Podcasts of the week: from gardeners to poets
Britain’s gardeners may have struggled to get hold of plants during the lockdown, but when it comes to podcasts, we have been spoilt for choice, said Rosie Kinchen in The Sunday Times.
by gardener and blogger Andrew O’Brien, is a “lyrical celebration of the joy of gardening”, combining book extracts, poetry and interviews with other “greenfingered folk”.
from Gardeners’ World presenter Adam Frost and beekeeper Jez Rose, has quickly become a firm favourite. Its format is “two blokes chatting in a shed”, with free-flowing conversation ranging across such topics as “prissy chickens”, biodiversity and mental health. If houseplants are your thing, try with Jane Perrone. It offers “cheerful and practical” tips on growing everything from cacti and succulents, jungle plants and epiphytes – and her website is exceptionally useful, too, whether you’re a beginner or a pro.
Grounded
on BBC Sounds) are equally classy. This is not one of those “anodyne and annoyingly chummy” podcasts in which famous people chat to their friends. Rather, it offers “intriguing insights” into life, language, nature, art and music via conversations that “veer pleasingly between the lofty and the everyday, the serious and the silly”. Guests include Kate Tempest, Maxine Peake and Antony Gormley. Strongly recommended in a similar broad vein is
in which Buxton has enlightening conversations – he calls them “ramble chats” – with assorted luminaries, recently including Malcolm Gladwell.
Buxton’s long-established podcast remains as “funny and engaging” as ever, agreed Charlotte Runcie in The Daily Telegraph. In the latest episode, he interviewed Louis Theroux, and seemed “genuinely a bit affronted that his old pal” has just launched a similar podcast. For the listener, though, it’s a winwin, said James Marriott in The Times. The first episode of
is “a joy” – and Jon Ronson was an ideal first guest. Both men possess that “unplaceable quality of interestingness that is not quite the same as charisma, but which is its close relation”. Here they share cracking tales of “right-wing nutters, religious fundamentalists and conspiracy theorists”.
lasts an hour, but “I could have listened to twice that”.