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 1977, and the presenter was Roy Plumlee. This week are cast away as a botanist and a biologist and a gardening expert.

He's one of the stalwarts of Gardner's question time, Professor Alan Gammel of Keele University.

Professor Gammel, how well could you adapt yourself to solitude?

I think I could adapt myself pretty well.

I'm, in many senses, a fairly self-sufficient person. I can enjoy being alone.

Mind you wouldn't like it to last forever, but I can enjoy it.

Of course you spend quite a lot of time on an island anyway, though it's not a deserted one.

The island of Arden and the First of Clyde.

Yes, that's a lovely island, not a desert island, nor deserted.

Beautiful.

That's where you have your Scottish home.

Yes.

How much does music mean to you? It means quite a lot not in the sense of an

intellectual exercise because I'm not intellectually understanding of music. I'm very much a sentimentalist as can be fairly clearly seen by

my choice of records and it means a lot in that I can feel quite strongly music.

Do you have any practical skill to play an instrument?

No, I've practiced many instruments, always notorious lack of success.

Do you play discs a lot?

Play discs quite a bit, yes. What's the first one you've chosen?

Well, the first one I've chosen is in fact one which harks back to my boyhood. I was brought up an ear, for example.

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