Anna Pavord

Speaker 40:00

This is the BBC.

Presenter0:03

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, the book, and the luxury item that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island.

Presenter0:16

For rights' reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast. You can find over two thousand more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Disc's website.

Presenter0:49

My castaway this week is the gardener and writer Anna Pay Ward. If you've already piled dry leaves on your agapanthus and marked up your seed catalogues for next year, she will be delighted. An expert in marshalling nature, she has created two magnificent gardens of her own from scratch, and for decades in her gardening columns doled out endless detailed advice on how best to create beauty, harmony, and tranquillity in an outdoor space. Her books venture even further, giving context to the social significance of our relationship with nature. In her literary triumph, The Tulip, she describes in over 400 fascinating pages the extraordinary story of a flower that she believes has carried more political, social, economic, religious, intellectual, and cultural baggage than any other on earth.

Presenter1:39

It seems in matters of nature she has had something of a head start. Her childhood was spent roaming the landscape of the Brecon Beacons with her mother, who taught her the Latin names of all the plants and grasses they'd encounter. She says the soul needs to look out at things and find rest and peace and beauty in the things that the eyes are seeing. I think that's a need. It's a need as much as having a roof over your head and food in your stomach. And so welcome, Anna. This month is a relatively dormant one. As you go out into the garden of a morning,

Presenter2:14

What pleasures your soul?

Anna Pavord2:17

Well, oddly enough, where we are now.

Anna Pavord2:19

I would say that I spend probably more time with my back to the garden than actually looking down at the things that I should be doing, because the situation is on a south-facing slope overlooking a valley. And the way that the light is moving in the valley, and what the rooks are doing in the sky, and what the sheep are doing, all these things have somehow become a paramount interest to me. And the weeding tends to get left slightly behind. But I did have a bit of a scurry around yesterday evening because I thought, crumbs, if she asks me what I've been doing in the garden, I better have been doing something. So actually, I was hauling in those lovely succulent black aeoniums called Schwarzkopf. So I was getting those into the greenhouse, and I felt, yes, that's a good job, that one.

Presenter3:01

Describing contact with the outdoors as a need, what do you think happens to us humans when we don't get it?

Anna Pavord3:08

Do you know, I don't know, because I've never been without it.

Anna Pavord3:12

And I think possibly there are people who want to be in cities, who find the comfort that they need in cities, and would find themselves a bit at sea in the country, in the sort of certainly in the isolated state in which we live.

Presenter3:26

In both of the gardens that you've created, you know, you've had lots of acres to play with. Many of us just have a few pots on a terrace, you know, and it might be just outside the back door. What should we be planting in those? How can that be rewarding for people?

Anna Pavord3:39

I think any space that you can go out into is rewarding. I think gardening in pots is a fantastic plus and window boxes. And you see, actually, I was walked over from Broadcasting House to look at the tree just planted over the other side of the road there, where actually they've done a really nice underplanting of box round the edge and then lovely cyclamen and then, you know, the Christmas cherry. And it's really so bright and so, you know, it's something that you would never find in the country. You don't

Presenter4:05

Don't use gloves when you're gardening.

Anna Pavord4:07

Why not? Well, I had a good scrub up before I arrived this morning.

Presenter4:10

Let me see your gardener's fingernails. They look pretty clean to me.

Anna Pavord4:11

They look

Anna Pavord4:13

Yes, that was a lot of scrubbing. I like to feel the plants. I like to feel the earth. I get a real sensuous pleasure from the touch of plants and from the touch of the earth and, you know, the feel of sticks and all the other things that you sort of have to touch when you're gardening. It's all part of it. It's a sensuous business. Anna Payvoard, let's turn then to your music. Tell me about your first disc. Well, this is going back into one of the things that I felt most exciting as a child was discovering jazz. If you think of a sort of rather backward upbringing, you know, we didn't have a television or we weren't, you know, the bright lights of anything. Suddenly to discover jazz through the radio was enormously exciting and so liberating. And of course, Bessie Smith, I think, is just one of the all-time greats. And I love this track because it's got James P. Johnson going boompity boompity boompity boom in the background and it's just phenomenal.

Speaker 35:06

When it rained five days in the skies on darkest nights When it rained five days and the skies turned dark at night

Speaker 35:25

Then trouble taking place in the lowlands that night.

Speaker 45:29

Hello, Lane.

Anna Pavord5:30

Yeah.

Speaker 35:33

I woke up this morning, can't even get out of myself.

Speaker 45:35

I will go.

Speaker 45:39

Get out of my

Speaker 35:44

I woke up this morning.

Speaker 45:44

I woke up.

Speaker 35:47

Can't even get out of my door.

Speaker 35:54

That's enough trouble to make a poor girl wonder where she wanna go.

Presenter6:00

Bessie Smith and Backwater Blues. Annipevs. I mentioned the Latin names that you learned as a child, and I think a little similarly to the world of opera, the learned, scholarly attributes that so many gardeners have of being able to rhyme off these great long complex Latin names can be a barrier to people. They can think, well, clearly it's not for the likes of me, because I don't know the name of that plant.

Anna Pavord6:23

I don't think that matters. If you like it enough, you'll be interested enough to go to some book, or probably now on the Internet, and you will search out the plant that you like, and the Latin name will sort of sink in over a period of time. And I think we are lucky in having common names. Common names have a great use, and we use them a great deal. You know, even when I'm with posh gardeners, we all talk common names. It's fine to do that.

Presenter6:47

Is

Presenter6:47

Yeah.

Anna Pavord6:47

It's fine to do that. It's just that actually, if you're really into something like, for instance, I'm absolutely nuts about what I call Spurges, which are the euphobias. But there's an awful lot of them. So if you are really keen on getting some more Spurges into your garden, you need to know that you've got Euphobia mellifera, you've got euphobia. So you need to know that actually the one you want with the sort of low trailing stems is Mercenites. And so because you are interested enough in this as a family, you will actually go and search things out. And it was Christopher who taught me that. You know, always look, always notice, and always then go on. Christopher. Lloyd. He was such an incredible mentor. And the thing that he taught anybody who spent time with him was.

Presenter6:47

Yeah.

Speaker 47:07

Uh

Presenter7:07

Good, I'm glad.

Anna Pavord7:34

You have to use your eyes. You have to look. Don't take other people's opinions on this necessarily. Decide for yourself what you're seeing.

Presenter7:42

Let's have some more music, Anna Payford.

Anna Pavord7:44

We're on your second. Tell me about this.

Anna Pavord7:46

Where I grew up you were always near song.

Anna Pavord7:50

When you went down into town you would hear people practising in the chapels, you would hear concerts often of the Welsh miners' choirs, because I lived in a a place called Abergavenny, which was just on a sort of boundary between the green valley of the Usk and the grey and black valleys of Ebervale and Brynmau.

Anna Pavord8:11

And my parents were were deeply troubled and imbued with the horrors of of the thirties in the mining villages, and we went there, you know, quite frequently. My father was a schoolmaster and did a lot of evening classes and things.

Anna Pavord8:23

And you would hear music, you would hear singing wherever you went. And this to me is so much part of where I came from this wonderful instinctive harmony that comes out of male voice choirs, particularly Welsh ones, I have to say.

Speaker 48:48

Like the window.

Speaker 48:53

On the sin, what he adores.

Anna Pavord9:13

What a

Speaker 49:17

Moreover,

Anna Pavord9:18

More now, Roy

Speaker 49:21

Lord how do we see

Speaker 49:26

And then I hear them we see.

Speaker 49:33

More thou tea, more thou tea.

Anna Pavord9:34

Uh

Presenter9:40

How Great Thou Art sung by the Modeston Orpheus Choir, directed by Alwyn Humphreys. Anni Payvorge, then it was clear you were a war baby in Abergavenny. Your parents were both, you've said superb gardeners. Your your dad's speciality was alpine troughs. Your mother was brilliant in her herbaceous borders.

Presenter9:58

Why did they want to put so much effort in?

Anna Pavord10:01

I think if you can't write or sculpt or paint, then making a garden is the one wonderful way of expressing a sort of artistic side. My father was a schoolmaster, and he had a very careful, organised mind, and he made the most beautiful sort of troughs which you could then get hold of, and he planted arrangements of gentiens in them. He made a rockery, which is such a thirties thing to do.

Presenter10:28

Yeah.

Anna Pavord10:28

And my mother made this sort of flowing herbaceous border, you know, full of lupins and delphiniums and ridiculous things again. You don't see lupins around very much now.

Presenter10:38

You've described this feeling of being, you say, stitched into the landscape where you grew up. Explain a bit more about that to me.

Anna Pavord10:45

I think roots are very fortunate if you have them. Both my mother and my father had been born in the place where I was born.

Anna Pavord10:53

My mother's family was an enormous one. She was one of twelve. So I had aunts and uncles and cousins all over the place. I think also from a very early age we went on walks. There wasn't an awful lot of other entertainment. We had no car. Walking was a very, very important part of my childhood. And picnicking. And certainly these particular pilgrimages which my mother made every year to see some plant that she considered quite rare, like the globe flower, for instance, which was a long walk all the way up this mountain, the sugar loaf, that dominated our landscape.

Presenter11:26

Meant a lot to her, but were you the child trailing behind, or were you equally enthusiastic?

Anna Pavord11:32

I think more enthusiastic a little later on when we led these fairly free lives on the mountain, this small gang that we had, my brother, who was two and a half years older than me, and about another four children, we roamed around on these hills and mountains and we were much driven actually by a man who's not very much in favour now, Arthur Ransom, and anything that the kids were doing in the Arthur Ransom books we wanted to do. So you'd be out there for an entire day just to later on we would be out there for more than a day. My brother was absolutely brilliant at making beds out of heather and then on top of that would come bracken. So we often slept out at night and you know this didn't seem to us at all extraordinary. And anybody who lives closely in that sort of half-wild way understands the dangers. But eventually my godfather actually built us a cabin quite high up underneath the sugarloaf and we went there for a week at a time and we cooked our own food and we tickled trout and we made these things called dampers which were nothing more really than flour and water which you wrap round a stick and then you had jam and you jammed the jam into the sort of centre of this funny thing you'd wound round the stick.

Presenter12:42

Let's have some more music, Anna Paperboard. Um we're gonna hear your third track now. Tell me a little bit about this

Anna Pavord12:47

I think Liszt and Chopin and Schubert are probably the three composers that I listen to most, because I listen to music most in the car on long journeys.

Anna Pavord12:58

And somehow piano is easier, and I love these explorations that the consolations were. There's often a great sadness in them, but I think melancholy is something which I recognize and which we all go through, and um sometimes y you respond to the slightly melancholy music, it's right for you.

Presenter14:17

Consolation number three, composed by Franz Liszt and performed there by Daniel Baronboyne. Anna Payvoard, you once said that as a teenager, you felt yourself to be living in Welsh border country with nothing that ever happened. The most interesting thing was the hissing of a great big Italian coffee machine in the local cafe. You know, as you explained to me, you know, the life in the outdoors, that's suitable up to a point. But when a girl's thoughts in the teenage years turn to love and romance and excitement, it might not quite be the thing. You're absolutely.

Anna Pavord14:47

Absolutely right. And, you know, glamour was what one wanted. It just wasn't glamorous in any way, in Africa. You always wanted to somehow be somebody else, you know, if you felt slightly dowdy and without any of that make up knowledge and wonderful high heeled shoes and knowing what to do with your hair, there was a lot to catch up on.

Presenter15:05

Was there a time when your mother, when she'd cleaned the the earth out from under her fingernails, did she put on her high heels in a little slicker now?

Anna Pavord15:13

That was interesting. I I've never thought of that until you've just mentioned it now. That might have been part of why uh I so thirsted for it. I grew up in a a a a wonderful home with, you know, splendid parents, but

Anna Pavord15:28

They weren't the partying kind. You know it was quite a serious household, where if you didn't understand a word you were, you know, sort of encouraged to go and look it up. There was a definite sense that the mind was the thing, and if you had something of a mind, then it would be a tremendous waste not to do something with it.

Presenter15:47

So you were the youngest of two. It wouldn't necessarily have been the case that people of your parents' generation should have thought that the second child, the daughter, should be educated. Did your parents always believe you should?

Anna Pavord15:58

Oh, absolutely There was absolutely no distinction of that kind. No. My mother would have treated with the utmost disdain the thought that women weren't absolutely capable of doing anything they set their minds to. She had a brilliant mind herself, so did my father. But when they were at the right stage to go away to university

Presenter15:59

Yeah.

Presenter16:01

Yeah.

Anna Pavord16:15

There hadn't been the money in their families to do so.

Presenter16:17

And so, insofar as any sixteen-year-old has ambition, I mean, what were you thinking of? Where did you think your life lay at in its early stages?

Anna Pavord16:24

I thought nothing at that stage. I thought nothing at all of what was available or what could be done. But I was born in nineteen forty, grim old time, rationing till fifty two, and then we exploded into the sixties, and somehow everything was always on the up.

Presenter16:41

We'll talk more about the 1960s and you in a second, but for now let's fit in disc 4. Just tell me about this one.

Anna Pavord16:47

Now, this is every time we say goodbye, Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter. I can see the LP cover, I can see the party at which this is being played. This is the beginning of all those smoochy parties, you know, that sort of went through your late teens and any number of dances where these sorts of numbers would be played at the end, and you hoped you were in the arms of somebody who was going to ask to take you home. So, these sort of smoochy numbers, you know, absolutely fantastic. I could have had an entire programme of them. I love them.

Speaker 417:18

Every time we say goodbye I doubt a little Every time we say goodbye

Speaker 417:38

I wonder why a little

Speaker 417:43

Why the God above me who must me?

Presenter17:53

Ella Fitzgerald seeing cold porters every time we say goodbye. Anna Pave Ward. During the 60s then, after you graduated, you started working for what was then the fledgling TV channel BBC Two. And I hear rumour that at the time you owned a white plastic mech and a purple suede hat. What was it like feeling that you were, you know, you were pretty much where it was at?

Anna Pavord18:14

Yeah.

Anna Pavord18:16

The clothes were great, by the way.

Anna Pavord18:18

The white plastic Mac seems unspeakable now, but boy, it was a really great Mac. And that hat was a James Wedge suede sort of mulberry-coloured hat, which was just phenomenal. And that was a very good thing. Very floppy brims. Yes, of course. And I remember precisely the day that I bought it. I remember it was a Saturday morning, and I'd just walked out from Liberty's, where I'd bought this hat, and I actually put up my hand and hailed a taxi. I had never been in a taxi in my life.

Presenter18:27

Ah

Presenter18:31

Void

Anna Pavord18:47

Why did I do this? I had this hat box dangling from one hand and the other hand was heading a taxi and I suddenly thought, I'm here. This could be a new me. Of course, unfortunately, you know, the new me was something that one could play with, but in the end, I'm still slightly over-serious for that sort of life. But it was just a moment, such a 60s moment. And yes, and you were going out a lot, Swain? Oh, hugely. So tell me about the parties. Give me a flavour. Well, it wasn't just the parties. At that time, although it seems extraordinary in retrospect, you were given a sum of money if you worked at the BBC that you had to spend on going to see stuff. It was actually to keep your mind well tuned with what was about, what was on, what was interesting. So it was a time when actually you saw a tremendous amount of plays and a lot of the satirical work that was beginning to happen in clubs. And all that was completely new.

Presenter19:14

So tell me about

Presenter19:15

Well

Anna Pavord19:41

I think also what was overwhelming at the beginning of BBC Two was that it was all to make. I had not been given the B B C training. We were just whisked in off the street and hired for our ability to have ideas. And so you were working on Leighton?

Presenter19:56

Tight liner

Anna Pavord19:56

Yeah.

Presenter19:56

Which at the time was a a pioneering bit of television.

Anna Pavord19:56

Yes.

Anna Pavord19:59

It was. I think the thing was that there were a lot of us on that programme who hadn't actually been in television before. So we didn't understand where the barriers were. Anything was possible. I mean, nobody showed me where the costume department was, so I used to hire everything I needed from places in Soho, for instance. It was done on a shoestring, which is always a good thing. You know, you're inventive. Things happen if you if you haven't got much money.

Presenter20:25

Let's have some more music, Anna. Tell me about the next one then. This is your fifth choice of the day.

Anna Pavord20:30

This is very sixties too, this business of somehow being exposed to foreign film, which hadn't really existed at all as I was growing up, but actually became very much more important to me when I first came to London, because I joined classes at the BFI, the British Film Institute, and there was a cinema called The Paris Pullman in the King's Road in Chelsea. At midnight they had these screenings of these extraordinary films. And the track that we're going to hear is the Miles Davis track from something that we call Live to the Scaffold, but it's called Assenseur pour le Chaffaud, and it starred Jean Moreau, who was one of those French film stars that you long to be with that sort of jolie-laired face and black and white, of course. But this was a very important exposure for me. And because I was making films for late-night line-up, you know, I mean, that sounds very grand. I was only making five-minute inserts, but even so, all techniques were interesting.

Presenter22:20

That was Miles Davis with Florence Le Champs-Elyse. Anna Payvoard. You have been married for, I think, just over half a century now to Trevor. I want to get a snapshot of your early married days. You lived for a while was it about about

Anna Pavord22:34

Barge or a houseboat? It was a Thames sailing barge. He would not be at all pleased to hear it described as a houseboat. Well, I won't describe it as such.

Speaker 422:40

So is it a function?

Anna Pavord22:42

No, please don't. It was the second thing he said to me after he'd asked me to marry him underneath the Parthenon on my birthday was we're going to live on a boat and so I sort of, you know, gl glassy eyed said, Yes, yes, of course, what a great idea And and so we lived a very sort of

Anna Pavord22:59

easy going life on this sailing barge moored on the side of the Thames, which only began to fall apart when we had our first baby. And um things began to get more difficult then because my husband wouldn't dream of putting up any sort of guard wires on the side, so this baby had a sort of one of those old fashioned leather harnesses and a rope was tied round the mast and the other end round her harness and it stretched us to the edge no further at the

Presenter23:25

She'd be on an at-risk register now if you did that to yourself. And in nineteen seventy four, then you moved to what sounds like it was a very dilapidated old rectory with a real jungle for a garden. The whole place am I right in saying it had been derelict for around about twenty years? Why did you take that on? Why, indeed?

Anna Pavord23:44

It's the sort of thing that if your children told you they were gonna do it, you'd be completely horrified. We'd fallen in love with Dorset. That was the key. Um we were living a very tidy life in West Sussex in a in a very tidy house and

Anna Pavord23:56

Okay, nice. Bart, we we wanted something sort of y more.

Anna Pavord24:00

But with two small children and a third expected, perhaps not the greatest time to take on a place that didn't have a roof, and with ivy growing up the insides of the walls. But

Presenter24:09

Yeah, I mean I mean

Anna Pavord24:09

Yeah, I mean I mean you had s used

Presenter24:10

Given birth to three daughters in six years. What did when you showed your mother this dilapidated wreck of a house that you were planning to live in?

Anna Pavord24:13

What did Weng?

Presenter24:18

What did she say?

Anna Pavord24:19

She was magnificent. Sadly, she never lived to see what we did with it. But after we'd acquired it, she came down.

Anna Pavord24:26

We bashed our way in. You couldn't even sort of, you know, get through a gate. There wasn't a gate. You just had to force your way through this sort of bit of a hedge.

Anna Pavord24:34

And I tried to point out as much as I could about, you know, the beauty of the Queen Anne windows and this and that, but there wasn't much to point out, quite honestly, because it was all completely covered in undergrowth.

Anna Pavord24:43

And so I sort of my heart sinking went back to the car and left my mother there, and she came back about five minutes later with a bundle of sticks under her arm, crawled through the hedge again, lifted the boot of the car, put the sticks in, and said wonderful place for kindling and I thought

Anna Pavord24:58

What a magnificent woman

Presenter24:59

Philosophy.

Anna Pavord25:00

Indeed. And you know, our three daughters would say the same. It was a very, very strong character, that house, and we had the most splendid time into that house, eventually.

Presenter25:10

What did those forty-five years teach you? What did it teach you about yourself, I wonder?

Anna Pavord25:16

Um

Anna Pavord25:18

Not to be arrogant, I think. To listen. Just to actually let the place settle around you, to learn about it, understand a little bit about how the sun works in it, you know, what the soil is like. I think also a sort of reverence for the tenacity of growing things. I remember at the rectory where we were when that awful storm came through in January 1990, slates were hurtling off the roof, and we had two magnificent big old beech trees there that I cared about very, very much indeed. And I was out there in the front of the house and I was shouting, Hang on, hang on, because I couldn't I couldn't bear the thought of losing one of them. And they hung on. It wasn't what damage they'd do, it's just the fact that their great, beautiful profiles would not be there any more. Because the older they get, the more precious they become. Especially in the winter, actually. The silhouette of trees in the winter is one of the great abiding pleasures of life. Let's have some more.

Presenter26:16

Anapo bored of your music. Tell me about the next one.

Anna Pavord26:19

Well, it's proving rather an extraordinary mixture, isn't it? But I mean, there's so many different sorts of music I like. This is a Bach cello suite. It is the liquidity of it that I love, and the fact that I can see it in a curious way in our landscape, I can see the stream rippling through it. It's that rippling quality of it that I love so much.

Presenter27:35

Bach's cello suite No. One, The Prelude in G major, performed there by Yo Yo Ma. Anna Pavord, you've written many books, but your most successful surely must be The Tulip. When The Tulip was published in nineteen ninety nine, you became known then as The Tulip Lady. Uh not everybody is as enamoured.

Presenter27:53

That flower as you are, what was it initially about it that captured your thoughts?

Anna Pavord27:58

I think it was the diversity. I hadn't grown tulips until we were in our first house, and my husband had been off to Amsterdam and came back with this little packet of bulbs, and this was my very first garden. And so I took this little net bag, and I went down to this ridiculous little round border in the lawn, and I planted them there. And then the next spring, up came these absolutely phenomenal creatures with huge great shoulders, and it was called Gudoshnik, and the petals were sort of creamy yellow, but streaked all over with red. And I just gazed at them, and I thought, you are an amazing creature. And I just wanted to grow more of them. And then I realised that there was such a lot that had depended on the tulip in the past. Its history is extraordinary. But I wrote the entire book for myself. It wasn't for publication. It was just to find out the answers to the questions. And I pasted 126 of my favourite pictures in this manuscript I produced and put it in a box and thought, well, that was fascinating. So it was actually for me, the whole thing.

Presenter28:56

And so timing, of course, plays its part in any success, but also the timing in your own life was remarkable because only the year before you had been very ill, you'd been diagnosed with with cancer. And I'm wondering what helped you through.

Anna Pavord28:58

It does

Presenter29:08

I'm thinking of the Maggie's centres, the the centres that are built to help people as they try to find their way through the horror of a cancer diagnosis and treatment. A garden is an essential part of what they offer.

Presenter29:22

When you were going through it, how important was connecting with that outside world, with feeling it and touching it and being in it again?

Anna Pavord29:30

Critical.

Anna Pavord29:31

Absolutely critical so critical that when I could actually move after coming out of intensive care, one day I was in a different room and there was a patch of lawn outside the window.

Anna Pavord29:42

And on my hands and knees, I crawled along the corridor to get out onto that grass.

Anna Pavord29:47

I just needed to feel.

Anna Pavord29:49

The real world the real world to me is not

Anna Pavord29:54

Buildings, it's not cement, it's not tarmac, it's not all the stuff of which so much of the world is now constructed.

Presenter29:54

Yeah.

Presenter30:00

And when you were well enough to be in your own garden again.

Presenter30:06

Did you see it differently?

Anna Pavord30:07

No, I don't think it was a transformative experience.

Anna Pavord30:11

I don't want anybody to think that this is necessarily the way through or the way out or anything at all.

Anna Pavord30:16

I was lucky.

Presenter30:18

Let's have some more music, Anna, pay for it. We are going to hear now your seventh.

Presenter30:22

Bit of a change of pace, this. Tell me about this.

Anna Pavord30:25

Yeah, what a man is Freddie Mercury. I mean, quite extraordinary. This particular Queen number we always used to belt out coming back from Salisbury Cathedral on Christmas Eve where when the children were older we went up for the midnight mass service and driving back over that high lonely ground the Cranbourne Chase and we would all scream all the way home all the Queen numbers and it was just such a wonderful start to Christmas.

Speaker 430:53

I see a little silhouetto of a man Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the band and go? Thunderbolt and lightning

Speaker 431:06

Yeah.

Speaker 431:07

We made this.

Speaker 431:08

I'm just

Speaker 431:15

Despair in this life of this monstrosity.

Presenter31:19

That was Queen and Bohemian Rhapsody and Memories for You, Anna Pavevoard, of you and the girls and your husband all sort of screeching those at the top those queen hits at the top of your voice after the carol service. You have written of the quiet landscapes that sustain you. What is it about those quiet landscapes that is so

Presenter31:39

So very powerful.

Anna Pavord31:42

The fact that they've been there for so long

Anna Pavord31:44

The fact that we're only passing through.

Anna Pavord31:46

It reduces you to your proper place in life, which is actually a blip.

Anna Pavord31:50

And you get this wonderful sense of permanence, and also a great respect for the land that it has gone on and on, enduring through all sorts of you know terrible weather, savage onslaughts of frosts and gales and storms and floods, and yet it emerges and grows things again.

Presenter32:14

How will you go about beginning to cultivate this uh disastrous little patch of sand upon upon which not much at all will grow? What w what will you try to cultivate on it?

Anna Pavord32:25

Well, I think my tedious side will actually emerge here. I'd love not to sort of bother about organisation and filing stuff and, you know, liking things in alphabetical order. But that would kick in, and I would actually roam about and I would work out where the water source was, because of course the sea would be absolutely hopeless for anything that I wanted to grow. And then I would start to actually be interested in things that were growing. And then I would do, as by trial and error, people must have done right from the very beginning, tasting things and seeing if they gave me a stomachache or not, finding out what I could eat. It'll work. Anna Pavorda. Your eighth disc, then. What are we going to hear?

Presenter32:42

Is there anything that I

Anna Pavord33:00

Oh well, this actually is because singing. It was there when I was a child, and I've recently joined a choir, the Broad Oak Choir, and I really, really love singing. We've been singing this Purcell anthem. I just thought, you know, I'd like to hear that.

Speaker 433:47

Snow.

Presenter34:04

Purcell's Thou Knowest, Lord, the Secrets of Our Hearts, performed by the Sixteen, conducted there by Harry Christophers. So, Anna, it is time now for us to get to the books. I give every castaway books. You get the Bible and the complete works of Shakspere, and you can take another book along with you. What's it going to be? Is it the King James Bible? If you wish

Anna Pavord34:24

Yeah.

Presenter34:24

Right.

Anna Pavord34:24

Yeah. The language is phenomenal.

Anna Pavord34:27

I thought, well, perhaps some poetry. I was very tempted by Aris Tamos, but actually in the end the tedious side kicks in again. It's the Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists and Horticulturalists. It's a fantastic book. How big is it?

Presenter34:39

Yeah.

Anna Pavord34:39

Here.

Presenter34:39

Uh

Anna Pavord34:39

Ooch.

Presenter34:40

It runs. You may have that then, and a luxury. What's yours gonna be?

Anna Pavord34:44

Oh, it has to be pen and paper. Right.

Presenter34:46

And you carry a notebook around with you.

Anna Pavord34:48

I do, everywhere.

Presenter34:49

Yeah.

Anna Pavord34:49

What

Presenter34:49

Step four.

Anna Pavord34:49

Just thoughts.

Anna Pavord34:52

Sounds very grand. But just if I see something that's extraordinary, or, you know, some connection is made, or something that just intrigues me, then it goes into the notebook.

Presenter35:00

Pen and paper it will be then. And finally, which of these eight tracks would you like to save if you had to save one?

Anna Pavord35:05

I think it has to be the Bach, because so many images come from that piece of music for me.

Presenter35:11

It's yours. Anna Payboard, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. It's been such a pleasure. Thank you.

Presenter35:38

I hope you enjoyed this edition of Desert Island Discs. You'll find more interviews with artists, musicians, scientists, sports stars, comedians and more at bbc.co.uk/slash desert island discs.

Speaker 436:05

This is the B B C.