S2:E12 Milli Proust @ The Great Garden Show

In this episode, we welcome flower farmer, florist, seed grower and author Milli Proust for a beautiful conversation about growing with the seasons and finding creativity in the garden.

Recorded as part of The Great Garden Show 2026, Milli shares her thoughtful approach to flowers, seed saving, naturalistic planting and the rhythms that shape life on a flower farm.

From the joy of cultivating beauty by hand to the lessons learned through patience, imperfection and close observation, this gentle and uplifting episode is full of inspiration for gardeners, growers and anyone drawn to the quiet magic of flowers.

The Newt Podcast is created by the team at The Newt in Somerset and produced by Harry Coade at Sound Matters. If you enjoyed this episode, follow The Newt Podcast to enjoy more walks and talks across the estate, or better still become a Newt Member to visit our estate yourself, stay the night, or shop The Newt online. 

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Transcript

Arthur Cole 0:21

Welcome back to the Newt Podcast. With me, Arthur Colt. Join us for a walk through the estate with our invited guests to the backdrop of the Somerset landscape and its wildlife residence. This episode was recorded live at the Great Garden Show here at the Newton Somerset in May 2026, where we brought together some of the country's most inspiring gardeners, designers, and plants people for a weekend celebrating the joy of gardens. Our guest is the brilliant Millie Proust, gardener, writer and broadcaster. Millie has a wonderfully down-to-earth approach to gardening, encouraging us to work with nature, embrace a little imperfection, and discover just how rewarding growing plants can be. Whether you're tending a windowsill, a small garden, or several acres, I think you'll find plenty of inspiration in this conversation. So, recorded live from the Great Garden Show, let's jump straight into it.

SPEAKER_03 1:49

Thank you so much, Arthur. It's so lovely to be here today. I am usually knee-deep in the soil, and this is such a rare treat. So thanks for all turning up. And please ask questions at any point, but I will, I'm gonna bore you with how I came to do what I do, why I do what I do, and a little bit of the sort of feeling and taste of how I do it. Okay, so um, this is my fourth book, and it took four and a half years to write, and it was born out of being asked a lot of questions, not about the floristry that I was doing, not about the colour combining, not about uh all the design work, but really I kept getting questions about how do you make your garden look so lovely? Which wasn't really what I was doing. I'm not a garden designer. Um, I'm not, I'm not really, I didn't consider myself a gardener for a long time because I was a flower farmer, and in the flower farming sector, it was uh not a done thing to call yourself a gardener. We were very serious farmers. I now proudly call myself a gardener. But it did take a while for me to sort of pivot and start answering those questions, and this book really was just an ode to answering all those questions. And then my lovely sister started gardening for the first time and asked so many more questions. When it made me realize that we all take for granted a lot of knowledge that feels intuitive to people who've been doing it for a while or for work, and there aren't any stupid questions with gardening, even the most basic things are some of the things that we can go back to and work out new ways of doing them. Every person has their own way of doing them. So this is a little bit about how I do it and the sort of angle that I look through it at. So I grow what I call a florist's garden. And what I mean by that is that I'm really greedy for flowers. I love flowers so much. And when I started growing a garden, it really was out of the need to grow flowers for a business. I didn't set out wanting to be a florist. I wanted to be a florist when I was 18, but I was told there was absolutely no money in it, so do something else. So I trained as an actor. Anyway, I'm a florist now, so uh my florist garden uh needed something every week of the year, pretty much. Um, and when my wedding and event work dried up in COVID, uh I started doing nationwide bouquets, and then I needed something to pick every day of the week. Uh, and that is when I really started seeing the gaps. But in in the meantime, uh I had been doing things like wreaths, so all the way through the winter, we're doing wedding work in the summer, uh, event work, working with brands, um, and then bunches locally in spring, which is what I found the time when people were most hungry for colour. And a lot of people where I um garden and maybe garden flowers already. So by the time they've got an abundance of summer blooms, they wouldn't buy locally from me. I'd I'd be doing all the weddings. So it was only sort of spring that I would do local bunches. But that was the sort of season of my year, um, and I started season seeds in 2018. So my year was flowers from start to finish in many different forms, whether that was wreaths, seeds, or actual flowers or bouquets. So, part of writing the book, um, why would anyone want to learn how to garden from a flower farmer? Well, the lens that I grow from was that I needed to make a lot of plants, make a lot of money for very little money. So the learning curve of propagation was really steep, and that taught me a lot. I think a lot of us go out and we buy things from, and this is how I started, going to a garden centre and picking things that look beautiful. I'm such a magpie for beauty. So I I'm very much the person who, before I knew how to propagate, would go and pick all the beautiful things in flower. Uh and I quickly learned that's a very expensive way to fail. So plants thrive really from from starting from scratch, whether that's from seed or from cuttings. They just love starting fresh. And so a big part of the book I knew I wanted to make it all about, all the propagating techniques that I've honed over the last decade and a bit. I'm really a big, obviously, I run a seed company, so I'm a big advocate for growing from seed. I think it's the easiest and most accessible way to get a lot of plants from very little. And what I do love about seed more than anything, and what I find most empowering about seed is saving your own seed. And that is so full cycle. And the thing that is so magical about seed is that every year the seed learns from its season. So when the plant produces the seed for the next season, it's it's learned in its genetics what happened and will slightly adapt to that. So the seeds that you save from your own garden will be better, stronger, healthier, and happier. So I'm a huge advocate for learning about more about seed saving and cleaning, and I've been doing that for eight years now and honing those skills. And they're skills that are really hard to find. I've I've gone to America to learn from some people, and there's a few people doing it here, but they're there are skills that are being lost. And so there are loads of really simple techniques, and I'm gonna, my maybe my next book will be about seeds so that we can all save our own, because it really is one of the most empowering things I think that we can do. And then it's totally full circle, and then you're not spending as much money on your garden, and you're getting amazing plants that are adapted to your specific site. Um, so a lot of the book is there's a lot about how I would think about making a garden and the design of a garden, but then there's a huge swathe on caring for a garden and then loads on propagation. Uh so I have grown in so many different types of I've set up five different five different flower fields. Uh I'm hoping that this one that I've set up this spring is my forever home, but I really don't want to have to do it again. But I uh I'm also setting up my garden from scratch again, and it's always an absolute joy, but I've done many different scales of whether it's borrowing a corner from a neighbour or an acre from a farmer or garden scale. Uh and a lot of that ended up in the book. So a project I've been doing for 10 years now, pretty much 10 years to the day, um, is called Windows Here Wednesday. If you follow along at all on my socials, you would have seen it. And um it was has really been one of the best projects I've ever done. If you ever get the chance to kick yourself into doing a weekly project, even when you don't feel like it, I really highly recommend it. It's taught me so much and it's offered me so many opportunities. And the one thing that it has fed so much into the work that I do and the gardens that I grow is seeing where the gaps are. It's also an amazing thing that has allowed me to collect 10 years of data. And when I say data, I just mean beautiful pictures that tell me a bit about the weather and what was blooming when. So I it it was a real quick uh learning curve on how to get successional plants, which is something that I think a lot of flower farmers or garden growers uh find difficult. How do you make your garden look beautiful every week of the year? And uh if you're making something beautiful from it every week of the year, it will look beautiful. So if you can't pick something from it one week, then you know that there's a gap. Um and one of the best ways to figure out how to fill that gap is go and look at other people's gardens nearby and see what looks great and then put it in your garden. Uh so uh that it also helps with my greed of flowers. Um succession has been a really big thing, and I'll talk about that a bit at the end as well. One of my best tricks for succession. But taking a picture of an arrangement I did every week of flowers, and when I talk about arrangement, it doesn't actually have to be flowers, it can be looking at the lichen on a branch and how beautiful that can be, and how much joy that can bring in winter when you see the bare bones of the garden, all the berries and the hips, or the seed heads can be extraordinary. And if you can turn them into a beautiful arrangement and look at them like that, then they're a really integral part of the design and framework of your garden. If there was any gaps, I knew quite quickly because I couldn't do my project, and it taught me also to learn and look at ingredients for a garden and for the vase harder and look at things that might not necessarily be showy but still have a lot of beauty. And I wrote a tiny bit about the weather in each. So now I have a ten-year weather diary, too, which is great, and I didn't really even realize I was doing it. And it's been really helpful. And it's all online on my Instagram. So if you want to know what was happening to the weather eight years ago on a Wednesday, you can always scroll back and find it. And I can see what was flowering when. And so I can tell that this year we were in April, we were four weeks, nearly four weeks ahead of where we were last year or year before. And it's really interesting to be able to gauge that. And with the ever-increasing, really wild weather that we get and the extremes, it's really useful to be able to see what's struggling and what's thriving, and how we can adapt our gardens to that. And one thing that I am doing this year is I'm growing an experimental garden in sand and rubble. And I know that's lots of pioneers have done that before and written lots of books about it. And but there's still not many gardens doing that, and it's interesting to see what's going to happen. I hope that I'll be able to share what thrives through the lens of wanting beautiful things to work with. Um so I'm scattering a lot of lovely things that I usually use in the garden and that we sell in the seed shop and seeing what will thrive with very little. And I think that's such a key is not not having to use a lot of resource to make something beautiful. And if the world can be filled with flowers without taking too much from it, but allowing nature to bring so much more, then that's that's the balance that I think we should try and be achieving. So that's my Windows or Wednesday project. Um, my very first sort of foray into designing a garden border that was not growing plants for crop was only nine years ago. Yeah, 2017. And was never any good at maths. Um so this is 2017, and I I quite quickly realized with my Wintersell Wednesday project that if you didn't have shrubs, I just don't know why I was such a snob about shrubs. I just didn't think they were very exciting. I now think shrubs are very exciting. Uh but I I saw that there were gaps in the year where shrubs could fill. So one of my favourite shrubs to use is vibernum tinus. Um, in fact, this is vibernum tinus here, which you'll know it having a glossy leaf and being quite a dark shape in the garden, but then it gets that flush of flowers, and I think it can be incredibly delicate if you just simply remove the leaves. So that is a that's a December forced paper whites, the first snowdrops, and vibernum tinnus. And uh you and it feels so delicate and spring-like. Anyway, I love uh messing around with plants' identities, but I all I I also love what they they show us, and I love seeing their characters, and vibernum tinus for me has both that sort of dark presence but also that airy frothiness. So I wanted to bring out that airy frothiness. So, shrubs. Started planting shrubs, and I and learning that I love the idea of formal shapes, and I know that a lot of us do. This is such a gardening 101, um, but this is really my first garden border, so this is really going back to basics, but having that, I love a wild, natural look to flower design, and my favourite gardens are the ones filled with butterflies and bees and birds and flowers doing their thing and being their beautiful wild selves. And I think they look even more beautiful when they have that tension of something that is really clearly got the hand of a gardener on it to show that this is a garden. So a couple of clipped you bulls always make me happy, and I love a little clipped hedge too, and then everything else can roll around in it. So when I was growing uh on the farm about 12 minutes away, and I had then I had my son, I I couldn't go to the farm and pick beautiful flowers like a pantry on any given Wednesday. So I uh had to make sure that my borders were full of beautiful things. So it developed over a couple of years, but my border, um I was very proud to say, was delightful every single day of the year, and uh uh I really miss it already. So I left it, it left it in uh at the end of last year, and I'm hoping it's being looked after and cherished. But we have to move on. I I've also um taken lots of cuttings from plants. I think that's one of the most magical things about plants is that I I was given a cutting of the geranium roseanne down here by my grandmother, who is no longer with us, and uh every time it flowered, it was like her saying hi in some lovely way. So um having that still with me, and then be able to give it on to people. It feels like it's good she she still is with us. And I think that's the most magical thing about flowers and plants. Um, so this is this is the garden from December. I think that's more like January, December, and then uh January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October. I promise you, November still looks lovely. Depends if the forests come or not. And then it does look like this in December, too. We leave the seed heads up to look architectural and beautiful. Thank you, Robin. What a legend. Um so that for me, uh it needed to have something every week of the year, and a big part of that is thinking about how you layer up a garden uh with things like the structure, the bare bones, the bulbs, the herbaceous perennials, and letting nature sort of take its course and letting it be a little wild, and always by the end of the year it was became far more textural and less flowery, but I think still very beautiful. Um I think it's really hard to get a garden that looks super, super flowery abundant all the way through the year. But there are amazing plants that can do that. Some of my favourite things are the things that die gracefully. I think that uh gardens, one thing that gardens always give us is that closeness to the full life cycle. So enjoying watching something be in its peak and fade, I think is such a beautiful thing, and reminding us that we are simply part of this huge energetic cycle. And things like Floomus dies so beautifully and then comes back looking absolutely beautiful too. Um the plants that I love less, but still have a place in my garden for different reasons, are things that don't die gracefully, like Budlia looks absolutely awful as soon as the flowers are dumb. What I do is I have it there for the butterflies and then chop it down as soon as it starts going to seed because you don't want that seeding everywhere. Okay, before and after is just because they're fun. So um I'm now looking at my garden from the new garden I've got, and starting from scratch, so it's always heartening to see a before and after of what I managed to do before, uh, so that I can do it again. So it was just a fairly sort of there were little bits to it, the garden, but it wasn't anything. There were really beautiful bones and some beautiful hedges, some really beautiful larger ewes. But you can see that I let that get really big. That's how big it was when I arrived. Um, as a sort of floral designer, I think about design a lot, and the design elements and scale is something that's really fun to play with. So tiny, like minute flowers, especially in spring, when those first tiny little flowers poke up like tete tete uh daffodils, which we can see here. Uh I just love when you want to get down and see the lovely little faces arrive in spring. And then having the abundance and joy, and we've got these great big oaks that overlook the garden, and it felt like the garden couldn't quite meet their majesty, so I wanted it to lift up and sort of greet it. Um, so we we managed to, it took about two years to get plenty commission for a greenhouse, but um, I'd outgrown the polytunnel many years before. I by this point I was already growing on a on a uh field commercially, but I wanted to have some of the seed crop close by so I could keep an eye on it, and also just see how the flowers performed and adapted and have some special things to trial nearby. So I wanted to make um sort of trial beds. Um I started small and that was in 2019, and then COVID hit, and I needed a lot more flowers on my site. So this is it in 2023. Um but it only took a couple of years to get really full and abundant because I uh don't adhere to plant spacing. Now that not that's not quite true. I always adhere to if I know how big a plant's gonna get, but I I squash things in a little bit closer than most people would. And we have we have quite a lot of airflow, which means it's okay and that the health of the plants are okay, and I heavily mulch in winter in the parts of the garden that I grow very tightly, so that everything has enough nutrients and stays healthy. But I also make sure that I invite enough nature in to create a sort of biodiversity and a healthy soil and healthy habitat and keep everything sort of in check and then remove any disease immediately to keep everything healthy. And I found that really helpful because it meant that I didn't water this garden at all. And in the droughts that we've had a couple of the summers in 2022, we had a big drought, and last summer we had a big drought. And uh these roses here I underplant with things like Napita or salvia. Not only I find them very good companion plants for roses and help with the black spot, but roses love water, they love being in clay. So a drought can I think they're very tolerant roses, but a drought can cause them to suffer a little bit. But they found that they thrived because they've got this lovely shady feet, and that really helps the uh transpiration stop happening from the soil. Whereas I had roses down uh near the greenhouse and they always suffered because I didn't underplant them. I I since went back last week to the garden to see it, and those roses by the greenhouse are thriving because they finally got big enough and they haven't weeded. So it turns out actually, weeding, you can let some weeds in. Uh, it can really help with companion growing. One other thing that I really uh loved about trying to create a space that was not only productive and full of nature and full of abundance, but I really wanted it to be really beautiful. Um and one thing that I learned from the floral design work that I took into garden design was creating line and depth. And those are two things that we think about a lot when we're creating flora design. We want the viewer to stay longer with the vase, and you you want to see a beautiful line, and you want to be able to sense that arrangement goes backwards and forwards. And the same applies, I think, to gardens. If this wasn't here, this arch and we just had this bare space, the only anchor to the eye would be this gate. But by creating a sense of barrier, but knowing there's something beyond immediately makes you want to walk down it. So those are the lens that I, and this is something that I know a lot of garden designers talk about is cut up your space and put it into uh more manageable little rooms. But I think of it in the way of like creating uh like depth and making the eye keep moving. Another, oh, this is a failure. I feel like people like to hear about failures. Yeah? Okay, I always get really embarrassed though, and I have to caveat. It's like, I mean, obviously, uh when you're dealing with nature, there's lots of things that go wrong. Lots of death happens and all sorts of things. Anyway, um I obviously do a lot of work on figuring out what can what's going to thrive in certain conditions. And sometimes I'm just um like I'm sure we all are, uh totally stubborn, and I want I wanted peonies because I had a big gap in the season. And r the brides would always say in May, Can I have peonies? I know they're in season. And I would say, Yeah, that's so true. Um that the garden that I uh was gardening on, and peonies are supposed to be I've asked so many gardeners, what's your favourite flower? And they say peonies because you can't kill them. Well turns out you can. So I and peonies, I so I bought uh 82 tubers for not, you know, you know, I'm not growing them from seed. It was quite a big investment. Um, and I knew that it probably wasn't the right spot because uh an apple tree had fallen down from from rotting. So I went and did it anyway, and it was really hard work getting them in the ground because it was this heavy, sloppy, intense clay. Um, I even I think I even like filmed myself doing it and put on Instagram, and I have some really good you know horticultural friends who were like, ooh, wouldn't do that. Anyway, I didn't listen to them. Um and for a couple of years I was prancing about being like, see, it looks amazing. They're there, I'm using them for my rides, I was thrilled, and um it worked, and I was felt very smug. And then we had an incredibly wet winter and it didn't stop raining. And uh because I was still, I think, only a few years into living in this garden, I knew that that ground was wet, but it just did not, it flooded basically, and it would not drain, and all the peonies basically died. I think in this picture is uh quite clear that it's not not that one anymore. Uh a few couple of the coral charm hung on, good for them. Uh the rest disappeared. I guess they just rotted. And uh it became uh a cover, I did a cover crop of Facilia, which is an amazing plant. If you don't grow it, I highly recommend, but it does self-seed and not gently. But it's brilliant. The bees love it, it fixes a lot of nutrients in the soil, and it is an amazing cut flower. It flowers for a really long time and it lasts for a really long time in the vase. So I put that in to sort of mitigate the loss, and we had some lovely self-seeding foxglovs, which are also useful for design work in weddings in May. So I was sad that I didn't have this beauty for very long, a fleeting few years of peonies, and then no longer. Anyway, that's my massive failure. We all have them. Um, okay, this is my favorite type of gardening because I have a three-year-old, and I obviously work full-time as a grower now. The first three years when I was growing flowers for weddings and events, I was still working as an archivist in London, so it was just really juggling evening work and weekends, and then I became a full-time grower after three years of juggling both, and that meant I could really put so much energy and time into the soil and growing things. And obviously, not everyone is a full-time grower or has all that time to give. So when my son was born and we were growing all commercially on the field and not in the garden, my garden got completely neglected, obviously. So, priorities. And my favourite place in the garden was a spot where my husband uh makes cider, and he would never let me touch his precious orchard. It was only there's only six trees in this tiny little orchard bit. Uh, but he felt like it was me stealing special nutrients off his very, very quite rightly precious apple trees. Anyway, uh slowly but surely we learnt a bit more about companion planting and about food rainforests, which was such an interesting technique of growing and forest farming, where you grow lots of crops underneath trees, and actually there's lots of benefits to growing crops together. Uh, after reading a lot about this and showing him ancient paintings of this happening, he agreed to let me underplant his trees. So my gosh, I went for it about uh 10,000 bulbs later. Um we had snowdrops leucogiums, iris reticulata, then we had the early narcissists, then we had the mid-season narcissus, the late season narcissists, the species tulips, they're fantastic, fertillarias, all different types. And then we had the camassias, and then uh oh look, we have anemones too. Uh camassias, the two different blue, and then the later white, we had martigonillies. I also put in alliums, but I also put in roses because I they loved the clay, and they are really rugged, and they don't they love having their I'd seen how brilliant they were at having things grow at their feet when lots of people say grow them on their own, and I found that they that wasn't true. So I put in loads of roses, a lot of old Ragosa types that are good for hips, and they thrived. I mean they weren't like they didn't look in the same way as they do in the border, they had a different sort of vibe, but they did brilliantly, and I could cut little buttonholes or stems and hips from them, and then the birds loved them too. So I had colour all the way up to where are we? Martiganelli's are probably the latest, and then a couple of Dutch iris. So we're getting to July. We got January to July, colour, all sorts of stuff. And then uh at July, the plum, we had there was a plum tree. The plum tree came in, uh, and then the apples. And then what was beautiful was the edges I filled with spindle, which is great for autumn design, and the and the lovely for the wildlife in the hedgerows, and the colour is just stunning. You get these sort of watercolour pinks in autumn, and then I put some teasels, which are fantastic for winter arrangement work. My finest accolade of all time. Uh, not uh beats my son, don't tell him that. Uh I am a Guinness World record holder, uh, really, truly, for the world's tallest teasel. Really a special moment, uh, thrilled to bits with that. Um obviously saved the seed, and I've uh sent some out to see if anyone can beat me. Which is probably a mistake because I'm really proud of having a Guinness World Record. Uh so this part of the garden gives and gives, and it is joyful and filled with wildlife, and so bountiful for me and wonderful to walk through at any time of year. And it needs so little from me. I cut it down once the martigans have died back and the alliums have gone. I mow around the roses and the apple trees in late August. And other than that, I cut a path through it in the spring, and that's it. It requires maybe 10 hours a year of work, and it gives so much. And of course, setting it up is a time resource, but it took a couple of days, not that hard, not that hard, with my sister, she's very hardworking. Uh, and it offered so much, so it went from this patch of having to mow it all the time to something that was far more special and offered me a world record. Uh, so that's my now my favorite way of gardening is to fill it with plants and then let it do its thing. Um, I still obviously grow on a farm scale, and we create beds that are very intensive for annuals and sweet peas is our speciality, so we we're growing 150 different varieties this year, uh, and that is on a much more sort of traditional uh creating beds and uh giving them a bit of irrigation and looking after them and time and energy and TLC. But for for me, the the best sort of gardens actually don't need much tending to as long as they can be filled to the brim with things. Okay, I think that's the end. But I would love to hear if anyone's got any any questions. Yeah. Anyone? Yeah, go on.

Arthur Cole 29:59

How does he pick up his apples in that long grass?

SPEAKER_03 30:01

Oh well, because I cut it in August late autumn. Oh, August, don't I? Yeah, yeah. It is, you're right. That's why I cut it in in late August. I've had this conversation before. Go on.

SPEAKER_01 30:18

It is his patch.

SPEAKER_03 30:20

Oh no. Our patch. Um I do grow apples. So he's also got a couple of other orchards which I don't I don't touch, but I also would never cut his blossom. Ever. So any other questions?

SPEAKER_01 30:48

You said at the very beginning you were growing stuff in sand and gravel.

unknown 30:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:52

Um and I just wanted how to get anything to grow and be watering and preventable.

SPEAKER_03 30:59

So um the one most wonderful thing about plants is that there are so many different plants that thrive in different conditions that are adapted for different conditions. And there are places in the world which are sand and there's plants that still thrive. And I'm looking for plants that will have been adapted to those conditions, and also trialing things that haven't been to see how they respond. Uh, so we're not irrigating, I'm I'm watering in because it's been a dry spring. Um, if it was down to me in timing, I would have planted it in autumn and left it. And we had such a beautiful wet winter, that would have been great. But yeah, no irrigation. There's no the and putting things in from seed or cuttings or bare root so that they're not in soil, so they're not coddled already, and there's no soil put in there because then otherwise they'd hold tight to that soil. Um, but asking the plants to find, go down and find and put a taproot down and seeing what comes out. But there's like lots of plants, and in my book, I wanted it to have a big plant directory for right plant, right place, and thinking about conditions of each. Because how do you write a gardening book for everyone? And everyone's the conditions are so minutely different that some things will thrive, like peonies, and some things won't. So uh there's a big grid of uh finding what your soil type is and your light and your and all the needs that you have and what you're looking for in a plant, and then the plant hopefully will be very easy to find on the grid, and then it's got a QR code and then a very extensive list because it wouldn't all fit in the book because I wanted so many different plants on there. How are we doing for time? Have we got more question times? Yeah, okay, great. Any more questions?

SPEAKER_02 32:37

Yeah, oh yeah, good idea.

SPEAKER_03 32:44

So much.

SPEAKER_02 32:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 32:54

It's my favorite subject. Um, I do actually have a whole presentation on colour, which I can't, oh no, I'm not gonna get up right now. Um in the book, uh there's a whole chapter on colour. It's my I honestly my favorite the favourite thing, the thing that lights me up the most is colour. And they do I think that is exactly the thing that I found hard at first about gardening, and I didn't know enough plants to get have it intuitively. Uh, knowing how tall things are gonna get and how things are gonna react through the year, and then colour. Um, I love how colour works with each other, and I think colour is one of the most personal things in the world. We all have our own reactions to different colours. A colour that you love, someone else might have a real bad reaction to, like it might be the school jumper colour. For me, that's like bright purple. Still find it quite difficult. Um, but then there's so many purples that I love, and I and colour, when it's next to another colour, colour only exists in relation to another colour. So it is amazing how many combinations we can do. And it if you want, I I go in the book and I've uh got flat lays of different colour combinations and how to work with really just colour theory, really simply, and how to put that into garden design. So things like uh simply like contrasting colour palettes and how you can work with them and make them feel harmonious. And there is the the hardest thing I think about gardening is that the colour will be different through the year potentially, unless you really dial back the choices that you make. And I think there's a lot of creativity and restrictions. So if you do decide to be restrictive in order to have a really harmoniously coloured garden, then that does make it easy about the the shopping list, the like long wish list goes down a load, which is actually quite helpful, because having a long wish list, then you want to put everything in, and actually some of the most successful gardens designed have repetition. And that is true to an extent, although Surge Hill Project, if ever if you've got a chance to go there, they don't have a single plant that's the same, and it's still astonishingly beautiful. Um, but yeah, colour is it's so fun to play with and such a personal thing, and there's a deep dive on it in the in the book, and it's the thing that I think about the most. Um, and it's also the thing that I think you can edit. Like if something doesn't work for you, or if a colour hasn't come out quite how you expected and it's jarring, then take it out. I I think also one of the most useful bits of information is that lots of people find white quite tricky to work with, but I think it's really, really a great thing. The I think the reason why it's tricky to work with is that if something's huge, orb-like, and white, our eye immediately gets drawn to it. So if you've got something white, like a big white peony, don't know why I keep talking about peonies, a big white peony in the corner over there, and everything else is like pinks, and you're immediately going to be like looking at the white peony. And it draws our attention. And I think it's because we're all run by the sun and the moon, and so we have to worship them in some way, and our eye is constantly looking for motifs of them. So white I think can be really brilliant, but I use it only ever in a monochromatic colour design. So, what I mean by that is not black and white, but going from a rich saturated hue and then going down the scale to white, and that can be incredibly calming and harmonious and beautiful. Um I did that in a in the garden in the book with a yellow garden. My dad gave me a bright yellow rose. Um I'd only been in the garden for a year, and I still naively thought that yellow was a horrible colour. Turns out it's one of the best. And uh I put it round the back by the compost heap because I didn't know whether I'd didn't know whether I'd like it or not. Anyway, it turns out it was a beautiful sort of honey buff rose that's actually got it's not available anymore. It's called Valencia. Huge flowers. It wasn't particularly healthy, but it was beautiful and it really hook me on yellow, so I will love it forever. Um and I had to move the compost heap so that I could grow an entirely golden and white garden around it. And it was beautiful. Uh so yeah, colour's fun. And if you want to know more and deep dive on colour, get the book. Um, any other questions?

Arthur Cole 36:53

There is X and section on any bit. I mean, all jokes aside, uh it's a wonderful uh reference uh manual as well as great reading.

SPEAKER_03 37:03

Thanks. Any questions? You scare people off. I did, go on, there must be one or two. Uh there's no yes.

SPEAKER_02 37:15

I was wondering where you get your cardboard from.

SPEAKER_03 37:17

Where I get my cardboard from.

SPEAKER_02 37:24

Because do you have an abundance of cardboard which desperately trying to get rid of?

SPEAKER_03 37:29

Find your local flower farmer. You're totally right. Well, you know, I I do sell my own books, which helps. So um I have four books in there, that's why I keep writing books, because I need the cardboard. You need to send a card bookshop. Um that we do laugh about that when we're we're setting up the field, and because my book got released this year, I managed to sell a few, thank goodness. Um, and it also meant that I had loads of cardboard. So just putting out Macmillan Publishing. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Um but yeah, otherwise, so that's um the cardboard in the case if you don't grow no dig, then I'm sure plenty of you do or are aware of it already, but um, to create new beds, it depends. And I'm not averse to using other methods either. I'm not a die hard no-dig um fan, but I found my shoulders couldn't hack digging into the clay every year. Um I'm strong, but I uh I still dig like a mouse, so it wasn't just wasn't the thing for me. So I did no dig and it was really fabulous on clay. Uh and then on the new plot, I'm on like a silty loam. If anyone's interested in soil, we can talk deep about soil. I'm on this sort of silty loam, it's got a bit of sand in it, and then there's a clay plug really close to the surface. Uh, in some places it's only uh like a foot down, and some places it's four feet down. Uh, it just means that in the winter it fills up basically, um, and the top part doesn't drain. So the top part is soft, not like clay, where it gets squishy and slippy. Top part is like a marsh, like a boggy marsh. Um, and for me, uh growing, trying to grow annual crops on that, or even perennial or biennial, is just it's tricky. A lot of marsh grass grows there. Um, and weirdly, we're on a sort of trifecta. There's parts that are clay and there's parts that are like pure sand, but where we've chosen to put our field is really boggy. But I think that the no-dig is really useful for that because I'm building up basically a raised bed. Um, and then eventually the soil will be altered a little bit when I mulch each year. So that's helpful for me. But I'm not I'm by any means I'm interested in so many different types of growing. But when I'm growing my my my flowers for seed, um, because I don't grow flowers for cuts now. Um this is my first year of not doing weddings and events, I'm just doing the seed business, and it's really very liberating and really fun. Um, but yeah, for that I grow on sort of more nourished land. Any other questions?

Arthur Cole 39:53

Well, I've got one jump in here. Um edible flowers.

SPEAKER_03 39:57

Yeah. Do you grow lots here?

Arthur Cole 39:59

We grow a lot of quite a lot of edible flowers. Things that um things I've never come across before, begonia tuberosa. Anybody grow begonia tuberosa? And for what reason?

SPEAKER_01 40:13

For salads and food are gonna be pressing killed.

Arthur Cole 40:18

I thought that begonia taking place uh in the garden at the bottom of a compost heat. I've since been educated, and the petals, the red, vibrant petals on begonia tuberosa go into our salad bags, they're fleshy, really satisfied by, and this pow of citrus is quite extraordinary. I mean, is there anything?

SPEAKER_03 40:45

Well, I I just love uh flowers or plants in general that have multi-purpose. So I don't know if you know salad bonnet. It's um, yeah, in a few nodes, it's got an amazingly weird taste, almost like I can't anyway I can describe it, it's like watermelon rind with a touch of, I don't know, sharpness. But it's so sweet for arrangements as well, when it has these tiny little wild bracts of flowers and makes an arrangement look really. What I love about a floral design is anything that looks like it belongs to where it is, that it's really anchored in that landscape. And those tiny little wild touches are amazing. So I we we try all sorts of things, and I'm a huge fan of nasturtians. Not many people grow nastyans for cuts because they think they're too short, but I think very lovely for a wedding. They flower for such a long time, and then you can also cut the trails if you're just really delicate with them, and they can just look incredible coming out of a compote bowl or even bigger in an urn. Um, so yeah, I love a flower that it has multi-purpose that you can eat. And I mean, you know you can eat dahlia tubas and dahlia petals as well. They're great, one of the most iconic cut flowers. You can just gobble them up.

Arthur Cole 41:55

Well, Mary Crows, um, this has been fascinating, floral, and precisely what the great garden show is all about. Thank you. Thank you for listening. Subscribe, tune in for more episodes from the estate every month. See you next time.