Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A gardener and writer who created two gardens from scratch, wrote gardening columns for decades, and authored 'The Tulip'.
On the island
Eight records
Tracks' details are corrected from automatic speech recognition errors when a real recording is confidently identified.
Consolation No. 3 in D-flat major
From Consolations, S. 172.
Florence sur les Champs-Élysées
From the film 'Ascenseur pour l'échafaud' (Lift to the Scaffold).
Cello Suite No. 1 in G major, BWV 1007: I. Prélude.
Thou Knowest, Lord, the Secrets of Our Hearts
Conductor: Harry Christophers.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:14What pleasures your soul [as you go out into the garden of a morning in this dormant month]?
Well, oddly enough, where we are now. 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.
Presenter asks
3:01Describing contact with the outdoors as a need, what do you think happens to us humans when we don't get it?
Do you know, I don't know, because I've never been without it. 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.
The keepsakes
The book
Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists and Horticulturalists
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.
The luxury
Just thoughts. 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.
Presenter asks
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.
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. 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.
Presenter asks
15:47Did your parents always believe you [the daughter] should be educated?
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 … there hadn't been the money in their families to do so.
Presenter asks
17:53During the 60s, after you graduated, you started working for the fledgling BBC Two. What was it like feeling that you were pretty much where it was at?
The clothes were great, by the way. 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. … 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. 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. … 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 BBC training. We were just whisked in off the street and hired for our ability to have ideas. … 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.
Presenter asks
29:08When you were going through cancer treatment, how important was connecting with the outside world, with feeling it and touching it and being in it again?
Critical. 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. And on my hands and knees, I crawled along the corridor to get out onto that grass. I just needed to feel. The real world to me is not 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.
“wonderful place for kindling”
“The silhouette of trees in the winter is one of the great abiding pleasures of life.”
“on my hands and knees, I crawled along the corridor to get out onto that grass.”
“The real world to me is not 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.”
“It reduces you to your proper place in life, which is actually a blip.”