An Interview with Arthur Parkinson - Writer, Presenter, Artist & Florist

How did the love of gardening become part of your life? I see you were trained at the famous Kew Gardens, can you tell us what that experience was like? 

I hated it to be honest, it wasn’t the best time of my life, I was very homesick and did the whole moving from a small town to a big city in a cold turkey fashion so I wouldn’t recommend that. I don’t believe that beautiful gardens come from garden training either looking back I should have spent those years doing acting or something more useful but you should be taught good pruning and propagation though and I did learn a lot, a huge amount but I never should have got the job. It was due to me drawing flowers on the envelope of my application that I got an interview! I didn’t know enough about botany at all and still don’t . To be honest, when I left school everywhere was doing these apprenticeship type jobs where you work a full time job but instead it’s a traineeship so you are studying a lot after work but working a full time job, it was a rough old time to get by in London. I’ve always been useless at Latin and I couldn’t work hardly any of the machinery, I was a mental ball of anxiety. The best moment though and the only thing that saw me cut the mustard was being the only person to catch,  on the first go an injured peacock by tempting it to eat biscuits from my hand before grabbing under my arm like a bagpipe so that made me known at Kew nothing to do with the gardening! 

The Flower Yard - Growing Flamboyant Flowers In Containers, a book we have stocked for many years, loved by all of us in the office and our customers. This book encourages everybody to grow flowers in pots, no matter the space - can you tell us why it is so important for us to be growing flowers anywhere we can? 

I find gardens and allotments, especially in urban environments incredibly moving, mentally.  The contrast between the human hardness and often complete disconnect from nature in a man dominated landscape and then where allowed to, plants and as a result nature still finds a way to flourish. It’s well known now that London honey bees are healthier often than those in rural areas due to the huge diversity of nectar and pollen available to them aided by the higher diversity of flowers being grown and available to them within the city of London and also the important fact that here , flowering plants are less likely to be sprayed with pesticides than rural flowering crops are. I think we all need to have our hands in earth weekly,  if not daily if we don’t manage and look after the earth even if its nurturing a window box then we aren’t part of the earth and we loose our animal soul. Even on very dark days of depression if I can go and pick something anything or feel the earth, I feel a willingness even though it’s tiny against demons,  to continue this journey. I also watch a lot of Joanna Lumley travel documentaries they help too! 

Most expensive therapy’s and ideals come back to this need in the end of us being growers and harvesters of plants and  if we all spent time growing and nurturing then it would be a far healthier and happier planet Earth. The way we are living today no doubt is making us all unhealthy it’s quite obvious to me. We have outsourced everything! 

We know you are passionate about chickens and the welfare of them, you have also written two books in relation to chickens The Hen Party - a deep dive into 50 chicken breeds and how to care for them and Chicken Boy, My Life With Hens - a personal memoir of a childhood with chickens and nature. Can you tell us about your love of chickens?

Always adored them and now it’s really vital we try and conserve the old, pure breeds as bird flu and intensive farming where just hybrid chickens are reared is pushing so many breeds into being endangered now. I love the Australian Australia’s with their big dark eyes and glossy feathers.   It was lovely to draw them all and give each breed my own flavour in how I draw. 

I’m very concerned with the greenwashing of late regarding free range egg production. It is often not at all what consumers imagine when hens are reared on what is a huge commercial scale and countries must be able to support their farmers with higher welfare practices whilst not allowing imports of cheap animal products from countries that are not following the same laws. Supermarket accountability is what I would like to see a lot more of they are always missing from the conversations yet they are making so much money! 

Arthur, you're an artist in floristry, photography and drawing - illustrating and photographing your own books, is this something you have always been interested in? 

When I published my first book The Pottery Gardener,  I had no agent so you have to do a lot of door knocking and countless emails to publishers and then you grab at if you are lucky whichever email you hopefully get back that says yes we’ll take a look at your manuscript. I had no money to even consider paying a photographer so I bought a camera,  the cheapest of the cannon range with a lense and I started to get my eye into the flowers that I was growing and documenting my work. I like photography to this day and I can’t imagine doing a visual book and not doing the photos myself as it allows for so much freedom and getting the best light too. The idea of instead, having a shoot day I can’t imagine that but the photos probably would be better taken by someone else.  A few people have presumed my books are photographed by some very talented people in the gardening photo world so I think I’m doing something right. Flowers are easier to photograph than hens though for sure. 

Flamingos! Can you tell us where this passion has come from?

They are just so beautifully and curiously designed.  I love the animation of them how they move together,  their alluring colour pink then flashes of the most proper scarlet and red and how that,  remarkably they are very tough cookies in the wild,  living in some really harsh and nasty salt lakes of toxic water. 

I should have been a zoo keeper really. 

What do you have currently growing in your garden? If you had to choose (hard I know!) What are your top 5 flowers to grow from seed?

Panicum frosted explosion, sprinkles or sparkling fountain it’s such a wondrous froth of little seeds it’s my go to foliage to cut for the vase but I love it for naturally feeding a lot of the garden birds. My brother keeps budgies so all year I post him envelopes of it. It is very much cut and come again all summer long then in the winter it provides good sparkle even once it’s died, willingly self seeds but I grow it purposely each year. It may be illegal in Australia though! 

Dahlia bishops children. I love this quick to flower grown from seed dahlia with dark attractive foliage and then the rocket lolly primary red, orange and plum single, bee attractive flowers. Sometimes,  you get yellow too but all are welcome and fun. Within a season a seedling will grow a surprisingly large tuber that can be then either mulched or lifted for next year. People get snobby about single dahlias and say they don’t last in the vase they do but you have to pick them as soon as the petals open from the bud before the anthers and stamens fluff out and the bees visit them. I love to pick them.

Pumpkin crown prince , I grow this in thought for its still life adoration but it’s got a very very good flavour too when roasted. It is the most beautiful duck egg blue skinned pumpkin not too big nor too small and the yellow crazed flowers that open at dawn lasting for little than two days are cheering too. I am going to grow this up fences next year that surround my dahlia bed, with no shortage of hen manure they should grow well here. I’d have home grown parsley too! 

Corsican hellebore - takes ages to germinate as it’s perennial and needs to feel the cold before sprouting but worth the wait and if it likes your garden it will self seed. Here in England,  it flowers from January onwards if it’s mild , the leaves are tough and wax jacket like but the flowers are so beautiful lime green and beloved of awakening bees. I love all hellebores and they are easily grown from seed. 

Violas - viola tiger eyes red and the Rococo mixed I love their faces and especially like to press them so they are preserved as antique like Christmas cards that people love. They also do very well in windowboxes. 

If someone was new to gardening, what advice would you give them? And for the gardener that has been gardening for years, what piece of wisdom would you share with them?

 
Let the plants do the work in a garden, use natural materials, nurture your soil, learn how your garden’s light and microclimate is. 

Our final question, we must know, what was it like meeting the absolutely fabulous Dame Joanna Lumley at the last Chelsea Flower show?

Joanna I’m very honoured to know and to be honest she’s the reason I go to Chelsea flower show on the press day to see her for a precious moment, she’s exactly what you’d imagine her to be wonderful, gracious it’s incredible to witnesss her being so timeless with people because everyone wants to say hello and get a photo she’s makes time for everyone especially the exhibitors and she’s knows her plants massively too.