Tom Stimpson: 12 top plants for superb structure in the garden - Episode 249

grow, cook, eat, arrange with Sarah Raven & friends

Sarah Raven

Cook, Arranging, Home, Flower Arranging, Grow, Arrangements, Kitchen, Vegetables, Flowers, Gardener, Veg Garden, Lifestyle, Gardening, Leisure, Home & Garden, Food, Cooking, Arts, Eating, Eat, Growing, Planting, Produce, Garden, Sarah Raven

4.7 • 843 Ratings

🗓️ 20 November 2025

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Whatever your garden’s size, picking plants with the right size and shape can be just as important for impact as their colour and scent. Tom Stimpson returns to ‘grow, cook, eat, arrange’ this week as we uncover the plants that form the backbone of beauty, function and vibrance all year round. You’ll hear hardy varieties, plants for both the garden and the kitchen, and inspiration as to where you should sow each flower for maximum impact. In this episode, discover: How to choose and incorpora...

Transcript

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0:00.0	This podcast is brought to you by sarahraven.com, which is home to everything you need for a truly
0:06.3	beautiful and productive garden. You'll also find great and essential gardening kit and stylish,
0:12.9	lovely things to have in your house to bring the outside indoors, all inspired by the garden
0:19.8	and the house being tied together. There's also plenty of
0:23.1	garden inspiration, how-to videos and specialist growing guides. So head over to sarahraven.com today
0:29.4	to discover even more. Welcome to Grow Cook Eat Arrange, the podcast of me, Sarah Raven, and various different guests and friends and members of our team at Sarah Raven.
0:51.6	Today, I'm joined by Tom Stimpson, who's our head of horticulture. And Tom and I work
0:58.0	a lot together, designing, pulling together collections of tulips, da-da-da, we go travelling a lot to
1:04.8	the Netherlands and around nurseries in this country. And we're very like-minded. So I guess that's a sort of brief introduction to Tom.
1:14.0	Hello Tom. Hi, Sarah. How you doing? Very nice to see you and to hear you. So, yeah, what we thought
1:20.9	through the winter, which is a time that you stand back a bit from your garden and you're not
1:25.9	needing to garden quite so much,
1:28.3	is it's a time to reassess things. And so we thought a step back, we would do a series of
1:34.6	the 12 best plants for dot, dot, dot. So all the way through with Tom in some of them and with
1:43.0	Josie Lewis O'Hagana in some of them and with Arthur
1:46.7	Parkinson who's my initial co-host from when we started four years ago in some of them and with
1:53.1	some of them just me on my own it would be our stepping back and our assessment of the things that
2:00.0	we've learnt over the years that we've been
2:02.4	gardening are the really outstanding stellar plants. And so it's sort of what I think of as a sort
2:09.8	of stock cube, whether you're a beginner gardener or a more seasoned gardener and you want
2:15.5	a bit of juzh and new ideas to go into your garden,
2:19.8	it hopefully will give you that.
	...

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