Our Plant Stories

Oct 01 2024 42 ep. 29 mins 15
Our Plant Stories Podcast artwork

Our Plant Stories - digging into the stories that plants tell us about people and places. This is a podcast that shares personal stories about plants. Plants often root us, perhaps to a garden, a country, or maybe to a person who loved them and taught us to love them too. By sharing these stories, we grow our plant knowledge through the experience, passions and sometimes quite remarkable knowledge of other plant growers and we will always learn how to grow the plant. It's presented by Sally Flatman, a former BBC Radio producer. If you have a plant story you would like to share, then do contact me: [email protected] and take a look at the website www.ourplantstories.com

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Silent Space - an Offshoot episode

Oct 01 2024 19 mins  
Picture yourself in a garden. Do you get your phone out to take photos of the plants and send them to friends and family? Maybe a swift selfie! Perhaps like me you google the plants - wanting to identify them.Now picture a bench in the same garden but this time you and anyone else around you are just sitting, not a phone in sight. You're in the equivalent of the 'quiet carriage on

Strawberry Hill Flower Festival - an Offshoot episode

Sep 13 2024 27 mins  
Some of us (I think I mean me!) buy flowers, rummage for a vase, search for the scissors and then maybe tweak them a little bit before standing back to admire our handiwork. This is lovely but it is not art.In this podcast episode we travel to Strawberry Hill flower festival where floral artists take British grown flowers to a whole new level and they do create art. Follow up and d

Philippa's Dahlias

Sep 03 2024 34 mins  
Have you fallen in love with dahlias this year? Perhaps you have loved them for many years. But have you ever thought of harvesting the seed from your favourite blooms and creating your own unique flowers? Listen to hear how this is exactly what Philippa Stewart has been doing for the past few years.We also learn about the relationship between the grower and the floral designer as

Standing on the shoulders of Victorian gardeners

Aug 05 2024 32 mins  
Hill Close was a pasture until 1845 when its owner decided to divide it up into gardens. Individual plots where Victorians could rent a space to tend their plants, build a summer house, relax with their family. These were detached gardens for people who had no outdoor space where they lived but a little bit of money to rent one nearby. Once there were many such gardens in the UK. W

The Cactus Hunters Offshoot

Jul 23 2024 23 mins  
Cacti are among the world's most threatened species. Jared Margulies research led him to the extraordinary illegal trade in these plants. Hear him talk about his work and his book The Cactus Hunters. Who are stealing the cacti and where are they taking them?You can click the Buy Me A Coffee link here or on the website to buy a virtual coffee and join the crew and get a shout out. E

Lindy's Disocactus x hybridus

Jul 09 2024 31 mins  
A Disocactus x hybridus or forest cactus but in Lindy's family this particular plant is known as Sally's Cactus! It is also sometimes known by a common name: orchid cactus. In finding out about Sally who gave the original cutting we also learn how to get these cacti to bloom, what "soil' you should use to pot them up and where you should put them. This is all thanks to Sarah Gerrar

Bonus Episode: The Rebel Botanists

Jul 02 2024 28 mins  
How's your knowledge of Latin plant names? Meet Elizabeth Richmond she loves Latin plant names and she chalks them around the plants she finds growing between pavement cracks or along kerbsides. She does also chalk the common name too!Why does she do it? And how an earth did she get started?Our Plant Stories is presented and produced by Sally FlatmanThe music is Fade to Black by Ho

A GCSE in Natural History - Offshoot

Jun 18 2024 28 mins  
"Every child needs someone to introduce them to nature" - Rachel Carson author of Silent SpringIn this episode we hear how one woman came up with the idea for a GCSE in Natural History - a way for children to be introduced to nature. So where did the idea come from, what would an exam look like, and how far has she got? She had the idea in 2011.In this episode we learn what it take

Janet's Saxifrage London Pride

Jun 04 2024 33 mins  
Why is a tiny plant from Janet Hickenbottom's childhood so important? And what was the special thing that her mum Margaret shared with Janet and her brother that has stayed with her for all her life?Lee Connelly is also a bit obsessed by this thing and he's on a mission to make sure we don't miss out on it....and even if we weren't given it as children, like Janet was, he promises

Offshoot A history of allotments

May 20 2024 25 mins  
When we think of 'allotment history' we perhaps have images from the two world wars with the population being urged to cultivate every spare bit of land from parks to bomb craters. But to really understand our relationship with these spaces we need to go back much further in time. Lally Snow has written a book called My Family and Other Seedlings and in this episode she tells us ho