This is the BBC.

Hello, I'm Kristi 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.

For rights reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast.

You can find over 2,000 more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Discs website.

Music

My castaway this week is the gardener and writer Anna Payvord.

If you've already piled dry leaves on your agapanthus and marked up your seed catalogs 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, dulled out endless detailed advice on how best to create beauty, harmony and tranquility 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 tulips 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.

It seems in matters of nature she has had something of a head start.

Her childhood was spent roaming the landscape of the brick and 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, what pleasure is your soul?

Well, all 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 over looking a valley.

And the way that the light is moving in the valley and what the rocks 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 turns to get left slightly behind, but I did have a bit of a scurry around yesterday evening because I thought crumbs.

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