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Welcome to Grow Cook Eat Arrange, the podcast of me, Sarah Raven.

And today, to start off the new year, we've got a slightly unusual format for us.

I'm not going to call it odd because that has slight negative connotations perhaps, but the opposite, which is that I'm going to be interviewed by Alex Clark, somebody

that I've been interviewed by twice already at Cambridge Literary Festival. And the reason that

I thought it'd be really fun for her to interview me on the podcast

is that she has amazing energy and she is a gardener, which is incredibly important.

And she likes the sort of gardening that hopefully we all like the fact that you're listening

to this podcast means you must sort of like the same kind of gardening.

And so we're going to do that and just chat about why to garden,

what it does for us, why one makes the choices of the plants, one makes, all that kind of stuff.

So a new year episode, I suppose, or end of one year moving into another year episode. So welcome,

Alex. Thank you so much for agreeing to do this.

I am absolutely thrilled. As you know, when I have spoken to you before at the literary festival,

we've not only had packed audiences who would like me to go to questions after about five minutes

because they just want to ask you their stuff.

And we persist though. We say, no, we're going to talk amongst ourselves for a bit.

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