Dan Pearson

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 8 February 2015

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Kirsty Young's guest this week is the garden designer, Dan Pearson.

His style is governed by a desire to create a sense of place and he is drawn to wild plants and gardens. Aged just five he discovered this passion, while building roof gardens for his collection of trolls and spent the summer watching the plant and animal life in a pond created by his father.

He gave up A' levels in favour of apprenticeships at RHS Wisley and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and then spent several years working abroad, studying plants in their natural environment. His first large-scale project was creating a garden for Frances Mossman, a colleague of his mother's, who asked him to design the garden at her Northamptonshire plot. He won more clients through word of mouth and set up his own garden design company in the late 1980s. His work has since taken him all over the world and he has designed five award-winning gardens for the Chelsea Flower Show. Amongst his current projects he is creating a design for London's proposed Garden Bridge.

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.
0:06.0	For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.
0:10.0	For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.
0:17.0	Radio 4. My customers. My castaway this week is the gardener Dan Pearson, although to call him just a gardener is like saying Pavarotti could hold a tune.
0:41.0	He's designed gardens everywhere from Scotland to Israel to Japan and has had entire museum
0:46.4	exhibitions devoted to his work. Informality, evolution and a sense of belonging permeates his compositions.
0:53.0	He's exhibited at the Chelsea Flower Show five times,
0:56.0	winning a medal on every single occasion.
0:59.0	One gets the feeling it was only ever going to turn out this way.
1:02.8	Age six, he would sit up in bed scouring plant catalogs.
1:06.8	A little later, it was among the rock gardens and rhododendrons of RHS wisly
1:11.6	that his fingers really began to green. Having won a scholarship to study in the
1:15.6	Himalayan Valley of the Flowers, it was the legendary Rosemary Viri who presented him with
1:19.8	his diploma when he graduated from Q. He says, for those of us who choose to garden,
1:25.0	there's nothing quite like the feeling of freedom that comes when you combine the
1:28.8	cerebral with the physical. And so Dan Pearson, I wonder what you think gardens are for? I think
1:37.2	they are a place of escape and a place of immersion there's somewhere where you can be yourself completely.
1:46.0	I think they provide you with an enormous amount of freedom and I've always found that
1:52.0	that's the place that I felt happiest and most myself.
1:56.0	And so you believe firmly in your planting in a sort of naturalism, letting nature take the lead if not indeed take over. I read that you have no truck with variegated
2:07.8	hostas. What's the problem? I think variegation often leads to confusion and I think one of the things I'm aiming to do with the gardens I'm making is to create places which are tranquil which are allowing you to escape from that clutter, that hubbub.
2:24.0	And therefore, I've always been drawn to plants which are on the wild side, drawn to gardens which are on the wild side,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.