Hello, I'm Krestey 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 2009. My castaway this week is the poet Ruth Pardle.

Critically acclaimed, her poetry brings the natural world into sharp focus.

All the better to describe and document it. If her clear vision and eye for detail sound

methodical, its little surprise, she comes from a long line of botanists and

scientists. Indeed her great-great-grandfather was Charles Darwin.

Wildness and wild animals lie at the heart of what I feel about writing, she says.

And of her childhood, looking at nature properly, knowing the names of plants, seeing how the petals worked, observing animal behavior, was just there.

That was what you did.

That was what being a person was.

So Ruth Pardle, on the origin of poems then for a moment, yourself have gone have you not at times to

extraordinary lengths to understand the world and then to make poetry out of it.

Tell me about some of the biggest journeys that you've made.

Yes, well I suppose the biggest one is the Tiger journey.

In 2002 I started to go to India and Bhutan and Nepal and Sumatra and Laos to find what was happening to wild tigers.

I grew up with scientists so I'm at ease with scientists and I like the way they think.

And so I went into the forests in the far east of Russia or up volcanoes and Sumatra with brilliant field zoologists looking for what was happening, you know, for the signs of Tiger, for hair

here, a footprint there, a scratch or a sort of marking on a tree and I was trying to understand what was happening.

Your great-great-grandfather wrote famously of course of these endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful.

Is there a little part of that spirit that travels with you then when you go?

Very, very much and it was actually during that Tiger journey that I began to feel most kinship with Darwin

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