Hello I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1998 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a gardener. He grew up in a Yorkshire village. His parents

saved hard to send him to a nearby boarding school, but he didn't enjoy it much and

left to pursue a career out of doors. In the mid-50s he went to work in and

masterminded the Harlow car gardens near Harrogate and it was here over the next 20

years that he made his home making things grow where not much had grown before.

He moved into broadcasting and writing, became a stalwart of Radio 4's Gardner's

question time and a popular presenter of many television programs, all of them concerning the living, growing things

that he's loved all his life.

If I'm depressed, he says, I just go and look at a flower.

He is Jeffrey Smith. What does it do for you Jeffrey in that moment, the flower?

I think it makes you realize that we live in an artificial world and the real world is the natural world the world of nature and you just need

look at a primrose and it puts everything in perspective I was looking at

primrose as last Saturday night I stopped at a little valley that I've loved since I was a youngster where I used to go and watch the badges and the bluebells were in flower and the primroses and ransoms you know the wild garlic and the

quiet the only sound you could hear was bird song and the noise of the stream

and I thought I don't need paradise the Yorkshire Dales will do for me.

And has it always been the same, you were born and brought up in Swale Dale, weren't you?

Has it always been the same even when you were a little boy, did it touch you?

One of the things I can remember plainly

is the smell of the moor after rain.

Have you ever smelled it?

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