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Welcome to Grow Cookie to Range, the podcast of me, Sarah Raven, and today I'm joined again by one of our regular visitors or regular speakers, which is Josie Lewis, our head gardener at Perch Hill.

And we had a really nice question, from a customer, what were the plants that Josie and I would recommend that would give

you glorious flowers and sort of presence in your garden for longest? And so in a way, if we were

each cast off to a desert island, which would be the six plants that we might take with us?

I always think, in a way, more if I was sent to prison and I was allowed to make a little garden, which were the six plants that I would try and persuade the prison to allow me to grow.

So I'm going to kick us off with Amalankia. And I remember working in a garden about 10 years ago

that had multi-stemmed amalankas in grass.

And I thought they were the most graceful and elegant things whenever I went.

In winter they had wonderful sort of branch bow shapes, these multi-stems.

They were quite well established and very nicely pruned.

In spring, they're absolutely beautiful because first of all come the copper flowers,

sorry, copper leaves followed by these very pretty, very simple, blossomy flowers. And then they go over and then in June, really early, you get these beautiful, sort of medium size, but quite small, not a crabapple size, berries.

And I love, we have now three amalancas in the Dutch yard here. And I open my back door in June.

And there is a flurry of blackbirds, both female and male. And for about 10 days, they are all, apparently in our Dutch

yard, all feasting on these Amalankia buries. They absolutely seem to love them. And I guess there aren't

that many things burying so early in the year in June. And then finally what happens is that they go

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