Hi, Sweetpea

 Hi, Mummy Bear.

 It’s chit chat time.

 It is.

 We have episode 78 with the wonderful Liz Knight.

 That’s right.

 If you can cast your mind back to Gardeners’ World, 2026 episode 10.

 Yes.

 Liz was on the programme.

 She had a segment where she was specifically showing us about foraging – not out yonder

 Tharrr.

 No.

 But in your own back garden.

 Exactly.

 Right there under your feet in the bushes.

 In the bushes?

 In the borders.

 In the borders, yeah.

 Exactly.

 In your own garden.

 And you may remember she talked about things like being able to eat Honesty.

 You get a nice wasabi pea from that.

 Also being able to eat ground elder.

 And that was a revelation for us because you can in fact eat it.

 Apparently it’s delicious.

 Yeah.

 So she’s turned us from seeing ground elder as an absolute pain in our garden

 and a real problem to actually being able to look at it and think, well, that’s

 a nice healthy crop.

 Yeah.

 I can do loads.

 She’s given us loads of recipes for that.

 And just generally, it’s quite amazing.

 So now when we look at it, we have kind of a bit of a hedge of it.

 Yes.

 We’re like, boom, crop.

 We can confidently say we’ve nailed ground elder.

 We’ve nailed ground elder.

 Another plant that’s a bit of my nemesis is Japanese knotweed.

 Now I’ve never experienced it firsthand.

 I don’t think I’ve ever seen it in the flesh.

 No, I don’t either.

 But I have a huge, or had a huge fear of it.

 If you’ve listened to any of the other chit chats, you’ll know I often bring

 it up.

 And Liz has turned me on that one as well.

 So my fear came from a mother who’s eternally worried about it, a brother

 who struggled with it in London when he got a house there.

 But actually, from listening to Liz, it’s actually a truly wonderful plant

 with many strings to its bow.

 Exactly.

 And now I have a totally different view of it.

 So thank you, Liz, for that.

 It’s fantastic.

 And Liz talks about a study that was done at Leeds University about

 Japanese knotweed.

 And I found a link to that study.

 So I’ve added that to our website.

 I’ll give you details of that in a minute.

 But first of all, there were a couple of updates to the recording, Sweetpea.

 Liz mentioned the viburnum.

 Couldn’t remember exactly which one it was.

 Have you got it?

 Yes, it was the Viburnum Cross Bodnantense Dawn.

 That’s right.

 The Arrowwood Dawn.

 Yes.

 And one other thing in the pesto recipe that I give, I forgot to include

 the key component of, well, any dish, as far as I’m concerned, but

 certainly for your pesto.

 And that’s garlic.

 Oh, my gosh.

 How did you forget that?

 Always whack in a load of garlic.

 Yes.

 In terms of noises, you’ll find there are some quite hard

 plosives to start with.

 But then Liz was able to readjust her mic.

 So she managed to sort that out.

 So do just hang on in there.

 The audio does improve and get over the initial couple of minutes with that.

 And then I think partway through it’s one of Liz’s daughters making

 breakfast in the background at one point.

 But as mentioned, we have added links to the website.

 So you need to go to notjustagarden.co.uk.

 If you click on Chit Chats and go to Liz’s face.

 Hell yeah.

 In there, you’ll find all the links we have in there, her website, the

 three books that she’s written, social media for her, also her

 pond or pool inspiration.

 There’s an image of that.

 That’s a good point.

 And also a couple of other books that she recommended.

 So you’ll find that Leeds University paper about Japanese not

 in there and Liz has got one pin on the map for a garden that she

 highly recommends that’s in Wales.

 So head over to the gardens page.

 You’ll find all the details in there.

 Fantastico.

 So Sweetpea, what’s the format?

 So for Liz Knight’s dream garden, we have garden boundary, shed

 a greenhouse, five ornamentals, five edibles, one statement tree,

 pond or pool plus one plant.

 I’m finding fear it’s eating area, drink and one plant for that area.

 Yes.

 And if you have any questions or comments on anything we’ve

 chatted about, please do get in touch.

 You can do that either through the website, notjustagarden.co.uk

 or through the email, notjustagarden@outlook.com.

 Right.

 Shall we have a listen to this episode?

 Oh, I think we should.

 This is episode 78, a good old chit chat with Liz Knight.

 Off we go.

 Welcome Liz to A Good Ol’ Chit-Chat.

 It’s so lovely to be here with you.

 I listened to your review of episode 10 of Gardeners’ World and

 absolutely adored it.

 And it was so lovely to hear your chit chat of your incredible

 knowledge of Gardeners’ World, but also of Gardeners’ World.

 It is a bit like our lunch chit chat.

 And your mother daughter relationship.

 So yeah, lovely to be here.

 So kind of you to say.

 Yes, it was episode 10.

 That was only a couple of weeks ago.

 It was.

 And your segment was specifically around foraging.

 And we absolutely loved this because we love the idea of foraging.

 We’re amateur foragers.

 We all are.

 I think what we lack is confidence, really, in what we’re foraging for.

 But there were several plants that you mentioned that we absolutely

 recognize, absolutely have in our garden and are absolutely

 planning to start eating now.

 You pretty much immediately afterwards went out to the garden

 and went, honesty, right?

 So I’m having some of those.

 They’re like wasabi peas.

 Did you get the wasabi pea flavour?

 Yes, and it’s a delayed impact.

 It is a delayed gratification.

 You kind of get lulled into it and think, oh, it’s really sweet.

 And then it suddenly hits.

 Bang, bang.

 And the nice thing is, is when you let them go to that papery,

 because you know that kind of how everyone in the 80s used to have the

 kind of dried flowers and honesty.

 Yes.

 Pennies was part of that sort of whole thing.

 And they’re having a real resurgence now.

 People are using them in beautiful flower arrangements and for like

 Christmas decorations and stuff.

 And they’re so lovely.

 Yeah.

 But if you get them exactly the right time when they’ve turned papery,

 those seeds are still a tiny bit green.

 And then they have just like intensified in their flavour.

 So you can very carefully peel them apart, take out your seed.

 And what I tend to do is have a little tiny bottle of cider vinegar

 and you just cram the seeds into that bottle of cider vinegar

 and it acts like an extract.

 It will extract all of that intense flavour that you can then like

 drizzle into, I don’t know, mayonnaise or cream,

 if you want to make a remoulade or something like that.

 And so it’s like an intense, you know, flavouring.

 You can use it, you know, kind of on your sushi or whatever.

 But then you also have left, if you peel them carefully,

 your very on trend kind of arrangements

 that you could use as your Christmas decorations.

 Well, it’s before when we tried our wasabi pea honesty,

 it was with a very green disc.

 Yeah.

 So you’re saying wait until it’s dried on paper.

 It’ll just change.

 It’ll just intensify in its flavour.

 It’s a funny plant because the flowers of honesty are sweet

 and so sweet that you can put them into sweet things.

 You can use them as an edible flower, you know, on puddings and stuff.

 Even though they’ve got that very slight mustardy, they’ve kind of

 they’ve got this lovely kind of floral flavour

 and kind of like honeyed flavour to them.

 And the leaves are more peppery.

 So it kind of like it’s it sort of like goes on a kind of a trajectory

 of of of intenseness over the season, I guess.

 But yeah, it’s lovely.

 And it’s not just the leaves and the flowers and the seeds that you can eat.

 You can also eat the the the roots, the swollen roots.

 Yeah. The tuba like.

 Well, just literally, you know, you can any like a kind of a root vegetable.

 They’ve got they’re kind of they’re a little bit like a more

 kind of crunchy sort of Jerusalem artichoke.

 So, you know, you imagine they’re turnipy,

 you know, a bit like a kind of a very moist, you know, young turnip.

 Radish. Right. All of those flavours.

 But you can dig them through the winter.

 So if you’ve got some honesty, it does that thing, doesn’t it?

 Where you can have not enough, but you suddenly your garden

 might be completely overgrown with it.

 Yeah. And so if you leave that first year growth

 and then in the winter, if you want to get rid of the honesty

 or if you want to move, they’re not very happy being moved.

 I have sort of successfully moved honesty before.

 But if you want to dig any clumps up, leave them till the winter

 and then we dig them up.

 They look like a whole bunch of balloons of slightly sagged.

 They don’t look particularly beautiful.

 But and then you get quite a cluster and you can roast them.

 Yeah. Or you can just kind of scrub them and use them

 in winter salads or whatever. But yeah, they’re nice.

 They’re mild and and lovely.

 But with that lovely kind of a mild radish kind of flavour.

 Yeah. Well, we’re definitely going to try that

 because Sweetpea got her her honesty game on a few years ago

 and we’ve been enjoying them kind of every other year.

 Every other every other year since.

 We haven’t yet managed to get the succession quite.

 Yes. Yeah.

 We’re supposed to just need to hold on to some seed, don’t you?

 And then, yeah, do that, making sure.

 But yeah, no, I think partly in a way for me, that biennial kind of

 planting is a bit of a joy of its own, isn’t it?

 Because it’s giving you a year without.

 It means you have to kind of find other things.

 And yeah, you appreciate it more when it comes.

 You appreciate it more when it comes back.

 You do. Yeah.

 Well, so you talked about honesty on on the show

 and you talked about some other plants that I’d love to get onto.

 But first of all, when we were doing a little bit of research on you,

 we read on your website that you said how you got into it

 because you found the secondhand book.

 I did. I’ve got it behind me somewhere.

 It was the it was Collins,

 the Collins Wildflowers of Britain and Europe.

 Just those little little white ones.

 Oh, no, the kind of slightly long ID to the field ID books.

 And they’re all colour coded, really easy to use.

 And I bought one from a charity shop.

 Oh, God, it must be 25 years ago or so.

 And we’ve just moved to just outside Monmouth to an old

 to a flat in an old manor house

 that everybody around us had been botanists

 had lived in the main parts of the houses.

 There was like a number of houses around it.

 And they all everybody had.

 Everybody was adults.

 We were like in our early 20s and everybody had these amazing gardens

 and just beautiful things in them, including Japanese.

 Not we bizarrely that had been planted as an ornamental

 by the original botanists that had lived there.

 And we were given a scrap of land in front of the old walled garden.

 And it was next to the churchyard.

 I think it was where unconsecrated graves were probably right.

 But it was just full of Japanese knotweed.

 But it was the land that you were given the land I was given.

 How close is that land to your house?

 Not too close.

 And it was before the year.

 I think you have to be worried about that.

 But actually, there’s a Japanese knotweed kind of.

 There’s been a lot of work done on Japanese knotweed

 as to how invasive it actually is.

 And it’s not as bad as everybody thinks it is.

 And it’s also unbelievably important medicinally.

 And as a food plant, like it’s unbelievable.

 We’re going on a tangent here, but we won’t.

 Yeah, don’t know.

 I do live my world in tangents, I’m afraid.

 Well, I’m happy to hear that.

 I did have in my notes.

 I did want to ask you about knotweed at the risk of sounding

 like I’m obsessed by knotweed because I do bring it up a lot now.

 Because I have a fear of it.

 Oh, no, don’t fear it.

 But then we do speak to people like yourself.

 So we spoke to garden designer the other day

 who’s for a chit chat.

 And he was talking about how he had had Japanese knotweed

 at the end of his garden that he thought was rather beautiful.

 So he kept a patch and he would just mow around it.

 And he would mow any that was coming through.

 He’s called them spears that shot up through the grass,

 which didn’t help me with my fear of that.

 He’s not. But he just mowed that.

 And he said it was incredibly beautiful.

 We’ve also heard from Mandy Barber, for example,

 who does Incredible Vegetables, who does perennial veg.

 And she talked about how delicious it is to eat.

 Yeah. Well, you.

 So what what is it?

 You say we’re learning a lot more about it.

 What is it that you know about knotweed?

 So you can help me rid me of my fear.

 So so my first encounter with Japanese knotweed was

 when I moved into this house and I had lots of Japanese knotweed.

 And I hadn’t I’ve never just instinctively never

 used any kind of chemicals in my garden, just because I just never

 kind of like the idea of it.

 So I spent a couple of years pulling up Japanese knotweed and burning it.

 And unfortunately, I didn’t know at that point that you could eat it.

 So I wasn’t forging at that point.

 But, you know, it’s it’s beautiful.

 It’s once I realized it’s a really stunning plant

 to eat, it’s related to rhubarb, you know,

 so you can use it in a very similar way.

 And it’s used an awful lot in Japan.

 You know, it’s kind of a really important food source.

 And it’s so it was.

 So the reason why I don’t fear it as an invasive is a number of things.

 So my own personal experience is that I managed it.

 We moved away from there 20 years ago.

 And then I was asked to write my first book, Forage,

 which featured Japanese knotweed in it.

 And if you listen to anything, you’d think that there was literally

 you walk out your doorstep and you have to walk through a forest

 of Japanese knotweed.

 And the country is infested.

 Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I had I there was no one.

 I put a call out.

 I cannot I don’t eat Japanese knotweed because I can’t find any.

 So there’s none of it around me.

 It’s really hard to come by in reality when you’re actually wanting to get it,

 unless you live in areas lots.

 And so I drove back to the house that I used to live in, thinking

 no one was gardening this little strip of land that I used to have as a garden.

 And so no one had been gardening it since I’d left.

 So I thought it’s going to have come back.

 I went back. It wasn’t there.

 I had got rid of it, but just simply by my process of weakening the roots.

 But I knew that the original invited impact

 where this botanist had lived in the turn of the century,

 they had never got rid of their Japanese knotweed, my old neighbors.

 So I went and knocked on their door.

 We went for a hunt through their garden.

 She’s a really amazing gardener.

 So her garden was lush and incredibly healthy, an ecosystem.

 And we literally found one stem amongst her garden.

 Like, oh, I think I’ve got some somewhere, you know, kind of like.

 And it was so this fear that this plant was just going to take over.

 It didn’t happen because the environment was healthy and diverse.

 And actually, when you look at what happens

 with Japanese knotweed in its natural setting,

 it does exactly the same thing.

 So it lives on volcanic mountainsides.

 Do you probably know this already?

 It lives on volcanic mountainsides in Japan.

 And when there’s an explosion, there’s a lot of flow.

 Everything’s just decimated.

 Everything’s gone under thick layers of lava.

 And yet years later, you go back to those sites

 and volcanic mountainsides suddenly become incredibly fertile environments.

 And one of the reasons why they do is that Japanese knotweed

 can be meters, meters, I mean, huge amounts of meters under the ground.

 And it can crack.

 It can send up shoots that will crack through the lava.

 So it’ll grow and it’s a pioneer plant.

 So it’ll grow hugely tall.

 I mean, it will send down roots, meters into the ground as well.

 So it’ll pull up any kind of nutrition.

 It will pull up anything from the ground.

 So it’s a mining plant.

 So actually it pulls up toxins as well as nutrition,

 you know, kind of good stuff and bad stuff.

 So it’s a cleaning plant.

 It will clean the ground, but it will find any kind of nutrition to grow.

 And then it will burst through the lava.

 Like when you see kind of roads

 with the tarmac and dandelions will pop through a similar thing,

 but on a bigger level.

 And then, as you see, Japanese knotweed grows really, really fast

 and then dies back every year.

 So it quickly creates a lot of organic matter.

 And it has very, very kind of attractive flowers,

 which is one of the reasons why we have Japanese knotweed

 everywhere all over the world is because it was

 both plant hunters thought it was this beautiful plant.

 It was planted to line Central Park in New York.

 You know, one plant was the mother plant that became all the plants

 which grow all across the world now.

 Yeah, you know, it was introduced to places like Kew

 and all of these, you know, as an ornamental plant,

 as it was to the house I lived in.

 And so what it does, though, is it attracts pollinators

 and, you know, kind of birds which will have seeds on them.

 So it starts to pull in all the things

 which will then be bringing other species with them.

 And they drop and then they’re able to grow in that organic matter.

 And over time, the Japanese knotweed then recedes

 because other plants are growing.

 So you don’t go to these environments and find just Japanese knotweed.

 Actually, what you’ll find is to begin with just Japanese knotweed

 and then you’ll find other things encroaching.

 And we have, you know, there’s lots of plants which do that.

 Birch forests will have done that as the first pioneer plant.

 And then they slow, you know, they create my work is done.

 My work is done. I’ve improved the soil.

 I’ve done this. I’ve drawn things in and they recede.

 And then you allow these next layers in.

 So you allow, you know, these next layers of plants.

 And so in a very, very similar with Himalayan balsam,

 if you actually go down to a patch of Himalayan balsam,

 you will often find real diversity of species.

 So we have a very negative association with these plants

 we regard as invasive.

 I have a real issue with the word invasive anyway,

 because, you know, I think that we’re, you know, we

 our planting is a representation of plants from all over the world

 because of what we’ve done.

 We’ve brought them in.

 But also, you know, we were so until so very recently part of mainland Europe.

 Yeah. So a lot of our plant is Eurasian.

 You know, we don’t really have anything that is just just as I think.

 And plants have always moved.

 You know, there’s always been that movement of plants.

 But yes, so Japanese knotweed, we hate it.

 We get really scared by it.

 And the reason why we get really scared by it is because

 I think it was in the 70s or 60s, I’m not sure.

 There’s a massive industrial, very polluted industrial area of Swansea

 that was all of the businesses collapsed, whatever, and flattened.

 And there was planning permission given to build thousands of homes,

 huge housing development.

 And it was given an immediate permission.

 And actually, you look at kind of like heavy polluted environments.

 Should houses be put on those environments straight away?

 Probably not.

 And actually, they wouldn’t be allowed now,

 you know, without kind of like big environmental surveys.

 But these houses were allowed to be put on.

 And then there was an awful lot of topsoil bought into that environment,

 which had Japanese knotweed in it.

 And then tarmac and houses built.

 And so the Japanese knotweed started growing through doing its job.

 And actually, if you had let the Japanese knotweed grow,

 nothing else was growing.

 So that’s an indicator to the fact that the soil is not healthy.

 But Japanese knotweed can, because it can grow in any soil.

 And then if the Japanese knotweed had been allowed to grow

 for a certain amount of time, it would have drawn out all of the pollutions,

 all of the heavy metals, all of those kind of things,

 which were in the soil to make it healthy, to be able to then

 remove it or whatever.

 But we have this instant, got to get rid of it.

 And so there was a big survey that was done that assessed

 kind of the invasiveness of Japanese knotweed.

 And it was done with Swansea as its focus area.

 And then we kind of went all of it’s like that here, it’s like that everywhere,

 which is why then suddenly you couldn’t get insurance on houses.

 It’s difficult to get mortgages.

 You could sue someone if you snowballed.

 Then in 2020, Leeds University did a big study

 because the prevailing view became that it was such a crazy plant

 that it would send its roots from one place under your buildings.

 But plants don’t grow like that, especially Japanese knotweed,

 because it wants to go up.

 You know, plants don’t spread their roots in that way, you know, and then shoot.

 They’re kind of, you know, they’re not stupid, are they?

 You know, they’re kind of light seekers.

 They’re drawn to it.

 And so Leeds University did a big study

 that was published in 2020 that was looking at actually

 how does Japanese knotweed grow?

 So they put in situ studies and of course discovered

 that Japanese knotweed doesn’t do the thing where it trails along

 and then grows up.

 It only does that if it’s something’s built on an existing patch

 of Japanese knotweed or some existing root or whatever.

 So you’ve got to be careful where you grow.

 But laws are slowly changing around that.

 But, you know, it’s all published and it’s, you know,

 kind of a really good study.

 And the stupid thing is is that we then our management processes

 of Japanese knotweed are incredibly expensive.

 So it makes a few people an awful lot of money,

 which I suspect fueled the fire of digs them out.

 So it’s either you have this hugely expensive digging programs

 or incredibly damaging sprays, which are which leaked out.

 And so you’re killing something, but you’re killing everything else

 in the environment.

 And actually, I don’t even know how well it works

 with the systemic sprays, but it certainly works on other plants,

 you know, injecting them into the Japanese knotweed.

 And then the stupid thing is, is we then have a really big

 import market for Japanese knotweed

 because Japanese knotweed has just been approved

 really recently by John Hopkins University as being one of the two things

 that can stop the progressions of Lyme’s disease, which is.

 Oh, gosh, now we’re going on another tangent.

 Yeah. I didn’t know this.

 So Japanese knotweed has got incredible compounds in it,

 which help with circulation like ginkgo.

 So it’s right to the tips of your brain.

 You have everything, your circulatory health.

 So it’s being, you know, there’s lots of explorations into it.

 So it’s used around heart health, but it’s also being looked at

 for lots of other things.

 So like you take ginkgo for cognitive health.

 Yeah. You know, it’s a sort of very similar plant.

 I’m not a herbalist, so you need to kind of like go away

 and do your own research as to it.

 But you can herbalists do prescribe Japanese knotweed

 and Japanese knotweed is used for heart condition.

 You know, it’s turned is used as a pharmaceutical herb.

 So we get rid of ours, import it.

 We have this increase in Lyme’s disease.

 Yeah. Which is another thing I’m fearful of.

 But is it used as a preventative measure for Lyme’s or a cure?

 I think it’s a cure. I think it’s a cure.

 You know, as I said, I’m not, you know, kind of a herbalist or a medic.

 Very interesting. Really worth finding out.

 So those two, ginkgo and Japanese knotweed.

 We love ginkgo until, you know, the fruits fall and they stink and everything.

 But yeah, I didn’t know it’s being imported for that, because, yeah,

 I know I knew a lot of work was being done around Lyme’s

 because it is on the increase, isn’t it?

 It really is globally.

 So what you’ve done there is actually you’re helping with two of my big fears.

 Japanese knotweed and one Lyme.

 So you’re going to research a whole lot more about this.

 How fascinating.

 Well, and also, so if you did have Japanese knotweed,

 how would you manage it?

 So the patch that I had in my garden where it was thriving,

 nothing else was growing, because it turned out it was like the midden

 heap for the old manna.

 So I found lots of old bits and pieces in there.

 So it wasn’t really very fertile.

 So I improved the soil, you know, kind of there’s that dichotomies

 that I love wild plants, but at the same time, I love gardening.

 And I only had a little garden and I didn’t want it to be

 totally overtaken by Japanese knotweed.

 I wanted to put my table and chair there.

 Yeah, yes, obviously.

 So so I I pulled it and so, you know, and had that more kind of like

 rather maybe it’s because I wasn’t fearful of it, you know,

 that I didn’t have that kind of

 going to get rid of this awful thing that actually I just kind of

 you see a little shoot coming up, you just get rid of it.

 And so it’s just you just harvest.

 You’re just weeding it like a normal weed

 and you’re not having a different emotional response to it.

 Yeah. And then I burnt it.

 But as I said, now, if I’d known then what I know now,

 I would have then taken it and cooked with it

 because at the same time that I was trying to grow Japanese knotweed,

 I was not trying to grow Japanese knotweed, getting rid of the Japanese

 knotweed, what I was trying to grow was rhubarb.

 I am dreadful at growing rhubarb where I just have I just can’t do it.

 I think I’m just a really, you know, I’m probably just

 not good at kind of following instructions on how to make things.

 So you can use Japanese knotweed exactly as you use rhubarb.

 Oh, right. Same family.

 It’s rich in oxalates.

 You’ve got to, you know, soak it to get rid of those oxalates.

 And you do have to do that.

 Yeah. You know, it is.

 So in Japan, they Japanese knotweed, when it’s eaten,

 often it’ll get sort of soaked in a salt solution.

 And that kind of draws out the things.

 So it’s ways of making Japanese knotweed

 something that is all the goodness for you

 rather than the downside of it. Yeah.

 Lots of oxalic acid.

 But yeah, there’s lots of oxalic acid in obviously,

 you know, rhubarb and sorrel and nettles and, you know,

 there’s oxalic acid and everything.

 And we need a certain amount of it in our diet.

 But yeah, Japanese knotweed, definitely.

 I think if you have it, it’s better to take away that fear.

 I think there’s nothing worse than thinking there’s something in your garden

 that’s just awful.

 Yeah. And like fearful.

 And you’ve got to sort out and actually, yeah, have a if I mean,

 so so I’d say hopefully it’s like it’s a ground elder thing, isn’t it?

 You kind of go, well, hopefully you haven’t got any.

 But if you have, it’s great.

 And actually, I don’t really think hopefully you haven’t got ground elder.

 I kind of hope everyone’s got a little bit that they can manage.

 We have. Yeah.

 And they definitely have that.

 That’s another plant.

 Ground elder is in abundance in our garden.

 Yeah.

 And I’ve just always spent a lot of time pulling it up to the extent that.

 So I’m not fearful of ground elder.

 I just find it a bit of a pain.

 And the smell now I associate with just the trauma of pulling it up all the time.

 So I don’t like the smell.

 But then you mentioned that on the show, how you can eat ground elder.

 Oh, yeah, it’s amazing.

 It’s just beautiful.

 And I wonder I do wonder whether we

 it was interesting to hear you say about how you don’t like the smell.

 I wonder whether you wouldn’t like the taste because you so because

 and the emotional association of taste and flavour so it influenced us so much.

 Yeah. You know, and I’m sure there’s a lot that well,

 there was a lot that of flavours we don’t like as adults

 that you can link back to when was the moment

 that you stopped liking that when something traumatic happened or whatever.

 As a child, might have been that you dropped your lollipop.

 Hugely traumatic moment, you know, but to a child, it might have been horrific.

 Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

 Got told, no, you couldn’t have that.

 Scarred for life. Scarred for life.

 We’re going to destroy you no matter what.

 Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

 So it’s another thing they can go to counselling about, isn’t it?

 Yes, there you go.

 You know what they can’t do for that.

 But yeah, but yeah, ground elder.

 So yes, it’ll be interesting to see whether you do ever like ground elder

 as a flavour.

 It’s I think it’s beautiful.

 Well, can you remind us how you eat your ground elder?

 So well, if you think it’s very close, it’s in the carrot family.

 So it’s one of those carrot family plants, which obviously you have to be

 careful, very careful with the carrot family because there was some delicious.

 There was some deadly.

 But ground elder looks like ground elder.

 So ground elder is a very safe plant to harvest.

 Yeah, because you know, it’s very specific in how it looks.

 So you look for things like

 shapes of stem, the leaf, the smell, flowers, all of that.

 Get to know plants.

 But anyway, once you’ve got to know your ground elder, you’ve got it.

 I’m sure if you’ve got it, you know you’ve got it.

 Then as soon as it starts coming up in the spring and again,

 you know, now with our winters being kind of.

 Less cold generally, you know, you’ll probably find that some people

 might have them through little shoots through the year.

 So in early in the spring, they’ll start sending up leaf shoots.

 So the leaves will come individually from the ground

 and you can start harvesting them.

 And it’s it’s sort of early on.

 It’s got parsley flavour,

 but it’s also really rich in beta carotene.

 So it’s got carrot flavour and it’s also rich in the kind of oils

 which are in lemon and citrus fruit.

 So it’s got the lemony orange flavour.

 Well, I know.

 I mean, you know, we all have got an Ottolenghi book or two, are you sure?

 Pretty much every recipe where he uses parsley,

 he’ll be having those flavours go, a bit of rose carrot, a bit of, you know.

 So those flavours just go together so beautifully.

 What’s not to like.

 What’s not to like.

 So parsley is a really strong flavour by itself,

 but it’s quite it’s got quite a punchy.

 Yeah.

 Whereas ground elder is kind of.

 It’s difficult to explain.

 It’s rather it’s got more rounded.

 It’s got it sort of seems to spoke off in different ways.

 If that makes sense.

 So you get different all that case like that and that and that.

 And so it feels a mouthful.

 Yeah, different flavour profile.

 Same, you know, but with different things added to it. Yeah.

 So you’re chopping that up as you would with parsley.

 Absolutely.

 So right.

 So so you can use the kind of the young leaves right through till,

 you know, they when they become quite tough,

 they become a bit more lovely,

 which again, you know, is a sort of sibling plant.

 So you can still use them when they get older and tougher.

 I mean, I use them right through the summer,

 even if you might chop them down once they’ve flowered or gone to seed.

 You know, they mainly spread through their roots, don’t they?

 Rather than kind of the seeds.

 Yeah, the whole process.

 So right from then, they first come up in the spring.

 You can start using the leaves.

 The flowering stems are really lovely when they’re tender.

 You can just chop them up and sort of sweat them off as a vegetable.

 They’re quite substantial.

 The flower buds before they open are just really lovely.

 They’ve got kind of a slight astringent kind of flavour to them,

 you know, that kind of drying flowery kind of,

 but with all of the kind of ground elder flavour with them.

 So they’re lovely just, I don’t know, put in an omelette or whatever,

 you know, again, put into salads and stuff.

 When the flowers are open,

 they are great as an edible flower in salads.

 They are a little bit of a laxative when they’re open.

 So, you know, just be aware.

 You don’t want to go gorgeing on them then.

 And then when they go to seed.

 Unless you’re having problems.

 Yeah, exactly. You know, you might.

 And then when they go to seed, you can even gather the seed.

 And the seed has, if you’ve eaten like naan breads with kind of

 nigella seeds and ajwain, the seed is very, very close to ajwain seed,

 which you can buy as a spice in the supermarket.

 Right. Wow.

 Interesting. And it’s delicious.

 So you can gather your own spice from, you know, from ground elder.

 Amazing. It’s a beautiful thing.

 And then what?

 And then it kind of flops and it stops.

 So it’s in full flower in my garden right now.

 It’s absolutely full of that.

 You will never see a plant with more pollinators on

 and different types of pollinators than ground elder.

 It’s the plant.

 It’s unbelievable and really beneficial insect.

 It’s just fantastic.

 And then once it kind of goes over and it’s gone to seed

 and it doesn’t look great.

 So at that point, I cut it back.

 And I learned this technique from an amazing gardener called Sue Mabili,

 who runs a garden called Nantibeth Gardens, which is just outside

 Abagaveni in the Black Mountains, and it’s very, very high up in the hills.

 And so it’s quite difficult to grow lots of stuff.

 But she has over the years created this stunning

 forest garden, permaculture garden.

 It’s kind of a bit of everything.

 And she has a huge swathe of ground elder.

 For years, she kind of tried battling with.

 And then one day it was like, oh, they’re beautiful.

 And actually, when you let ground elder go to flower,

 they are the most beautiful flower.

 They will stay as a cut flower.

 They’re beautifully, far nicer than cow parsley,

 because cow parsley gets that funny smell after a few days of being inside.

 Ground elder doesn’t do that at all.

 But what she does, because she’s a, you know,

 she’s a very light touch gardener, so her garden is this wild garden.

 But what people don’t realize is that she’s gone around

 doing a little bit, you know, curating.

 A little bit of tweaking. A little bit of tweaking.

 And what she does to tweak her ground elder to make it beautiful

 is that she, when it’s in flowers, she takes off the bottom leaves.

 So you just have these spires of flowers on these very slender stems

 that you kind of see through them.

 Oh, right. And it becomes a good idea.

 Yeah, beautiful.

 And then she chops and she leaves her ground elder

 chopping in a pile by where the ground elder grows.

 So it’s not spreading it where she doesn’t want it.

 And then it grows back again.

 And within a couple of weeks, that bare ground becomes lush with new growth.

 So she’s got more ground elder for her salads and stuff through the summer.

 OK, it’s really, really lovely trick.

 It’s incredibly helpful hearing all this.

 It truly is, because it puts the emphasis

 in a different place on all these plants.

 And I think there’s the yin and yang of everything, isn’t there?

 And to hear some of the positives from plants

 that we’ve only seen as negative, you then just go out into your garden

 feeling much more relaxed.

 Like I now, ever since seeing you on Gardeners World,

 I see the ground elder and I go, yeah, great.

 Well, we’ll do something with that.

 Whereas before it’s like, oh, no, I’m going to pull that up now.

 I honestly think that there’s a thing that when you put a value on something

 and something suddenly changes into something that you can even see

 it’s giving benefit, not maybe not directly to you, but maybe to

 other animals that can have down the chain, because we’re all connected,

 suddenly transforms the way that we view things.

 And I was, you know, I grew up in the area of stripy lawns

 and there’s a little bit of me, it’s still like, oh, I like to have that.

 You know, but there’s our gardens are feel so public, aren’t they?

 They’re so, you know, they are.

 I literally live on a footpath, so people kind of walk through my garden

 and like, you know, see it.

 And some people would be like, oh, my gosh, you know,

 we’ll see it as a mess.

 Whereas to me, it’s just beautiful and lush.

 And when it’s in flower and when there’s, you know, so much going on

 and then I have to kind of cut it back, you know, kind of once everything’s

 after the summer, you know, when it’s all because I don’t like that.

 Then that kind of flop of everything.

 And then, you know, and then there’s like air through things

 and, you know, kind of late summer and then it kind of comes again.

 And but, yeah, we’re we’re so fixated, I think,

 with what people think of us that I think that our gardens are

 almost a direct reflection of how we’ve of our inner monologue

 about how the world views us and how we’re judged.

 That’s so true.

 I think we’re also like that in our own appearance as well.

 We really are.

 We worry too much about what we do.

 We do. And I think as soon as I think you have to have,

 I think that we’re psychologically, there’s something that switches in us

 that when you’re to allow us a garden to be messy

 and more natural to look looser, you know, which benefits everything,

 but by knowing that we have to have the back,

 we have to have the stuff that comes back to us

 and the stuff that comes back to us is I can eat that.

 That’s my food. That’s my medicine.

 That’s my, you know, that’s something else’s food

 and something that’s important to me.

 And we’re so disconnected from the cycle of the of the world

 and the environment we live in that we have that that we’ve lost that.

 And I think by reconnecting, it’s literally is nature connection.

 I know people talk about nature connection,

 but actually we are just part of it.

 We are just to the extent that every cell in our body,

 you know, the water in our bodies has been here forever

 and has been through all of these plants,

 has been through dinosaurs, has been through rocks.

 And, you know, we are, you know, I’m not particularly spiritual or whatever.

 I don’t probably sound a bit woo then saying that, but, you know, but we are.

 We’re all incredibly, as soon as you realize that, we’re just, you know.

 I couldn’t agree with you more.

 And also, how could we be anything else other than connected with it?

 What makes us so special that we stand apart?

 Yes, yes, we just nature and mother nature.

 Yeah, we’re not we’re not we’re we’re we’re part of it.

 Yeah, absolutely.

 Gosh, I mean, I could talk for hours.

 We must loop back to, though, before we go on any more tangents.

 This book, because I was so intrigued.

 Oh, gosh, yes.

 You came across and opened your eyes to this world.

 Yes. So, yes.

 So sat in my Japanese not witty garden.

 That’s it. Yeah, yeah.

 With the book that I bought.

 I had been trying to garden this garden for, you know, a couple of years

 and make it, you know, vegetable, nice straight lines and everything.

 I’ve got some roses in and everything.

 And when I used to pull up plants and be like, oh, I smell so nice and garlicky.

 What a shame. You can’t, you know, what a shame.

 It’s not because I’m not growing my garlic very well.

 And this is like really a mustardy.

 And wow, isn’t that amazing?

 Had no idea.

 You know, I used to pick elder flowers and stuff.

 And I had no idea about all the plants that you could could use.

 And then you bought this book from a plant shop.

 So I was interested in IDing plants and laced through all of the pages

 was just sort of annotations.

 And it would say things like eat the eat the stems in a salad.

 Cook the roots in the winter.

 Do this, do that.

 And it was just like, oh, my goodness.

 All of these. And it wasn’t a foraging book at all.

 It was just literally a wild plant book.

 And whoever owned this book before me had taken the time,

 don’t know who it was, had taken the time to annotate

 probably just the things that they were learning.

 Don’t know who they’d learnt it from and were just writing down.

 They hadn’t included everything.

 They weren’t like a pro.

 You know, there were loads of plants in there

 that they kind of hadn’t kind of written down.

 But it was just these few bits, maybe one or two on each page

 that that they had discovered that you could eat.

 That then was like, wow, OK, I can do, you know, I can do this.

 I’ll find out about that.

 And it was pre, you know, kind of like big internet.

 You couldn’t just go away and search on stuff.

 You had to go and get a book.

 So I got like Roger Phillips books and maybe and started my foraging

 journey there to open up this whole new world to you.

 Yeah. And I don’t know.

 I need to try and I I think it’s really amazing.

 It’s just like that moment that you don’t realize the impact

 you have on the world.

 So that person doing that one thing,

 maybe just purely for themselves, probably it was.

 They probably weren’t thinking about it.

 But the impact that that’s had led me to discover foraging,

 led me to becoming a foraging teacher and doing quite a lot of TV stuff.

 And so teaching courses and doing talks.

 And I think over the years, over the last 15 years,

 I probably have spoken to quite a few hundred thousand people,

 you know, about plants and foraging.

 And I think that it wasn’t me that triggered that.

 So there could be hundreds of thousands of people.

 The catalyst was someone else.

 And the catalyst for them would have been someone else.

 Yeah, amazing. It is amazing, isn’t it?

 It is amazing that those things you do life off on it.

 Yeah. And has taken other people’s lives off because there are people

 who have come on courses or who have just done, you know, a walk with me

 or have seen some things that I’ve got to know about that

 and investigated in sort of their own business about the plant or whatever.

 Yeah. The spread is and it’s not to do with me, you know,

 it’s to do with just it’s to do with the plants, isn’t it?

 And that if we share our knowledge and yeah,

 I feel incredibly privileged to be able to do that.

 I can imagine. Gosh.

 So you took the ball and ran with it, basically.

 Yeah. You say that you now you teach about foraging.

 You your career is now based around that.

 So what is your what’s your day job?

 So my day job for years, for many years after.

 So before I got into foraging, I’d worked in social service

 and before that in the corporate computers and stuff when I left university.

 So I had a kind of a very career.

 My kids always joke at me saying, I must have been sacked from lots of job.

 And I keep going, no, no, no, I wasn’t. I just was promoted.

 Yeah. Yeah.

 So for the last 15 years, 14 years, 15 years,

 I’ve been teaching and writing and I first set up a wild food preserves business.

 So basically foraging, you know, wild food has been my income for that time.

 And but actually, through that time, I never wanted to be self-employed.

 I like being with people.

 I love teaching, but it kind of worked really well for

 whilst I was at home with young children.

 But there was an organization that I worked with over that time

 who are just, you know, a wonderful organization that make botanical extract.

 So they are based not too far from me.

 And I’ve supplied them before and I’ve cooked for them.

 And who’s that?

 They’re an organization called Blue Sky Botanics.

 And they’re based near Ross on Wye on an organic farm.

 And they were set up originally as a herb farm.

 And then 20 years ago, started making extracts from the herbs.

 It’s an organic farm based business.

 And they’re real pioneers.

 So you probably if anyone sat listening to us now drinking a glass of elderflower

 cordial, what they bought from the shop, it’s probably got an extract from Blue Sky

 because we’ve literally this week been having hundreds of kilos of elderflower

 come into the site to be processed into extracts.

 But they their whole business philosophy is around

 making extracts with things.

 So they grow we grow roses.

 I’ve been involved in we’ve had Rosaria and Michael Marriott

 this year has come and helped to establish a bigger rose field for us.

 We make rose extracts for cosmetics and for food and beverage.

 Oh, wow.

 But also we source a lot from overseas.

 So we work with a lot of communities where there might be real poverty,

 but there might be an amazing weed growing that is used traditionally

 that we turn into an opportunity for people to be able to harvest and make

 so to be able to support those economies.

 So, you know, a lot of stuff we kind of just supply and source normally.

 But there’s a few, you know, kind of really exciting projects.

 So we do a lot of work with an organization called Fairwild,

 which is basically you pay a premium for that kind of is very,

 very carefully monitored as to how the premium is spent in the community.

 So it’s kind of everything is always kind of goes back to the communities.

 We do stuff with amazing things like boab and wild harvesting of boab

 across Africa and, you know, with.

 Yeah, so it’s really exciting, botanical stuff that goes on.

 And yeah, so I approach them.

 I just I’d had was diagnosed with breast cancer in the end of 24.

 And last year, I was like, what do I want my future to be like?

 Where do I want to be? Who do I want to be with?

 And I was 50 is what just turned 50 this year.

 And I was, you know, kind of reaching all those milestones

 where you kind of just knew, you know,

 what do I want my next period of life to look like?

 And so I got in touch with them and said, look,

 if you ever are needing someone with my kind of skill set,

 actually, I really would love you to know that I really would rather

 love to work with you.

 And amazingly, they took me on, which I think is astounding.

 They took somebody on mid chemo treatment.

 Wow. You know, took a real punt on me.

 You know, a woman who’s just about to turn 50.

 They’re female led.

 But I mean, it’s cool.

 It speaks volumes of the knowledge that you were able to bring them

 what you were going to the table.

 Yeah. But but also, I think it’s I think it’s also a

 hopefully it inspires other employers

 to see, you know, the people that they can employ.

 But yeah, and also, hopefully, inspires other women of my age

 that kind of go, actually, we’ve got careers ahead of us

 and we’ve got life ahead of us.

 Life doesn’t stop at this.

 And also, if you’ve gone through cancer treatment as well,

 well, there are things ahead of you as well.

 And that was mentioned on the show as well.

 You were wearing a headscarf at the time.

 And I think I saw you put a post on social media after saying

 that it was filmed prior this time last year.

 Yeah, this time last year.

 And we’re now looking at you.

 We actually had a bit of a chat prior to recording

 your incredible head of hair, which is way thicker than mine.

 And you were awesome.

 Could you give us some tips on on how to do that

 other than suggesting chemo?

 Yeah, yeah, that’s what you know, that was a fringe benefit.

 I think there’s also rosemary oil, right?

 Yeah. So I there’s yeah.

 So rosemary and nettle are two plants

 which are known to help stimulate hair growth.

 So when I was very bald and thinking, oh, my goodness, in my head,

 I literally was, you know, had a very alter ego.

 I looked like a 90, like a 70 year old man who drunk too much cider.

 My name is Larry during this process.

 Larry. Yeah.

 All right. There was nothing beautiful about my bald chemo look.

 The reason why there are no photos of me online with him.

 And so as soon as any kind of like

 and it starts to come, one of the worst things is your hair

 starts to come back with a major recedor.

 So I was like, oh, my goodness, I’m just going to start now.

 I’m going to look like I’m not going to look like Larry.

 Larry’s just comb over.

 Yeah, it’s comb over.

 So I needed a toupee.

 So it starts going back out the back then.

 It does. I mean, I think for everybody, it’s different.

 I think it can be patchy or whatever.

 So I started to just rub an oil infused with rosemary and nettle.

 Homemade?

 I had some homemade, but actually, are we allowed to advertise people on there?

 Oh, yeah. Really amazing.

 OK, so there’s an amazing woman who actually I think if you’re interested

 in kind of stuff that I do, you all love her.

 She’s called she’s Lass, the plant scientist, and she’s on Instagram.

 And she’s a botanist and she does herbal.

 I think she’s a medical herbalist.

 I’m not entirely sure, but she works at Hugh Gardens

 and on the side also makes some really interesting things.

 She makes a hair oil that and so I bought that hair oil.

 And actually, I’ve now given it to someone else

 who’s kind of menopausal going through, it’s been passed around.

 This is becoming the new thing that’s being passed around.

 Yeah. You know I’m straight onto that after this report.

 Yeah, I do. It’s amazing.

 And actually, you can see these cases.

 But if you if you don’t want to buy a hair oil, all you do is you get

 rosemary and nettle.

 I think you can use the seed of nettle as well as the leaves.

 So right now, nettle has sort of gone over its time

 that you’d want to be eating it.

 It’s become too long and strong, so it’s no longer good to eat.

 Good for you.

 But you can use it when it is in that stage and you can make a bain-marie.

 So you put, you know, hot water in a pan and then a bowl on top

 and put some oil in that.

 I used olive oil, but you can use kind of whatever oil you want.

 And you just very, very slowly infuse

 the rosemary and the nettle in your oil.

 And as I say, she’s added other things which are, you know,

 probably really beneficial as well.

 And there’s properties within both rosemary and nettle,

 which help to stimulate your hair growth.

 So it stimulates the follicles.

 So, you know, and kind of helps your hair to come back thicker,

 which is why you can go to shops, you can go to boots

 and find rosemary oil, little bottles of rosemary oil.

 If you make stuff yourself at home, it probably is going to be stronger

 than the stuff that you buy, unless you buy it from someone

 that’s making it in small batches like Laz.

 OK, but yeah, really worth finding out about.

 Rosemary and nettles in abundance.

 I think, Sweet Pea, you should get digging.

 You can start rubbing your head with all this oil.

 Slapping my head with nettle.

 Yeah, you probably know that as well.

 You probably actually, it stimulates the circulation to your scalp.

 So maybe there’s a thing in the whipping.

 Well, get ready, Mummy.

 Isn’t it? That’s a suggestion for osteoarthritis.

 It is. It works.

 It’s fantastic. Yeah, it stimulates your blood flow.

 But it’s it kind of.

 But also it just does lots of things.

 So, you know, nettle helps to.

 I mean, nettle’s fantastic for things like people who’ve got,

 you know, overreactive with histamines.

 So if you have, you know, kind of

 a bad hay fever, nettle’s a thing to have, eczema, asthma,

 all of those things.

 But yeah, all of that kind of inflammation based

 kind of things is hugely important to inflammatory.

 They really are. It really is stunning.

 You can make a great nettle pesto.

 Yes, I heard you talk about that. So good.

 That is delicious.

 How do you make yours?

 I did it with walnuts, lemon juice, olive oil,

 Parmesan, I put some Parmesan in as well.

 Salt and pepper.

 And I whizzed it up actually in a blender rather than pestle and mortar.

 And it was delicious.

 It’s so tasty. It truly is tasty.

 Well, I used to make or not used to.

 I do make nasturtium pesto as well.

 Oh, gorgeous.

 I have to say the nasturtium pesto and the nettle pesto

 knock the socks off any basil pesto that I have.

 Oh, really do.

 Anywhere else and so much cheaper to make the basil pesto.

 So, but talking of that, something you mentioned on the show was you said

 wild food knocks cultivated food out the park when it comes to nutrition.

 Yeah. Why is that?

 Well, for lots of reasons, for one thing

 down to how our farming practices,

 so, you know, we as soon as we started

 cultivating plants and farming plants, we started selecting certain plants.

 So 20,000 years ago, our diets that we became farmers

 and our diets would then start growing monoculture effectively.

 So we started to to select things for kind of going,

 oh, that produced a really big root or that was really sweet or whatever.

 And every time you do that, every time you choose a trait,

 you’re losing another trait.

 So, OK, yeah.

 So, you know, there’s always a trade off.

 So one of the traits that we love is sweetness.

 So we kind of lose bitterness, which tends to be a reflection

 of lots of nutrition for sweet things and for starchiness

 and all of those different things.

 So that’s that’s been going on for thousands of years, a very long time.

 And the soil is very depleted.

 So, you know, and this is not a new thing, you know,

 kind of back in in Andalusia.

 Thousand years ago, there was a real issue around soil health,

 which is why we start using clover as a cover crop,

 because it was suddenly discovered there that actually it was so great

 at drawing nutrients and nitrogen, fixing the soil.

 And, you know, so there’s a long history.

 We haven’t been in this.

 This isn’t a new, this soil depletion is not new.

 It’s been there before, which is encouraging that we’ve learned.

 Yeah, exactly.

 And we kind of having to go back to having to go back is good

 that we’re going back to, you know, kind of farming practices

 are going backwards into the way that, you know, was proven and worked.

 But there’s so much less nutrition in the soil at the moment.

 And how we farm crops that we grow are so,

 you know, specifically dependent on certain fertilizers or whatever.

 So, you know, and at the moment, we’re, you know, about to enter

 a real era of real kind of global concern around fertilizer.

 But actually, again, wild food doesn’t need fertilizer to grow.

 It doesn’t really well and to have all these crops.

 And so and also lots of wild food tends to be perennial.

 So it’s sending down these really big taproots into the subsoil.

 So one of the relations of Japanese knotweed, for example, is dock.

 Dock is phenomenally nutritious.

 It sends down these really, I’m sure every gardener listening to it

 will know very deep roots into the subsoil,

 which are pulling up things like if there’s selenium in the soil,

 it’ll be pulling it up.

 You know, we have a selenium deficiency in the soil,

 but actually it’s pulling them up, you know, and then and then

 it does the same thing that Japanese knotweed do.

 It grows really big and then flops back down

 and creates that organic matter on the top soil.

 But if you eat it, you know, you’re getting all of this nutrition.

 I mean, I think, you know, it’s wild greens can be like 10,

 12 times more nutritious than conventionally

 kind of farmed greens.

 It’s just phenomenal, the amount of nutrition that’s in them.

 Yeah, very interesting.

 And we should say in terms of, you know, when your body was being

 depleted of various things through your chemo, you are fully recovered now.

 Yeah, fingers crossed.

 I had I had

 the kind of chemo that needed to go on for quite a long time.

 So I had chemo, just a preventative that finished a few weeks ago.

 So actually, yeah.

 So actually, when the Gardeners World episode with me in it was aired

 was days after my final chemo treatment.

 Right. So it was interesting.

 Well, congratulations. Oh, thank you.

 Thank you.

 Gosh, as I said, I could talk all day with you, Liz,

 but we must get on with your dream garden.

 But just briefly, just to wrap up one other thing you were talking about,

 you approaching blue sky botanics.

 So what is your role with blue sky botanics?

 Oh, well, I have a very lovely title of a botanical ambassador,

 which sounds so nice.

 That sounds amazing. It is, it is.

 Yeah, so I’m kind of working on projects with them.

 So I’ve done some.

 So I joined them in January.

 So the first thing we did was we had a few hundred roses,

 which were organically grown, so beautiful varieties.

 And we needed to expand our rose field.

 So the amazing rosarian Michael Marriott,

 who has written books on roses and was one of the lead guys at David

 Austin, he came and advised us on what roses to produce.

 We had this very quick end of season window to plant.

 So that was the first lovely project to work on.

 And yeah, we’re doing kind of a lot just to do with kind of

 just making people a bit more aware of the organization.

 I think that it’s an era that people need to know about the good

 the good work that’s going on, especially in food.

 We’re all very concerned about what’s on the back of our label.

 And quite a lot of especially drinks people will have

 will have a little bit of blue sky in the drinks.

 And it’s really beautifully, very cleanly made products

 and sourced really well.

 And I think people we need to know about the good things

 as well as the old process.

 We need to know about the good.

 So partly it’s about that.

 It’s going to be about sharing those good news stories

 and kind of communicating a little bit more about

 what the organization does.

 What an exciting role.

 It’s a nice role.

 Yeah, it is alongside with alongside teaching my foraging courses.

 And yes, that’s cool.

 I mean, that was one thing we read on your site was

 you will come to people’s gardens as one of the offerings

 and you’ll go around the garden with them and identify what they can

 and what they mustn’t eat. Yeah.

 I imagine it’s kind of an important one.

 Yeah. Yeah.

 Kind of sounds like a great cause.

 And then, of course, your books.

 So we saw you have three books at the moment.

 You know, Wild Drinks, Forage and Buds and Blossoms.

 Buds and Blossoms. Yeah. Yeah.

 What was your was Forage your first book?

 It was my first book. Right. Yeah.

 And in there, that will say so that’ll cover things like not weed

 with it. And it does. Yeah.

 So it’s the 50.

 It’s 50 plants that and they kind of are plants

 which are quite globally sourced, but all that you can gather from the UK.

 I’m very inland.

 Well, so I’ve got a coastal forager.

 And so the plants that I talk about are kind of, you know,

 wherever you live, you will find them.

 Yeah. Basically.

 Yeah. And it’s a bit of the history recipes.

 Yeah. So some of the recipes that I cooked on garden as well came from my books.

 But yeah, right.

 So it’s a really easy introduction to Fodgley.

 It’s beautifully illustrated.

 I can say that because I didn’t do the illustrations by a botanical

 illustrator called Rachel Pedder-Smith, who is a really fantastic illustrator.

 So, Liz, to start off your dream garden,

 what would be the garden boundary if you want one at all?

 I’ve been thinking about this.

 So my garden here looks out onto, it kind of has got a little wire fence

 and looks out onto a meadow, which then looks out onto the Black Mountain.

 So the Hatchel Ridge. We’re really high.

 We’re on top of a hill.

 And there’s something about that that I love,

 that when you’re away from the agricultural wire fence, you don’t see it.

 So you have this hidden, you know, the garden follows on before the haze cut.

 It looks beautiful.

 And I let the meadow kind of creep in into my garden a little bit.

 So for a short period of time, I would say, bizarrely,

 an agricultural wire fence, if you’ve got a nice,

 you know, if it can blur into to things afterwards.

 But if you’re not, I’d say a good hedge. OK.

 So would you be where you are now?

 So looking at the Black Mountain? In my dream garden? Yeah, yeah.

 Yeah, maybe. I don’t know.

 I’m quite a content kind of person that, yeah,

 maybe my garden would be a bit would extend into the hay meadow a bit more.

 OK, yeah. So what size is your garden currently?

 I think it’s a bit hard to say.

 My house is sort of sat in the middle of the plot.

 So I’ve got three little gardens.

 So I’ve got a tiny little courtyard garden at the back that’s got

 kind of a stone wall. I love a stone wall.

 I love a brick wall, actually.

 So maybe a brick, maybe a kind of a walled garden.

 And then I’ve got the side that was filmed that is wilder.

 And then I have my need to have a little bit of mutant tidiness in the front

 garden, which was where our dog basically is as well.

 So you don’t want to kind of forward stuff.

 OK, got you. Say no more.

 Yeah, it does functions.

 But yeah, I so I think that maybe something with a disappearing view,

 you know, or with a borrowed view.

 Borrowed view, absolutely.

 And then you said about a little bit of a walled area as well.

 Yeah, I think maybe a little bit of walled is a nice thing.

 Stone or brick.

 Yeah, yeah, for the shelter, because we’re very windy where we are.

 Oh, I’m quite exposed.

 Are you born and bred, Herefordshire?

 No, I was born in North Hartfordshire in Letchworth, which.

 Yeah. OK.

 So kind of commute about from London.

 Yeah. And then moved out here.

 Yeah. What brought you out there?

 Was it to be more out in the.

 Yeah, my husband’s family were originally from Wales.

 So we moved into Wales.

 Yeah. And now we live just just on the outskirts outside of Wales.

 Like literally a mile out.

 OK, it’s quite cool.

 Yeah. Looking into it.

 Fantastic.

 So you’d stay put where you are and what sort of size you imagine.

 I’m saying I’d stay put where I was.

 I wonder actually whether a view of the coast

 would be a pretty amazing thing, wouldn’t it?

 That would be.

 But sometimes it might.

 But if it’s a dream garden, it can be quite.

 You can do whatever you want, can’t you?

 So maybe I might just have a switch.

 Oh, I might be trying to transport mountains.

 OK, like a backdrop that.

 Yes. So you have the mountains and woods.

 Yes. And actually, yeah, there’s a really lovely book

 called Putting Back the Apple by some called Alison Campbell, who

 she was she spent a lot of time in

 walking across Australia with indigenous populations of people.

 And she then came and did the same kind of walk

 of looking at what would the indigenous population of the UK have lived like.

 Oh, yeah.

 She discovered that actually that we would have been we would have done that.

 We would have spent time in the mountains getting the blueberries,

 the bilberries.

 You would have then spent time by the coast.

 You would have spent time in the woods.

 So actually, maybe my got my dream garden reflects

 the transitory nature of how we used to be when we were more nomadic.

 Yeah. So could my god be nomadic, please?

 You can have a nomadic garden.

 That sounds good.

 I’m thinking immediately of the Pyrenees is a great place for that, isn’t it?

 Because you’ve got the mountains right by the sea.

 Yes. Absolutely.

 That beautiful juxtaposition of the two.

 That would be nice.

 Yes. Lovely.

 There, please.

 There, please. Of course.

 Well, then would you like a shed or a greenhouse?

 Shed. Oh, wow.

 Yeah. Straight in there.

 With a tin roof.

 With tin roof.

 Why tin? I just love a shed with a tin.

 Like so much. I love a shed with a tin roof.

 So much that my children literally now point them out to me

 because they’ve had their lives of, oh, it’s a lovely shed.

 My husband loves Land Rovers.

 Whenever they drive past Land Rovers, there’s a lovely Land Rover and a lovely shed.

 Yeah. Tumble down.

 I mean, we’ve got a tin roof shed.

 It’s my favourite thing in the world.

 Unfortunately, I’d love to say it was beautiful inside.

 It’s not just crammed full of the detritus of.

 Off in the way.

 Well, that’s fine because that’s how it works.

 But there’s nothing like the sound of rain on a tin roof.

 On a zinc gutter as well.

 A zinc gutter.

 I do love a tin roof.

 Yeah, there’s something about it, isn’t there?

 And there’s something about even the warmth that when it warms up inside a building with a tin roof,

 it’s a different kind of warmth, isn’t it?

 Oh, lovely.

 Yeah. What a great idea.

 And what are you keeping in your dream shed?

 Is it going to just be full of detritus or are you going to have a seating space?

 No, no, it’s not.

 My dream. So that shed out there would be.

 Order. Order. Order, order.

 Little hooks and everything.

 Yes, it would have a little bed because I’d sleep in my shed.

 I love my shed more than a hat.

 Oh, I would live in a shed.

 OK. Oh, no, so much.

 I love sheds.

 I mean, it’s come from Charlotte when my mum and dad had a shed that was,

 I think, was the original shed to the house.

 So their house was like one of the exhibition houses in Letchworth,

 which is an arts and crafts town.

 And it was an arts and crafts shed and it was black.

 Oh, God, that smell of the creosote.

 Oh, God, it’s gorgeous.

 But it had a wooden floor.

 And yeah, no, I just literally would just go and spend so much time in there.

 It was my favourite place ever to be in the shed.

 So, yeah, no, I would very happily live in a shed with a veranda.

 A bed, a little bed, a bed in my shed.

 And yeah, a bed in the shed.

 Literally, that’s pretty.

 In fact, that’s it.

 A desk, a bed.

 And that’s it.

 So it’s not really even anything for gardening purposes.

 It’s to have the space right in amongst the garden.

 But you’re in the garden, in it?

 Yes, yeah.

 A big door, a big door into the garden.

 Yeah, from the shed.

 Well, what colour would you like your shed, by the way?

 Well, the tin has got to be rusted.

 OK, tin has to be rusted.

 Can’t be new.

 No.

 No.

 And the shed could be red brick or it could be,

 but it probably would be wood.

 But it could be red brick.

 Yeah, let’s go red brick, because I love red brick.

 Well, we come on to my favourite part, which would be,

 what are your five favourite ornamentals?

 Five favourite ornamentals?

 Just five.

 Five.

 Well, one of my favourite ornamentals is definitely

 not to be eaten as foxglove.

 Yes, not to be eaten, but absolutely stunning.

 Not so beautiful.

 And it blurs the boundaries between the wild, complete wild.

 So our little footpath is a very old footpath,

 and it gets lined with foxgloves.

 Oh, magnificent.

 My oldest daughter just used to love foxgloves

 when she was little, and just so it reminds me of her.

 But yeah, so when I start bringing,

 so I pull foxgloves as they sell seed

 and then bring them into the garden,

 and it just feels like it does that kind of,

 they act in both worlds, don’t they?

 Yeah.

 Yeah, love foxgloves.

 They’re a very happy plant for me.

 They are.

 They do give a wild feel,

 and yet they’re incredibly ornamental.

 So beautiful.

 And then you’ve got all the little bee butts.

 Yes.

 The little tubular flowers.

 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

 So gorgeous.

 Very sweet, nice choice.

 Marshmallow.

 Oh, I love marshmallow.

 Oh yes, marshmallow.

 What is the best?

 Oh my goodness, the marshmallow, marshmallow.

 It grows everywhere in my garden.

 So my garden, very heavy clay.

 So it does that either really, really, really wet

 and kind of even on top of the hill,

 it flooded or just bone dry.

 And it just keeps going.

 It doesn’t matter where I stick it.

 It’s just majestic.

 It’s so beautiful.

 It’s happy.

 And it takes over that spire from foxgloves later on.

 Oh, we haven’t had a marshmallow before.

 Oh, if you’re not, how are you eating them?

 Use the roots.

 So the roots are what marshmallow sweets

 originally were made from.

 Oh yeah.

 Ancient Egypt.

 Back in the day.

 I remember looking at that.

 Back in the day, they were turned into halva,

 which then turned into sweets,

 which then got just lovely.

 Just very good medicinally as a mucin largeness plant.

 And in skincare, so they’re just lovely.

 But you can use the leaves and you can use the flowers.

 Alongside, I have a thing for that family.

 All edible.

 I have a thing for that family.

 So I’d go hollyhock as well.

 Oh, are they all edible as well?

 All edible.

 Right.

 Because we have a lot of those.

 They smell sweet.

 Oh, so good.

 You can use the flowers and stuff them.

 So that all those mallow flowers.

 You can use lavateras as well,

 but yeah, you could just, they’re lovely.

 Right.

 I like that.

 Use those little.

 I’m on three so far, aren’t I?

 Yeah, you’ve got two more.

 Viburnum.

 But not, I’ve got, I love opulus,

 but I’ve got a viburnum.

 It’s never did very well.

 And I think it has just died.

 And I’m so sad because it’s,

 and I have got it written down.

 It’s very woody and with a lovely,

 I bought it, I don’t know where I bought it from.

 Years ago.

 I’m trying to see whether I can find.

 And it has very heavily scented,

 pale pink flowers.

 Oh my goodness.

 And it’s on the footpath.

 And you can see people in the spring

 when they’re walking past.

 And they’re like, what’s that smell?

 And it’s just a loft of this amazing viburnum.

 Are you eating that?

 No, you can’t do it.

 No, just purely there.

 We don’t have to eat everything in our garden.

 No, you don’t.

 I don’t have to eat everything.

 What, your final one?

 Well, I think to be honest,

 and funnily enough,

 it featured in the episode that I was in

 and Monty John’s got what’s in his garden,

 it’s Forget Me Not.

 Yeah. Yes.

 I think that’s the thing.

 What a transformation it makes after the winter

 when everything is just so bleak looking

 and you can go, oh,

 and suddenly they just cover everything

 and hide all of the bearer.

 Yes.

 Gorgeous.

 And then you do get-

 I love them.

 I love them.

 Aren’t they lovely?

 They are lovely, lovely things.

 All guises.

 You know, I’ve got some Forget Me Nots in the pond.

 I’ve got-

 In the pond?

 Yeah, water Forget Me Nots and-

 Oh yes, I have heard of those.

 Beautiful.

 But yeah, no, they’re a good plant.

 One question I did have for you is,

 do you know about any edible plants,

 any edible kind of foraging plants

 that would really surprise some of us

 that they’re actually edible?

 Any that you’ve been like, wow,

 didn’t know about this?

 The hosta on the program was a, you know,

 I think it will be a surprise for a lot of people.

 Yeah, all the time, peony.

 Oh God, I love peonies.

 Yeah.

 Peonies are great.

 They look amazing.

 How are you eating your peonies?

 Just so lovely.

 Well, traditionally they were eaten,

 they were used medicinally,

 so you can buy peony root,

 which is used as a spring tonic

 in sort of medicinal Chinese soups.

 Oh, okay.

 It’s slightly bitter,

 but they’ve got a lovely flavour.

 But the leaves, I mean, so the flowers,

 so the flowers of peony are bitter.

 Lots of flowers are bitter and perfumed.

 So imagine, you know,

 that lovely floral spray of a perfume

 that when, if you accidentally lick it,

 you go, oh, it’s really bitter.

 And actually lots of flowers

 have got a very similar flavour profile in that way.

 So peonies do this amazing thing.

 They’re lovely to eat.

 You can use them as an edible flower,

 but the kind of sweetness is a little,

 it’s more overtaken by the bitterness.

 So, which I think is really good

 because I think sweet things can become too cloying.

 Yeah, I’m with you on that.

 Yeah, so in my book, Buds and Blossoms,

 which is about lots of edible flowers,

 mainly the only thing that’s got like a cake topped

 with a flower is a whole, it’s a square sponge.

 It’s topped with a massive peony bloom.

 Right.

 And it looks so, you know,

 because it’s like, if you’re going to go big,

 if you’re going to do it, you’ve got to go big.

 You’ve got to go for it.

 You know, I’m not into one flower and a cupcake.

 Go big or go home.

 Exactly.

 We always say about peonies.

 Exactly.

 And it is go big or go home.

 And it’s got that flavour of go big or go home.

 And so, but inside it,

 I’m not really a fan of a sponge with jam inside.

 Again, it’s too sweet,

 but you can make a jam with peony flowers, which tastes,

 it’s like a bitter marmalade almost.

 So it’s got just all the lovely deeper tones of flavour.

 So in that sponge is cream and a bit of that peony jam.

 Peony jam.

 Now you’re talking sweet peony language.

 Bicing peony, peony flower on top.

 So good.

 Can you do that with both the herbaceous

 and the tree peony?

 I don’t know about the tree peony.

 You might find you can,

 but I have to stick with obviously the things

 which are kind of proven.

 Funnily enough, I think that the herbaceous peony

 came about through the medicinal use of peony,

 if I’m right, that the tree peony roots,

 I think were originally used a long, long time ago.

 So they were then the,

 I think it was Chinese kind of garden,

 you know, kind of horticulturists

 then cultivated the herbaceous

 to be able to make access use of the roots.

 Right.

 Because otherwise, you know,

 the tree peony takes so long to grow,

 does it matter?

 Yeah.

 So I think that we have-

 Yeah, kind of Chinese traditional medicine

 to thank for what we now have.

 I might be wrong, but that was kind of what I’d read.

 Well, before I say this next bit,

 just in the interest of time,

 we’re gonna have to rattle through this next part

 of your dream garden.

 So what are your- Liz has a meeting to get to.

 Liz has a meeting.

 So what are your five edible favorite plants?

 Okay, it changes through the year.

 So kind of like, I’m gonna be heavily spring focused

 and this is where the weeds come in.

 So I would definitely go nettle at the top without a doubt.

 Oh, all the time.

 Okay.

 Yeah, every time.

 Are you making everything with that?

 You’re doing teas, soups, crisps?

 Oh, teas, soups, cakes, everything.

 Cakes as well.

 Yeah, or great nettle cake is delicious.

 It could be used in so many things.

 Because we’ve got time restriction,

 will we find all that in your forage book,

 if we find it?

 You will.

 Grace and then wild drinks.

 Rose, so good, so beautiful.

 Can be used in so many different ways.

 Linden as a, just a beautiful tree,

 the lime tree, linden tree.

 I just love it.

 The leaves, the buds when they come out,

 the flowers, there’s so many different things

 you can do with it.

 Are you getting a lot from trees in terms of-

 I do get a lot from trees.

 Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

 What other trees are you thinking?

 Hawthorn, really lovely, kind of the leaves,

 the flowers, the berries, you kind of get through to that.

 But yeah, there’s a whole season in the early part of spring

 that you have tree leaf salad season for a couple of weeks

 where you can just go and gather like beet leaves,

 linden leaves, always different leaves

 and make lovely, lovely salads and stuff.

 But yeah, trees are a really important part

 of the edible landscape.

 They’re highly nutritious.

 Highly nutritious.

 And even actually a lot of the parts of the trees,

 the fruit trees that we don’t know, that we don’t use.

 So, you know, I’ve got little mulberry tree,

 I’d love to have a big mulberry tree.

 I’ve got a couple of little mulberry trees

 and the leaves are incredibly nutritious

 as well as the fruit.

 Same with apple, you know, with lots of fruit trees,

 you can use the leaves and teas.

 Yeah, very true.

 So yeah, where am I at?

 You’ve got three nettle, rose, linden, lime tree.

 What are your two others?

 Two others.

 Oh, a little tiny weed that most people

 will just ignore called swinecress,

 which is gonna be coming into season soon.

 Do you know it?

 So good.

 It comes if you get compost, it’s quite feathery.

 It’s a summer fly and kind of comes

 so you get bittercress in the spring

 and you know, kind of that you weed out the garden.

 Swinecress replaces that.

 So it’s quite verdant green, it’s quite lime green.

 And it’s almost like carrot-y leaf looking.

 I’ve just Googled it.

 It reminded me a bit of rocket.

 Yeah, it looks sort of the same family.

 It’s a mustard plant, but incredibly peppery.

 So a bit like detander, which I spoke about as well.

 It’s a very hot and yeah, yeah.

 So it’s got that real heat.

 Nice choice.

 So swinecress is a weed that you’ll be pulling out

 and getting rid of.

 Gosh, there’s so many.

 It’s really hard to choose as an edible.

 Do you know, I’m not very good at,

 I haven’t been able to grow successfully yet,

 but I would love to be able to grow a bit more.

 Is this four or five?

 This is your fifth one.

 Oh, no, I’m gonna change it then.

 Blackcurrant for the leaves.

 Oh, for the leaves.

 And for the wood.

 What are you doing with the leaves and the wood?

 The leaves have got more vitamin C in than the fruit.

 They are absolutely phenomenal.

 So Victorians used to make, yeah,

 you can make blackcurrant leaf cordial and sorbets.

 You can infuse the twigs.

 If you prune the tree, the shrub, sorry,

 you can smash them up

 and then you can infuse the wood in olive oil

 and blend it and you can use that to make olive oil cakes,

 which tastes like blackcurrant.

 Oh, it’s just amazing.

 The buds are used in herbal medicine

 for kind of like respiratory problems

 and for your throat.

 There’s loads of different things.

 They’re amazing, taste incredible.

 And actually they are so important.

 When I was in the middle of my chemo treatment

 and I was bored as a coot,

 I would go out, I’ve got a whole row of blackcurrants

 that I grow for the leaves.

 Last year I had my first really big harvest

 of berries as well.

 They’re still in the freezer.

 I’m not that bothered by the berries so much.

 It’s the leaves I love.

 It’s the rest of it.

 It’s the rest of it.

 And I would sit,

 well, I must have looked like a complete mad thing

 and I would take my hat off.

 I would show my bald head to the blackcurrants

 and I would sit and I would talk to the blackcurrant buds

 because I knew in a few months,

 there was me rubbing my rosemary oil on my head

 and I knew that in a few months

 that they would open up and they would bloom

 and they would- Just like your hair.

 Be burnt just like my head

 and they would be alive again.

 Absolutely.

 So yeah, blackcurrant.

 There we go.

 Big symbolic plant.

 Well, then what’s your one statement tree?

 That’s a hard one.

 I know, we ask demanding questions.

 It’s a demanding, it really is.

 It really is.

 Like news night.

 It is.

 Part of, ah, do you know,

 there was so many things that I wanted to say.

 Was it birch?

 Was it whatever?

 I don’t know, but there’s a tree

 that I would love to have with me for the whole of my life

 that I won’t be able to unless we live here forever.

 And it’s two fields away.

 It’s a specific tree and it’s a linden tree

 that must be about a thousand years old.

 It’s a veteran linden tree that was coppiced

 and it’s so wide that it’s almost as wide as a car

 and it produces the most beautiful flowers

 and I harvest from it

 and I actually walk past it every day

 and one of the side effects of chemotherapy treatment

 is that you can’t produce much saliva.

 So when I’m like walking my dog or going for a run

 or whatever, I’d be like, oh, I’ve got a really dry mouth

 and linden produces lots, it helps.

 It’s a mucilaginous plant.

 So it’s actually the same family as hollyhock and mallow.

 It’s a Mulvacy family.

 And so I just eat a leaf.

 If you have a dry mouth, you’re out on a walk

 and you just chew a leaf

 and it fills your mouth with like its own saliva.

 It’s amazing.

 So it’s good for that.

 But also the flowers are just magical.

 They’re used to help calm anxious thought.

 They help with sleep.

 They’re cooling.

 They’re really good for menopause,

 lots of different things.

 But yeah, it’s a very special tree

 and that one tree in particular

 where it is, is very special.

 And yeah, so that’s my statement tree

 but I can’t move it into my garden.

 No.

 But then it is the garden of all things.

 So in it goes.

 It’ll come.

 Next to my tin roofed.

 Yes, exactly.

 Well, gonna rush through this next question.

 Would you like a pond or a pool

 and what plant would you have in that area?

 A pool I can swim in

 and I would have water lily.

 Ooh.

 Fantastic.

 So a natural swimming pool.

 Absolutely.

 Yes.

 Yeah.

 And a water lily.

 What colour is your water lily?

 White.

 Doesn’t matter really

 but white probably just like the,

 you know our bog standard water lily.

 Yeah.

 And how big’s your pool pond going to be?

 Oh, enough to, yeah.

 Get some length in.

 Quite a size.

 Okay.

 Totally inspired by Lantibeth gardens

 that I was telling you about.

 They’ve got, they built their own pond

 with the wood from their,

 Oh.

 Their land.

 Yeah.

 And it’s just beautiful.

 Well, final question is

 what would be your favorite seating area?

 Drink to have and a plant to have by your side.

 A hammock.

 Yes.

 Ooh.

 I planted.

 We love a hammock.

 I planted a cherry tree and a willow tree.

 Hammock width of distance.

 So my garden that you saw garden as well

 didn’t exist when we moved in.

 It’s totally, it was made, it was just a scraggy field.

 So I plant the two,

 the two things that I planted specifically

 were hammock width distance of these two trees.

 So I grew my hammock.

 So yeah, hammock.

 So are they big enough now for a hammock?

 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

 They’ve been big enough for a few years.

 Oh great.

 And that was where I convalesced after my surges.

 Yes.

 In my hammock.

 What a great place to convalesce.

 It was a nice place.

 So with the, yeah, trees.

 So it’s the willow.

 Is that the plant of choice for that area then?

 Well, maybe.

 Do you have something else in mind?

 Yes.

 I don’t, I’ve struggled with just the one plant of choice.

 Oh no, it’s kind of like the main plant.

 People often go for something scented

 to have a nice smell near them or grasses,

 for example, because they like the sound.

 The white noise.

 Yeah.

 The white noise near them.

 Yeah.

 Maybe.

 You might have something you just want to pluck and eat.

 Yeah.

 That’s a good idea.

 That really is.

 Put on your pimps.

 Yeah.

 Yeah.

 Just pop in your pimps.

 Yeah.

 Probably the right, a honeysuckle.

 A honeysuckle.

 Because I can, yeah, you can sit out in the evening.

 Absolutely.

 I can put it in my drink.

 I can eat it.

 Yeah.

 What drink would you have?

 With that honeysuckle.

 Yes.

 I would, just everything.

 Maybe because it’s honeysuckle, I’d,

 it would be, so it would be now.

 I’d make myself, I would have probably

 a whole load of strawberries,

 which I’d bought a few days earlier

 that was starting to look a little bit, you know?

 That everyone’s forgotten.

 I’d mush them up and have them mushed up

 with a little bit of elderflower cordial

 and smashed up some honeysuckle in it.

 Oh, wow.

 So a honeysuckle and elderflower, strawberry,

 and maybe some early cherries,

 but they’re not quite out yet.

 But yeah, that would be the…

 That sounds a great drink.

 A pretty looking drink as well.

 Yeah, really pretty.

 Absolutely gorgeous.

 Well, I’m going to really quickly read back

 to your dream garden,

 just in case I’ve missed anything.

 So first of all,

 it’s definitely going to be reflecting nomadic times.

 We’re going far back.

 We’re going to have a switch, a light switch,

 where you can change the view

 between the Black Mountains or the coast,

 which will be very pretty.

 You wanted a wire fence to blur into the landscape.

 The garden will extend into the meadow

 and possibly a little walled area as well,

 possibly some hedges.

 You then wanted a shed, very important,

 with a tin roof, slightly rusty.

 You’re going to have a bed in there, a desk,

 so you can sleep and everything,

 and it’s going to be in red brick.

 Then your five ornamentals.

 We had foxgloves, marshmallows, hollyhocks,

 viburnum with the pink flowers, forget-me-nots.

 Your five edibles.

 We have nettles, rose, linden, lime tree,

 swinecress, and blackcurrants.

 Your one tree was a linden tree,

 the one that’s two fields away,

 but it’ll be in your garden this time.

 Then you wanted a natural swimming pool

 with the white water lily,

 big enough so you can swim length.

 And finally, you’re going to have a hammock

 between two trees, a honeysuckle,

 and a strawberry elderflower and honeysuckle cordial.

 Oh, that’s very lovely.

 It’s made me realise

 that I am actually pretty content with my lot

 because actually it’s pretty much what I’ve got already,

 apart from the shed that’s messy.

 Yes.

 What better place could you be in then?

 Yeah, exactly.

 A contenting place.

 Sounds wonderful.

 What a superb garden.

 And gosh, as I say, could talk to you for hours,

 but I’m definitely gonna get your book

 and get back to you with some questions on that.

 Oh my gosh, absolutely.

 It’s been really lovely speaking to you.

 Thank you, you’ve been a real joy.

 And honestly, I think that it was one of the nicest

 things to listen to, just you reviewing

 and your lovely love of plants

 kind of comes through hugely and of each other.

 So it’s been very nice to hang out with you.

 I mean, I kind of love her, but I don’t know.

 She’s all right.

 Well, thank you so much.

 That’s been A Good Ol’ Chit-Chat with Liz.

 Thanks so much, bye.