to be part of the human race.
This is Grace Jones, and my mum brought this into the house. She did a fashion show for her students every year at Winchester. And she used to run up and down our living room, pretending to be on the catwalk, to check the timing for the show. And I remember her doing this to this fantastic album. And I went to see Grace Jones a few years ago, and she's just such a larger-than-life, enormous, charismatic person. I couldn't be on the island without her.
The keepsakes
The book
an encyclopedia of plants of the region
Plants can be your ally, and I certainly don't want them to be working against me. I want to know what's around me and how to use it, and I would find that endlessly fascinating.
The luxury
the contents of my potting shed
The luxury it's maybe a big ask, but I was wondering if I could take the contents of my potting shed.
In conversation
Presenter asks
What do you think gardens, our gardens, are for?
I think they are a place of escape and a place of immersion. They're somewhere where you can be yourself completely. I think they provide you with an enormous amount of freedom, and I've always found that that's the place that I've felt happiest and most myself.
Presenter asks
What were your specific aims in designing the garden for Maggie's Cancer Centre at Charing Cross Hospital?
We had an amazing client and really good connection with the architects. And they do, through the inclusion of gardens in every project that they've done, draw this connection between the power of greenery and living things that have their own pace and their own life force and their ability to allow you to connect with something that has its own momentum, that is going to continue regardless of whether you're there or not. And one of the things we wanted to do was to make the garden really wrap and be part of the building. So you have a walk through greenery and through trees and through shadows to get to the front door.
Presenter asks
The recording
Timestamps play the recording from that turn
Presenter
Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.
Presenter
For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.
Presenter
My castaway this week is the gardener Dan Pearson, although to call him just a gardener is like saying Pavarotti could hold a tune. He's designed gardens everywhere from Scotland to Israel to Japan, and has had entire museum exhibitions devoted to his work.
Presenter
Informality, evolution, and a sense of belonging permeate his compositions. He's exhibited at the Chelsea Flower Show five times, winning a medal on every single occasion.
Presenter
One gets the feeling it was only ever going to turn out this way. Aged six, he would sit up in bed scouring plant catalogues. A little later it was among the rock gardens and rhododendrons of RHS Wisley that his fingers really began to green.
Presenter
Having won a scholarship to study in the Himalayan Valley of the Flowers, it was the legendary Rosemary Veri who presented him with his diploma when he graduated from Kew.
Presenter
He says For those of us who choose to garden
Presenter
There's nothing quite like the feeling of freedom that comes when you combine the cerebral with the physical. And so, um, Dan Pearson, I wonder what you think gardens, our gardens, are for?
Dan Pearson
I think they are a place of escape and a place of immersion. They're somewhere where you can be yourself completely. I think they provide you with an enormous amount of freedom, and I've always found that that's the place that I've felt happiest and most myself.
Presenter
And so you believe firmly in your planting in a sort of naturalism, letting nature take the lead, if not indeed take over. I read that you you have no truck with variegated hostas. What's the problem?
Dan Pearson
I think variegation often leads to confusion and I think one of the things I'm aiming to do with the gardens I'm making is to create places which are tranquil, which are allowing you to escape from that clutter, that hubbub. And therefore I've always been drawn to plants which are on the wild side, drawn to gardens which are on the wild side, which feel like they might be just tumbling into something quite primitive and unmuddled with.
Dan Pearson
The way I garden is to let things go almost to the brink of being lost, and that's often quite a frightening thing to do. It s often unnerves my clients.
Presenter
Um let's go to your list then. Your your list is so sort of wound through your whole idea of life and how you garden and how you see the world. Do you play music in your garden to enhance the experience?
Dan Pearson
I don't. I never confuse the outside world with music. I'd much rather listen to a wood pigeon, or the sound of seeds pinging out of pods on a hot day.
Dan Pearson
For me, music is something that uh it's an escape that's to do with being inside.
Presenter
Are you appalled by the thought that you know you can get those rocks now that look like speakers and you can plant them in the rock?
Presenter
Horrific, isn't it?
Presenter
Tell us about this first disc this morning, wha why have you chosen this and what is it?
Dan Pearson
This is Marvin Gaye Got to Give It Up and it's always a trap whenever it comes on that makes me want to dance and I love to dance and I'm imagining that I might have just eaten, I've got sand between my toes on the island and what's beautiful about this piece is that it's got a built-in audience so I've got all these people who are in that flickering light of the bonfire helping me enjoy this piece too.
Presenter
That was Marvin Gaye and got to give it up. So, Dan Pearson, you created a garden for Maggie's Cancer Centre at Charing Cross Hospital in London. What were your specific aims in doing that?
Dan Pearson
Well, we had an amazing client and really good connection with the architects. And they do, through the inclusion of gardens in every project that they've done, draw this connection between the power of greenery and living things that have their own pace and their own life force and their ability to allow you to connect with something that has its own momentum, that is going to continue regardless of whether you're there or not. And one of the things we wanted to do was to make the garden really wrap and be part of the building. So you have a walk through greenery and through trees and through shadows to get to the front door.
Presenter
And have you ever sat in the garden with any of the centre's users and asked them what they thought about it?
Dan Pearson
I have, I have, and it was really fascinating. I befriended a woman called Kath who lived to see the garden completed. And during the time that I was making the garden, I spent quite some time with her. And she described the importance of every single moment being a moment that might be your last one. So blossom swelling and then popping and then dropping and the petals falling, how important those moments were. And I learned through working with her how really time becomes something very precious that's viewed through the way that things grow and move through the seasons. And the users that I've spent time within the centre have said to me on more than one occasion that they look out of the window and they're taken away from themselves, they're taken transported, which is what I'm aiming to do with the garden really, into a place that feels free of their immediate issues. And they've said that the gardens have allowed them to continue, just simply continue, and take one step at a time and move on to the next day, and that they have got an enormous amount out of that building garden connection.
Presenter
Let's have your next piece of music then, Pearson. Tell me about this.
Dan Pearson
Fellow Kuti, one of the things I love about his music is it always takes a very long and slow time to build. And I see it very graphically as it's building and evolving. And it's very much like the way I put my planting plans together. So you get one thing providing you with a bass note that may continue or drop off. You get something else coming in to allow a contrast. There's a tremendous energy in this music that always sweeps me along. So I'd be really very happy to have this wonderful long 12 minute track with me on the island.
Presenter
That was Water, No Get Enemy from Fella Cutty. I'm sorry, Dan Pearson. It is a very long track. You get all of it on the island, though. You'll be glad to know. Tell me then about the very first.
Presenter
little bit of garden that you ever worked on?
Dan Pearson
I had um a troll collection when I was or I only had about one troll at a time.
Presenter
True, like the little dolls, the little with the crazy hair.
Dan Pearson
With the crazy hair.
Presenter
Yeah.
Dan Pearson
and the constant smile. And I used to make troll gardens, which were basically three bricks with a slate and then a roof on the top. And after a while, I was probably about five, I realized that actually the gardens were much more interesting than the trolls were, because the things that were on the top were growing. And I was incredibly lucky to have very supportive parents. My mother grew the vegetables and dad grew the flowers. And we had a wonderful neighbour called Geraldine Noyes, who was a retired history teacher. And she said, come into my garden whenever you want, the doors always open. And she had this amazing garden. She was a naturalist.
Presenter
So this then, you say around about five, that would have been the m the mid sixties. You were born in nineteen sixty four, and it seems to me that your parents your father was a fine art lecturer and also a painter himself, and your mother had a background in uh textiles and design. Was your house inside? Was it full of your dad's paintings and your your mum's work?
Dan Pearson
Um it was a ma a house of makers, really. Mum was always making something, and Dad had a studio in the garden which he'd go out and retreat into that smelt of oil paint and you know all those lovely things that you remember from being a kid. And he would spend time with us in there if we wanted, but we kind of roamed around in the garden.
Presenter
And so this garden was in Hampshire. Was it was it a a was it a big garden? Was it a fancy garden?
Dan Pearson
No, it was a a fairly modestly sized garden in a collection of houses in Woodland and we actually moved from that house along the lane to this extraordinary garden in 1976. It was an acre that had been overwhelmed and overgrown and an old lady called Miss Joy used to come out of the hole in the hedge every autumn with her windfalls and homemade hats and she was a wonderful decrepit character, quite frightening. And when Miss Joy eventually had a series of strokes, my mum managed to get us in to help clear the house up and the house was the most extraordinary place with curtains rotted up from the floor and a keebia vine that had got in underneath the skirting board inside the house and the old lady who'd lived there had planted the garden very beautifully we discovered as we started clearing the garden. So for me it was a complete paradise because we'd clear, you know, fell a laurel or push through some bamboo and find a winter sweet growing in brambles beyond it. We had this wonderful magical thing underneath all the undergrowth.
Presenter
So many people listening want to go back and have your childhood, I think. That's absolutely extraordinary.
Dan Pearson
Yeah, no, I'm extremely lucky.
Presenter
Let's have your third. Tell me about this, why have you chosen this one?
Dan Pearson
Well, this is very timely actually because Cape Bush Under the Ivy is just a very simple song. It's a story about going into a garden which is overgrown with ivy and it always reminds me of Hill Cottage, this wonderful place that we were brought up in, the place that was my place of discovery.
Speaker 4
I sit here in the thunder, the green on the grey, I feel it all around me.
Dan Pearson
All around.
Speaker 4
And it's not easy for me to give away a secret.
Speaker 4
It's not safe.
Speaker 4
Go into the gun.
Speaker 4
Go under the I V.
Presenter
That was Kate Bush and Under the Ivy. Gardening, Dan Pearson, can be a very solitary pursuit, and sometimes it's all the better for that. You are the older of two brothers. How would you describe yourself as a little boy? Quite solitary?
Dan Pearson
Yes, I was very happy being alone in the garden, and I did have my friends, but they were all all adults, and I didn't really feel like I needed friends. I felt like a misfit at school. I didn't really get school until I went to a middle school.
Presenter
And what made you when you say you felt like a misfit, what what what made you uncomfortable?
Dan Pearson
I just felt different. I didn't feel like I had anything in common with my peers at that point. I kept my gardening, for instance, very private. Nobody knew that I did it. And later on, when I was a teenager, people did know and they didn't understand. They thought I was slightly curious. And I did have friends at school, but the friends that really first connected with me was this amazing family called the Williamsons, who came to live opposite us. And they were from Australia. They arrived in the mid-70s, and they were completely feral. There were four kids. The eldest daughter played a flute in the trees, and they took up growing Jacob's sheep in a domestic garden immediately. And Ruth, the mother, plucked the wool and spun all their socks and jumpers. And the Williamsons were a kind of free family, and I just totally loved it. There was nobody like that at school, and I became great friends with Peter, who was my age. And we had quite a wild time climbing trees and building camps and all those things that kids do.
Presenter
It's interesting that throughout your life there have been so many women who seem to have been your mentors. There was a very early mentor, when you were aged about ten, you were allowed to go and work in really work in the garden of a lady called Mrs. Pumphrey.
Dan Pearson
Well, Mrs Pumphrey was she was a fantastic character. Her husband was a captain, absolutely charming couple, and they opened their garden to the public. And I was allowed to do anything that she felt I was capable of, and quite quickly she realised I knew what I was doing, or mostly, and she'd pushed me hard to learn. And then my mother introduced me to a woman called Frances Mossman when I was seventeen, who was teaching fashion with Mum at Winchester College of Art, and she gave me my first opportunity to make a garden when I was seventeen.
Presenter
And in those teenage years, just winding back a bit from the age of seventeen, I mean, I imagine if I said to uh any of my teenage kids, you know, I'm going to take you to Sissinghurst and I want to show you the splendours of the
Dan Pearson
Rose Garden. I mean, your parents did that with you. That was my treat. My dad and my time, you know, and he took me to the Chelsea Flower Show when I was a teenager as well.
Presenter
Can you remember particularly anything that stood out for you?
Dan Pearson
Oh, Beth Chatto, of course, was absolutely the one stand that I connected with because she was growing plants that were on the wild side, with things alongside them that I I knew worked.
Presenter
Let's have some more music, Dan Pearson. This is your fourth of the morning. Why this choice?
Dan Pearson
I love Jeff Buckley's music. I think he has a tremendous capacity to sweep you into a piece. And this piece, the Corpus Christi Carol, is set to a Benjamin Britton version. It's an exquisitely sung, perfectly beautiful piece that always teeters me on the edge of tears every time I hear it. And I'll be very, very happy to be sitting there enjoying that as part of my experience of being alone.
Presenter
Jeff Buckley with Corpus Christi Carroll. The importance of apprenticeships is heralded these days as the great new thing. You're a great advert for being an apprentice because you did not do A-levels, but you went to be an apprentice, is that right?
Dan Pearson
Yeah, no, I I kind of got slightly lost at school and I really found it much more satisfying being in the garden. And mum had, I think, said to me when I was studying for my A levels, the start of my A levels, and I was going to go to art college,
Dan Pearson
Why don't you follow your heart? And it was the best thing that anybody ever said to me, because what I was thinking was that I couldn't do my passion, or I shouldn't do my passion as a profession. And she said, Well, why on earth not?
Presenter
So you went to the Royal Horticultural Society then as an apprentice, and you began a bit of travelling. You went to the Picos Mountains in Spain, and you've said before that that there you experienced a you did say an epiphany.
Dan Pearson
Hmm.
Presenter
What happened?
Dan Pearson
I spent some time walking up mountainsides, from meadows through fringes of woodland up to snow melt, seeing things growing in the wild in natural combinations. And suddenly everything made sense. When you see a plant growing in the wild, you know what it likes and why it grows there and what it grows with. And I knew at that point that I wanted to garden like that, to emulate nature in the way that I garden.
Presenter
How did you end up in the Himalayas, and what did you do there?
Dan Pearson
When I went to Kew, I went to study at Kew for three years, my partner there, Jane, was a fantastic explorer. She inspired us really to go on these exciting trips. And we went off to the Himalayas, to a valley called the Valley of Flowers, which was deep into the Himalayas, and had a hair-raising journey getting there, with people singing prayers on the way up, one wheel hanging off the edge of a precipice on the coach, and then a long, long walk up with altitude sickness and the rest. And I'd read about this valley, and when I saw it, as far as you could see, there were sweeps and drifts of podentillas and Cypripedium orchids and persicarias and enormous quantities of things stretching five miles into the distance.
Speaker 2
Which was
Presenter
What time of the year was this then?
Dan Pearson
This was in July, it was in monsoon, so you'd walk up through the clouds and for a moment they'd part in the day and you'd see what you thought were the tips of the mountains and then another cloud would part and you'd just see another crag above you and it would just go on and on and on. And this feeling of magnitude and this is where my inspiration has come from for what I want to try and capture in a garden, this sense of being in a place that transports you, that moves you, that is also of course in balance.
Presenter
With any garden that you've ever designed then, have you been able to stand in it and think, I've captured it I have that same, even just momentarily, that same feeling as when I stood in that valley in the Himalayas?
Dan Pearson
I think I have. I think I have. And that's something you're constantly striving for. So those moments can often be just ten seconds, you know, when the light's just right. You know it's never going to happen again. But for that moment you think, Yes, I've done it. I've done it for now.
Presenter
Let's have some more music. It's your fifth. Tell me about this.
Dan Pearson
This is David Bowie Wild as the Wind. When I was trying to select my music, I was looking at the Nina Simone version of Wild as the Wind. And I'd been torn because I've listened to so much David Bowie over the years. And when I alighted upon Wild as the Wind, it kind of knocked Nina out. And I was very interested when I started reading up about why he recorded it. And he'd been to see her in Los Angeles and have met her and been so inspired by her that he'd recorded it for himself. And I just think this is the most beautiful, beautiful love song. You know, one line in it, you're spring to me, you're all things to me, your life itself. It's just such an amazing thing.
Speaker 4
Worth your guests my life again
Speaker 4
Your screen retained
Speaker 4
To me.
Speaker 4
Don't you know your life
Speaker 4
It's so
Speaker 4
Like the
Presenter
That was David Burry, and Wild is the Wind. Whilst you were a student, Dan Pearce, I understand you lived on a houseboat. That sounds very romantic. How wasn't she?
Dan Pearson
It was romantic, it was also a disaster because we bought the boat with the idea of living cheap, you know, while we were students and bought a boat with one hundred and thirty seven feet of rotten planking and it was a wonderful idea and I'm a romantic at heart, so I was caught by the romance.
Presenter
Was it quite a strange idea to be on the water? I mean, I think of you being so rooted in the land that to be floating on the water must have
Dan Pearson
That's a really good observation, actually. I I found it quite disturbing, I think, that idea of it being something that was so transitory and without roots, and I still have nightmares about it sinking.
Dan Pearson
But it was an education.
Presenter
And you say we went to Israel. Who was that you went to Israel with?
Dan Pearson
I went with Jane, with my partner at Kew, and went to work in the Botanic Garden there and spent every weekend on a bus, ending up where the bus finished, wherever that might be. It was a wonderful way of exploring landscape and I've grown to love deserts and spaces that allow you a freedom in your mind because of their openness.
Presenter
One of the biggest spaces that you first worked on was the garden of Frances Mossman. There was a television series that was centred around it that was broadcast in two thousand one about you you building this magnificent uh garden at home farm. I mean for any gardener, however experienced they are, they're always sort of in the end often confounded by nature. What were the things that you wanted to do that that didn't come to fruition?
Dan Pearson
We built the pond at last, and the pond was the thing that we'd been building the courage to do all the time that we'd been experimenting. And the pond created a heart within the garden, and it allowed us to bring all this wildlife that came wriggling along all the hedgerows out into what became a hub and create a space that we moved around very naturally and the gardens became less and less relevant to this wild thing in the centre. Again, another very good little learning curve, and I'll often start on the biggest thing first with my clients as a result of doing that last there.
Presenter
You had built a little pond as a very young boy with your dad, hadn't you? You did a little pond in the garden.
Dan Pearson
Yes, Dad was a fantastic supporter of me in the garden, and he and I built a pond which was four foot by six foot with a marginal shelf around the back. And I remember lying with my night light on in bed looking at this very dry pond catalogue with numbers for water lilies and marginal plants and oxygenators. And I remember them very vividly coming in these little muddy bags, you know, with these little embryos of growth and putting them into this cloudy water. And then looking into the pond like a lens for the whole of that summer and eventually this lens clearing as the pond stabilised and became balanced and this life that just happened within it that was beyond my control, it was, I suppose, the next step on from the roof gardens I'd made for my trolls. It was that connection with nature and being able to steer something very gently and be connected to it as a result of doing that.
Presenter
Let's have some more music. Tell me about this sixth disc of the morning.
Dan Pearson
Nick Drake is an artist I wished had lived longer. I know all his music and listen to it a lot, but Riverman always comes back as being a central piece. I think it has a lovely languid quality, his voice is so strong, the guitar is powerful and there's this wonderful string sequence that sweeps you away and allows you to be lost in this beautiful song.
Speaker 4
If he tells me all he knows About the way this river flows
Speaker 4
An all-night show
Speaker 4
Summertime.
Presenter
Nick Drake and Riverman. Tell me, Dan Pearson We've been out in the wilds, but I need to wrangle you right back into the the centre of London, to Vauxhall, in fact. You ended up in the early nineties living in Bonington Square. How did you end up there?
Dan Pearson
I had a life-changing thing that happened to me in my mid-twenties when I met my current partner, Hugh, and he lived in Bonington Square, which is this extraordinary little enclave. And it's a place where they dug up the pavements to plant things in the street, and there were vines around the windows, and it was still semi-derelict. There was a party house, there was a house that had, for a while, a dead sheep hanging in it as an installation, and it was somewhere where I met a wonderful group of people that really allowed me to feel.
Dan Pearson
In my shell, my own skin, for the first time. A lot of New Zealanders had alighted there and they had this tremendous energy that reminded me of the Williamsons.
Dan Pearson
Australian comedy, yeah.
Dan Pearson
And it was just a kind of freedom and energy and optimism. And I had a lot of fun there. The fun that I'd sort of been hoping I might have when I was a teenager, but had been too busy gardening in a way. So my mid-twenties were occupied with making a wonderful garden there. We stayed for six years in this little flat and made a rooftop perch with a windy roof garden and then built this beautiful garden with the community in a space where several houses had been bombed in the war. And it was just a magical period.
Presenter
And you say meeting Hugh was life changing.
Dan Pearson
Well, it was for me something I'd
Dan Pearson
wanted to
Dan Pearson
Fined in a way for a long time with somebody that allowed me to feel myself. I I had a wonderful relationship with Jane, who I was with for six years, and we're still great friends. We live very close. But for the first time I just felt like I was myself through meeting him and the friends that came with him. And he's a great person. He's not somebody that fits into a box. I've never felt I fit into a box. And I just feel comfortable.
Presenter
Let's have some more music, Dan Pearson. Tell me about your seventh disc.
Dan Pearson
The Monteverdi Vespers are a magical, absolutely magical piece of music. And I lost my lovely dad in March last year. And when we were selecting music for his funeral, I went through his music collection and found the Vespers, which I'd remembered and must have been deep inside me. And I love the fact that you've got these two voices calling to each other and responding. And I imagine myself maybe sat on the edge of a lagoon with this sound calling from one side of the bay to the other, feeling very happy to be part of the human race.
Presenter
Glaria Patri from Monteverdi's Vespro della Beata Virginee, sung by members of L'Ecopelia Royale, directed by Georges Aval. So you embark then, Dan Pearson, on your sixth Chelsea this year. I'm imagining that plans are are well in hand for that. They would have to be. The stakes are very high, given that every year you've exhibited you've you've bagged a medal. You feeling optimistic?
Dan Pearson
You have to feel optimistic about Chelsea, and it is the most infectious thing actually. There's a tremendous feeling of camaraderie, and we're working with a fantastic team of people who've already made a mock-up of the garden. We're collaborating with Chatsworth on this. So we've got this amazing connection to an extraordinary garden that we're trying to distil in some way in the confines of this massively artificial environment to allow people to be sort of transported a little bit outside the show.
Presenter
What about that? You say a m a massively artificial environment. Does that bother you, given Note
Dan Pearson
It does, I I think that
Dan Pearson
Chelsea I stopped doing Chelsea about ten years ago exactly, because I started to feel really uncomfortable about making something just for five days. Gardens are often things which take many years, you know, to come to fruition. But the reason I'm doing it is the garden's got a second life. And I said I wouldn't do the garden unless it had a life beyond the show. So the garden is actually going to go back to Chatsworth to have another life there, a real life, which will be something that goes on into the future.
Presenter
Just one last thing before we go to your final piece of music. If you were to pass on one gem of a piece of advice you know, most of our listeners are never going to get to hire you to do their garden. What what could you pass on to all of the gardeners listening as something that they can take with them into their garden?
Dan Pearson
I think you have to work with things that you love. I don't think you can compromise. So you have to choose the things that you really want to be close to you and grow them as well as you possibly can.
Presenter
Let's have your final piece, Dan Pearson. What are we going to hear now?
Dan Pearson
This is Grace Jones, and my mum brought this into the house. She did a fashion show for her students every year at Winchester. And she used to run up and down our living room, pretending to be on the catwalk, to check the timing for the show. And I remember her doing this to this fantastic album. And I went to see Grace Jones a few years ago, and she's just such a larger-than-life, enormous, charismatic person. I couldn't be on the island without her.
Speaker 2
Walk down the street.
Speaker 2
Kicking can.
Speaker 2
Looking at the billboard.
Speaker 2
Oh Gorad.
Speaker 2
Summing up the people.
Speaker 2
Checking out the race.
Speaker 2
Doing what I'm doing.
Speaker 2
Feeling out of place.
Speaker 2
Wildpool
Speaker 2
Water with the rail.
Presenter
Praise Jones. I I wonder, Dan Pearson, what are you most looking forward to on this island?
Dan Pearson
I think I'm looking forward to a sense of discovery. I want to treat the island as a garden, and what I would do is make it a mission to find all the special places and make a kind of series of chapters that connect through a walk that will lead from
Dan Pearson
Contrasting place to contrasting place. I will want a garden there, so one of these places will be a garden, but some of them might be just a very gently manipulated.
Dan Pearson
Place under a tree or somewhere with a view that allows me to think about good things.
Presenter
It's time now for me to give you the books, the complete works of Shakespeare, as you know, and the Bible too. What else will you take as another book?
Dan Pearson
I'd like to take an encyclopedia of plants of the region. Plants can be your ally, and I certainly don't want them to be working against me. I want to know what's around me and how to use it, and I I would find that endlessly fascinating.
Presenter
We shall give you that and a luxury.
Dan Pearson
The luxury it's maybe a big ask, but I was wondering if I could take the contents of my potting shed.
Presenter
Yes, you certainly can take the whole potting shed if you want. Do you want the actual shed? That would be wonderful. As long as you promise not to use it as a shelter.
Dan Pearson
I do I promise.
Presenter
Okay, you can have that. Thank you.
Presenter
And finally, which one of these eight would you save?
Dan Pearson
I think it would be the Montiverdi Vespers, simply because the purity of the voices in there is just something that has a timelessness about it that I'm never going to tire of.
Presenter
Dan Pearson, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.
Dan Pearson
Thank you very much.
Presenter
You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website: bbc.co.uk slash Radio4.
How would you describe yourself as a little boy? Quite solitary?
Yes, I was very happy being alone in the garden, and I did have my friends, but they were all adults, and I didn't really feel like I needed friends. I felt like a misfit at school. I didn't really get school until I went to a middle school.
Presenter asks
What happened in the Picos Mountains in Spain that you described as an epiphany?
I spent some time walking up mountainsides, from meadows through fringes of woodland up to snow melt, seeing things growing in the wild in natural combinations. And suddenly everything made sense. When you see a plant growing in the wild, you know what it likes and why it grows there and what it grows with. And I knew at that point that I wanted to garden like that, to emulate nature in the way that I garden.
Presenter asks
Have you ever been able to stand in any of your own gardens and feel the same feeling as when you stood in [the Valley of Flowers] in the Himalayas?
I think I have. I think I have. And that's something you're constantly striving for. So those moments can often be just ten seconds, you know, when the light's just right. You know it's never going to happen again. But for that moment you think, Yes, I've done it. I've done it for now.
Presenter asks
If you were to pass on one gem of advice to all the gardeners listening, what would it be?
I think you have to work with things that you love. I don't think you can compromise. So you have to choose the things that you really want to be close to you and grow them as well as you possibly can.
“I think they [gardens] are a place of escape and a place of immersion. They're somewhere where you can be yourself completely. I think they provide you with an enormous amount of freedom, and I've always found that that's the place that I've felt happiest and most myself.”
“The way I garden is to let things go almost to the brink of being lost, and that's often quite a frightening thing to do. It often unnerves my clients.”
“I'd much rather listen to a wood pigeon, or the sound of seeds pinging out of pods on a hot day.”
“Why don't you follow your heart? And it was the best thing that anybody ever said to me, because what I was thinking was that I couldn't do my passion, or I shouldn't do my passion as a profession. And she said, Well, why on earth not?”
“I lost my lovely dad in March last year. And when we were selecting music for his funeral, I went through his music collection and found the Vespers, which I'd remembered and must have been deep inside me. And I love the fact that you've got these two voices calling to each other and responding. And I imagine myself maybe sat on the edge of a lagoon with this sound calling from one side of the bay to the other, feeling very happy to be part of the human race.”
“I think I'm looking forward to a sense of discovery. I want to treat the island as a garden, and what I would do is make it a mission to find all the special places and make a kind of series of chapters that connect through a walk that will lead from contrasting place to contrasting place. I will want a garden there, so one of these places will be a garden, but some of them might be just a very gently manipulated place under a tree or somewhere with a view that allows me to think about good things.”