Show Notes
The Easter Lily - Lilium longiflorum
There is another part of the process alongside the audio that is also important to me and it is the show notes that will accompany each episode. Whenever you are researching a story you go down many paths. Some are dead ends. Others take you to a fascinating place but its not really for this story. I love this process and you know you have reached a point to record when you are starting to trip across the same links for a second time. Those of you who know me well know I have a very poor sense of direction but for stories somehow my sense of direction does work.
So the question is, how do we share that journey in the show notes so that other people who are fascinated by the subject can go down some of the roads? For example I am currently researching the Easter Lily. Eric is a florist and he owns a flower shop just round the corner from me. We have many conversations about flowers and when I told him I was leaving the BBC, not completely sure of what was next, he was one of those wonderfully positive people who was excited for me and reassured me that all would be well.
Eric’s favourite flower is the Lily longifollium but he never has them in for the shop because people won’t buy them for their houses - they associate them with funerals. This plant story has led me to Japan and I am now in email conversation with a very lovely, retired, Japanese professor who made these lilies a large part of his life’s work. I am asking him questions and he is kindly answering them. However he also has some questions for me, which involve seeing if we can find any documents from around 1900, that refer to longiflorum by its Japanese name - the Blunderbuss or Gun Lily, so I have been in contact with Nicky at the RHS Lindley library. This plant also has roots in Bermuda and the West Coast of America - so how much to share this in the show notes so that others can share in the fun of tracking a plant across the world?
Watch this space, I hopefully will have grappled with this question between now and launch on the 2nd April. But a quick question - I would love to know from those of you who listen to other podcasts; when the presenter says you can find more information on my website or in my show notes, do you go on that journey and look? Or is life just too busy and we have information overload - I have heard the episode and that’s enough. I guess I am interested from the point of view of how much time do I spend on the episode pages.
In the spirit of sharing articles that plant lovers might enjoy, I wanted to point to this wonderful collection of videos on the Beth Chatto website. I attended the Rewilding the Mind symposium last summer and it was very thought provoking. Worth watching if you have the time.
PS Just wanted to let you know about our new Privacy and Cookie Policy which we have uploaded. If you go to the website one of those cookie banners will now pop up and ask you to accept or decline the cookies. Basically the ‘analytics and performance cookies’ are there so we can see how many people land on our website. If we switch them off, then the same person might pop back 5 times and I’d think there were 5 people interested in the Easter lilies as opposed to just one. So with the cookies we get more accurate stats. We don’t know anything about what you as an individual have looked at, it’s an overall statistic. But of course feel free to accept or decline.