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Hello and welcome to the BBC Gardner's World magazine podcast, brought to you by the team here at the magazine.

Join us as we chat all things gardening with the nation's favourite experts.

The death of someone we love can be devastating, leaving us grieving and feeling that life

can never be the same.

When she was seven months pregnant, Victoria Bennett lost her sister suddenly.

For her, building and tending a garden was an act of hope that helped her during some of her darkest times.

Hello, I'm Catherine Mansley, and I'm with Victoria to talk to her about how gardening helped her to manage her grief and anxiety,

and what she learned during that period about gardening and our resilience in the face of seemingly overwhelming

challenges. Hello, Victoria. Thank you for joining us on the Garden Aswell podcast. Hello, I'm delighted

to be here. If I can start by taking you back to that awful time, your sister had just died very suddenly

in a canoeing accident and you were pregnant

and then obviously subsequently had a baby. You moved to a new house in rural Cumbria.

I think many of us would feel that we had enough on our plates. Why did you decide to start

making a garden? I decided really that

that I needed to grow something. To put it in context, my sister's death actually was the start

of several bereavements in my family. And so it became a point where I felt like there was just so much loss, so much death in my life.

And I began to feel overwhelmed by that and afraid of it as well.

And when we moved to the new house, it had nothing growing in there.

It just had a blank, a blank sort of scrubby

...