Olivia Laing on Christopher Lloyd, Gardener and Writer
Great Lives
BBC
4.2 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 13 December 2022
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Known to his friends as Christo, Lloyd spent his whole life, from childhood until his death aged 85, at work in the same garden: Great Dixter in East Sussex. He wrote a weekly column for Country Life for 42 years and was the author of 25 books, including The Mixed Border in the Modern Garden (1957) and The Well Tempered Garden (1970).
Christo is the choice of the writer Olivia Laing, herself a passionate gardener. She and Matthew Parris go to Great Dixter to meet Head Gardener Fergus Garrett, who worked alongside Christo for many years and was one of his closest friends.
Olivia Laing is the author of five works of non-fiction and a novel. Her books include To the River (2011), The Trip to Echo Spring (2013) and The Lonely City (2016). Her books have been translated into 19 languages. She writes on art and culture for the Guardian, Financial Times and New York Times, among many other publications and a book of her collected essays on art, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, was published in 2020. Her most recent book is Everybody: A Book About Freedom (2021) and she is currently working on a book about gardens and paradise.
Produced by Mair Bosworth for BBC Audio
Photograph of Christopher Lloyd used by kind permission of Jonathan Buckley
Transcript
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| 0:28.8 | dedicated sports fans across the UK. |
| 0:31.2 | So if you like this podcast, head over to BBC Sounds where you'll find plenty more. |
| 0:35.8 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:44.8 | I'm walking along a path weaving through tree firms, Japanese quints, bagonias, |
| 0:50.4 | palms, eucalyptus. |
| 0:52.6 | If I look up, I can see the huge leaves of a banana tree above me. |
| 0:57.4 | The BBC haven't splashed out on travel budgets to send me somewhere in the tropics. |
| 1:02.4 | I'm deep in the East Sussex countryside and it's a barmy 14 degrees centigrade this morning. |
| 1:08.8 | This exotic garden used to be a formal rose garden designed by the architect Edwin Lutchens |
| 1:16.2 | until it was ripped up by today's great life, the gardener and writer Christopher Lloyd, |
| 1:22.0 | known to his friends, only as Christo. |
| 1:25.4 | We've rarely had a great life associated so completely with a single location. |
| 1:32.4 | Our great life spent his whole life devoted to one garden, this garden, great Dixter, |
| 1:38.4 | and he's the choice of who is this, bounding out of the undergrowth, the writer and cultural |
... |
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