Going for the green
Ayr on the airwaves
Ayr will take to the airwaves this Friday as it plays host to Gardeners’ Question Time.
Veterans charity Gardening Leave welcomed some household names to its Ayr horticultural therapy garden last week when members of the BBC Radio 4 show visited to record one of their muchloved programmes.
Gardening experts and broadcasters Eric Robson, Matthew Wilson, Anne Swithinbank and Bunny Guinness toured the Auchincruive project, meeting Armed Forces veterans, volunteers and staff. Veterans shared their stories for the programme, explaining how gardening therapy helps them.
The team then decamped to Ayr Town Hall to record the second part of their programme, tackling questions put to them by around 120 local gardening enthusiasts.
The programme will
be broadcast on Radio 4 at 3pm this Friday, September 11, and is repeated at 2pm on Sunday. A second programme, using questions recorded at Ayr, will be aired during the autumn.
Heather Budge- Reid, chief executive of Gardening Leave, said: “We felt so honoured, on behalf of every gardener in Ayr, to host this wonderful event. It meant a lot to the veterans who contributed to the programme and we are looking forward to hearing it when it goes out.”
Gardeners’ Question Time attracts over two million listeners a week. Recorded in a different location each week, this long- standing radio programme has answered well over 30,000 questions since its inception in 1947.
Gardening Leave tends to the invisible wounds of conflict. Using gardening therapy it helps veterans with mental health challenges such as PTSD, depression and anxiety. It has sites at Auchincruive; Erskine near Glasgow, Dundee and in London at the Royal Hospital Chelsea.