This podcast is brought to you by sarahraven.com, which is home to everything you need for a truly

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to discover even more. Welcome to Grow Cooket Range, the podcast of me, and today I'm joined by Tom Simpson, who's our head of

horticulture. Hello, Tom. Hi, hello. Tom and I and Ruth Smith and Josie Lewis, our head

gardener, and others sometimes head off

to the Netherlands in the autumn, either sort of end of August, beginning of September every year

for a few days, sometimes up to a week. And I've talked about that before, but it's absolutely

the highlight of our year, or one of the highlights. And what we do is we visit

the breeders that we have found over the years have the same sort of taste and eye as us.

They like the same sort of things as we do. And what we find is quite a lot of daily trials,

the people that are walking the trials are selecting very,

very, very different things to what we are looking for. And really often people are on the

daily trials are looking for sort of really huge flowers and really, really strong, almost

sort of classroom colours, if I could put it like that,

without sounding rude. Post to paint colours, reds and yellows and things. And to be honest,

it's almost exactly the opposite of what we're looking for, which is what I guess we're looking

for when we're selecting really stellar delias is,

I mean, Tom, you must add in here, but I would say my list would be perhaps beauty, of course,

often lengths of flowering, so starting early and carrying on late.

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