Welcome to our podcast Grow Cook Eat Arrange with Sarah Raven and Arthur Parkinson.

Arthur and I are going to do a podcast over this year recording once a week on all our favourite flowers and more me

than Arthur, my favourite vegetables I pick from the garden. Arthur's not really a foodie,

but I hope by the end of the year I'm going to have convinced him equally to love his veg

as much as he loves his flowers.

Thank you. equally to love his veg as much as he loves his flowers. I started gardening when I was quite young actually.

I was brought up in a gardening family just outside Cambridge.

And my father was a dawn at Cambridge University and we had a beautiful garden.

I was one of five children and we spent a lot of time outside.

And so gardening was very much part of my life from when I was born.

And then through my teens and then in my 20s, I decided I wanted to be a medic.

And so I went into hospital training in London in

Charing Cross and I found that too sterile and too far away from nature and too distant from the

seasons I absolutely loved it intellectually and emotionally because I loved looking after patients

but I just found the whole sterility a bit challenging.

So I started gardening myself when I lived in London, and I just started, in fact, growing radishes

and lettuce, cut and come again salads. And then things like artisotes, really simple things.

And when we moved to Sussex with Adam, my husband and my first daughter, Rosie, who was by then

about nine months, I just started doing a tiny little garden outside our kitchen, where I could

be with Rosie, but also we could both go out into the garden because we arrived here in May.

And I did these trial patches of cut flowers because I always love bringing the outside in

and that was something that I'd had throughout my childhood is picking flowers and putting just small

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