Hello, I'm Lucy Worsley, chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces.

You're listening to our podcast that explores the history and stories of our six palaces.

These talks are a collection of some of our best live events.

I really hope you enjoy listening.

The history of the English Garden reveals more than expected about the past and its people.

This series explores the theme of gardens as places of work, rest and leisure.

In this talk, award-winning garden designer Anne-Marie Powell talks about mental health, horticulture and happiness.

I'm here tonight really to talk about health and horticulture and happiness, really.

And this year I had a great privilege of designing the garden for the Chelsea Flower Show. I was asked by the RHS to design

there, green and grey Britain gone for health, horticulture and happiness. Now, I think I'd just

start by telling exactly why health, water, culture, and happiness is so important to me. So I'm in

quite an unusual scenario that I've been designing gardens now for over

20 years. But I did find myself growing up without a garden of my own. So I really understand

the value of gardens coming from a different perspective. My dad was in the army. So we moved

every 18 months between the ages of when I was born

and before I was packed off to boarding school so gardens and me were kind of rented spaces

and balconies and army barracks so it was really my grandfather that flicks my switch and open my

eyes to gardening so and he himself he lived in a back-to-back terrace in Leeds on a council estate.

And literally his lawn was the size of a postage stamp and he could cut his lawn with some

nail scissors. So, but he did have the wonder of an allotment. Now, that was a magical place

for him. He'd been a miner all of his life, so his world was very much a space of dark.

So whenever we weren't stationed too far away, we'd be packed up as a family, up for the weekend,

...