... and what made you do this new one? Tell us all about it.

Okay.

So this one, I obviously was a florist, a flower farming florist, and h- even though, though I was showing mainly the flowers that I was growing and the farm setting, I was also showing a bit of, I was growing in my garden as well, and I, I was showing not just the sort of flower production, I was showing, started showing my garden as a whole and I got more and more questions.

Less questions of, "Oh, how do you do your floral arrangements? Oh, how long does that flower last?" Less of those and more of, "Wow, how do you plant a border? How do you have a border looking nice through the year? How do you have something t- to work with ingredients-wise throughout the year? How, how do you look after your soil? How do you make your fences?" All these questions every day.And I just was, that was what ma- like, my main sort of time spent on social media.

I try and connect with as many people as possible who ask questions, so I was just replying to these.

And I had finished, my book came out, my first book came out in 2022, and a few months after, my lovely editor and designer came over and they said, "We really want you to do another." And I said, "Well, I've got..." Had this idea from these questions I get, and they loved it.

But it took four years from that point to come out, almost a week.

Yeah

And then like what you're describing, would you do that in like, is that like one area of the garden?

Oh, I try and do that nearly everywhere now.

And I even bring it into the sort of, my favorite low maintenance way of gardening.

If you're low on time and I have a toddler, so there's areas of the garden that I still want to be really beautiful and abundant and useful for me and my work for floral design.

So I fill them up with bulbs and then I have fruit trees and then I grow roses in the meadow, meadow-y grass, but I just cut the grass once a year and I mow paths through it every few weeks.

So it's really low maintenance, but gives me a lot and I'm interested in, so permaculture I find really interesting and I learn a lot from people doing food forests.

There's an amazing guy called Joshua Sparks over here who's been in Japan and America learning all sorts and I was just at a conference watching him talk and it is, I want to go and do a course with him.

Like that's not that bad in the end.

So, Millie, will you give us a picture, first of all? So, yeah, tell us sort of what made you write the book and a little bit about how your sister persuaded you, etc.

Firstly, thanks.

Thanks for reading it and thanks for having me on.

So, it's fun because this book is not to do with... floristry at all which is what I think a lot of your book is about and a lot of my previous book from seed to bloom was about and I found that a lot of the questions I was getting from people was less and less to do with like how do you make this vase how do you do this and people are always interested in that but I think the things I kept fielding was like how do you How do you grow the flowers? How do you grow a border? I started showing lots more of the borders as I was going through my journey of making the garden and people started latching onto that and the fences and lots of little tiny questions.

I found that started becoming the majority of the questions I was getting asked.

And I think people getting really interested in gardening and wanting to get out and maybe working from home more.

My sister then finally got a garden.

Okay,

So botany and then being out in the garden is still the two threads, I would say.

I wonder that I love that idea of easy abundance.

And I see that in your vases.

And I really learned so much of my initial skill set.

I think I've told you this before, but learning how to put a bouquet together.

I watched a YouTube video.

I think it was literally the only thing that you could find on the internet over and over and over again.

And that makes it draws you out into the garden, doesn't it? Yeah, it does.