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Transcript

Chapters 0:19 Welcome Back to On The Ledge

0:52 Catching Up on Life Changes

3:02 New Job at Scribehound Gardening

3:11 Upcoming Book Release

6:13 The Fate of Legends of the Leaf

9:33 Remembering Wolfie

12:05 Future of On The Ledge

13:25 Introduction to Scribehound Gardening

16:03 Preview of the Deep Dive Podcast

31:42 Wrapping Up and Future Plans

[0:00]Music.

[0:15]Hello. How the devil are you? It's been a while.

[0:19]Welcome Back to On The Ledge

[0:20]I'm Jane Perrone. This is On The Ledge. Let's have a catch up. In this new episode, I'll be catching you up with what I'm getting up to, what's been happening since the last episode, September 2024. And I'll be bringing you a little bite of my new podcast. Phew.

[0:52]Catching Up on Life Changes

[0:52]It's been a while, everybody. Thanks to all of you who've been keeping in touch, saying how much you've missed on the ledge. And I have to say, I have missed making this show too because it's been an important part of my life for the past seven and a half years. Let me catch you up with what's been going on though. Although maybe I should start with an explanation because maybe this is the first time you've ever listened to On The Ledge. This is not your typical On The Ledge episode. This is a podcast that covers indoor gardening, aka houseplants of all kinds, has been going and we've been going and I've been going since 2017. The show went on hiatus in September 2024. So if you are new around here, do go to the archive and listen to some other episodes because this one really isn't representative, great though it will be, of what On The Edge is all about. On my website, janeperrone.com, there's a thematic guide or you can just dip in to an episode of your choice. The last episode came out in September 2024 which was my episode with Ben Newell of Worcester Terrariums and as you may remember the last couple of episodes were an all singing all dancing video production which was fantastic and I loved doing those episodes.

[2:22]However, after such a long time making the same show, I needed a change. And I'm not going to lie, I got a bit lonely because working on your own, completely on your own without any colleagues for such a long time was getting a bit much for me. And so I started to look for a job and I started my new job in December of last year and I have an incredible job title. So I'm working four days a week for Scribehound Gardening and I am head of inspiration at Scribehound.

[3:02]New Job at Scribehound Gardening

[2:59]So yes, I'm, yeah, I have a lot to live up to there. What is Scribehound Gardening? Well, I'll get onto that in a minute, but I wanted to tell you first about some other things that have been happening.

[3:11]Upcoming Book Release

[3:08]So started my job at Scribe Hound Gardening in December. That was just after I had finished writing my third book. So yes, I have another book coming out in October, October the 23rd. It's out and it's called, well, I'm not sure if I'm allowed to tell you what the hell. It's called the Atlas of Deadly Plants.

[3:34]Yes, it's about poisonous plants. It is a guide to 50 poisonous plants from around the world. And I guess you could say it's a bit like Legends of the Leaf for toxic plants, because I go into the same detail about the stories behind them, the culture, the religion, the art, the history, the politics. And it was so much fun to write. So that's going to be out in October. There will be an e-book. There will be an audio book. There will also be a US distribution.

[4:11]Fan bloody tastic. So whereas Legends of the Leaf you couldn't get in the US via regular bookshops and stuff.

[4:22]Atlas of Deadly Plants published by Greenfinch, an imprint of Quercus, will be available for order in the US in all the usual places that you would buy a book. so that's really exciting. The other exciting news is that Legends of the Leaf is coming back so if you are in the US and you haven't bought a copy because the postage was just so prohibitively expensive fear not because I've got the rights back to that book and I'm going to be self-publishing it. So exciting so you will be able to get hold of it in the US and all over the world.

[5:01]It will not be quite the same as the original first edition, if I can put it that way. Why? Well, it's very expensive to produce what we did with Legends of the Leaf Mark 1. So it won't probably have the foiled cover and it will probably be softback slash paperback rather than hardback. But it's still going to have all the same amazing content. And you never know, I might chuck in a bit of extra info in there as well. If you're thinking, well, I actually want that hardback copy, the original first edition. Well, then do drop me a line. I do have some copies, which I am able to sell and send anywhere around the world. The benefit being I can also sign your copy and add in a couple of little bonus cards and so on. So if you want the hardback, drop me a line on the ledge podcast at gmail.com and I will sort you out. No problem. If you want to pre-order the Atlas of Deadly Plants from Kinshaw.

[6:02]The usual places, then you can certainly do that now. It's up on all the book selling websites as of now, and those pre-orders really help.

[6:13]The Fate of Legends of the Leaf

[6:10]So if you're interested in that book, do go and take a look. I need to update my website with the details, which I haven't done yet, but it's coming and I'm very, very excited about it. Just going back to Legends of the Leaf for a minute though, you may or may not be aware of what happened with my publisher Unbound. So the great thing was I got to write this book that I was really, really proud of. And I had a lot of editorial freedom and I wrote the book I wanted to write, which was amazing. The downside, however, was that the publisher Unbound, in my opinion, did not do the book proud. So as you know, it wasn't distributed in the US. I'd said from the start, it needs to be distributed in the US. They didn't do any social media about the book. The week that the book came out, no one came to my launch party from Unbound.

[7:14]So on and so forth. Yeah, I'm not going to bang on about it. There is a post on my blog, which I'll put in the show notes if you want to read more about what happened. Unfortunately, unfortunately Unbound has gone into administration. It's no longer exists as a company. I was kind of lucky in that my book had already come out, but unfortunately some of the authors who were crowdfunding their books have now been put in the situation where their book's not going to be published. And even worse, the people who've pledged for that book are not getting their money back from Unbound because the company doesn't exist anymore.

[7:54]Weirdly enough, and I don't really understand the technicalities of this, but Boundless Publishing has kind of stepped in. A new company with the same people behind it from what I can see are publishing some of the books that were on Unbound ready to be published, but not all of them. It's a really complicated situation. It's not great. Unbound owe me money, hundreds of pounds that they haven't paid me from my royalty statements. They have sent me a payment plan and I should be getting that money over the next few months. And I will keep that post updated as to what's happening with that. So you can see whether they do actually pay me. I don't have many nice words to say about Unbound, to be honest. I loved the model I raised £35,000 for that book for them and to be honest I haven't seen a great deal of that money details in the blog post if you want to go and read about the actual figures involved I love the concept of crowdfunding for a book but.

[9:01]And I don't really know how they've managed to go bust because it seemed like a really sound model. However, that's the situation we're in. So Legends of the Leaf, it stands as a wonderful thing that I've created, but there's a bit of a sad backstory to it. And I'm really excited about my new book. I have to say my new publisher has been absolutely amazing and it's been a very different experience so far. So I'm really looking forward to you having a chance to check out that book.

[9:33]Remembering Wolfie

[9:33]What else has been going on? Well, the other news that I have to bring you is that in November 2025, the on the ledge mascot, my wonderful, wonderful dog, Wolfie, left this mortal plane. It's hard to talk about this without crying. Um, he was 14 and he had been having problems with, uh, arthritis basically in his joints. Uh, and he got more and more poorly. He was on hydrotherapy. He was on medication, monthly injections, but it got to the point where it just wasn't fair anymore to let him keep going.

[10:25]So my family and I made the decision to take him to the vets we all were there, my kids were very brave and they were all there um for his last moments and it was it was I felt that we'd done right by him because it was time for him to go and the vet was absolutely lovely and if you've been through this with a pet you know how difficult it is, but you know that you're doing the right thing as an owner.

[11:06]And I still have a little bag a little baggie with some of his hair in it because I wanted to keep that. And I have a paw print and I haven't got another dog at the moment. So I've had a lot going on with this new job starting and adjusting to that and a really busy time. So at the moment I am dogless, but I don't think it's going to stay that way forever. Um, because I do love having a dog. So at some point there may be a new doggo coming into the house, but not at the moment but I am still walking a dog for the cinnamon trust once a week I go and walk Oscar the Shih Tzu who is a real character um a very different from my own dog but is a fun character so that is giving me my dose of dog every week.

[12:05]Future of On The Ledge

[12:05]So what's happening with On The Ledge? Well, as I've said, the show has been on hiatus since last September. And the bad news, I guess, is that I'm not planning to bring the show back on a weekly basis because I just simply don't have the time with my new job. Making a podcast on your own is a heck of a lot of work and I just don't have time right now. However, I don't want to completely mothball the show because as and when I've got something I want to say, I want to have this channel available and open to me to talk to you. So there's going to be this episode, which is going to include a preview of my new podcast with Scrypound Gardening. And then there's going to be another episode coming soon where I talk to a former guest, Avery Rowe, Tradescantia expert, about the new research they've been doing into drainage in our pots, which is really fascinating. So I guess what I'm saying is stay subscribed and you'll find that the occasional delight drops into your inbox from on the ledge as and when I'm able to do so. I'm definitely planning some episodes ahead of my book coming out in October and there may even be the odd live show recording in there too.

[13:25]Introduction to Scribehound Gardening

[13:26]So Scribehound Gardening, what is it?

[13:29]It's a community for garden writing. So I am one of 30 experts in the field of garden writing. Among them are people like Alan Titchmarsh, Adam Frost, Sarah Raven.

[13:44]Anne-Marie Powell, James Alexander Sinclair. Lots of names you'll be familiar with if you inhabit the world of garden media or consume garden media here in the UK, but hopefully of interest beyond that too. And I am the head of inspiration so I manage these 30 people and decide when their articles are going out and I also make excitingly not one but two podcasts. The first podcast is hosted by me and it's called Deep Dive and it's out now and this is a show where I interview one of our writers about a piece of work they've contributed to the platform. So it might be Matthew Pottage talking about how to help your garden cope with climate change. Or it could be Hugh Warwick talking about cats in the garden and the damage they do to wildlife. Or Chris Young on the legacy of the wonderful landscape designer John Brookes.

[14:45]So every week you're getting a different guest and a different story to tell about the world of gardening. The other show is yet to launch and And I'm not in that show, but I am. I guess you I guess I'd call myself an executive producer on it in that I am dictating to some extent the direction and the content of the show. It's going to feature two garden celebrities from the UK, and I'm sure it's going to be really popular and that will be dropping soon. The first episode in sometime later this month, the month of May 2025.

[15:21]But I thought I'd give you a preview of the Deep Dive because although it won't fill an on the ledge shaped gap, because it's largely about outdoor gardening, you will get to hear my dulcet tones. And I know lots of you are interested in outside gardening as well as inside and will be fascinated by some of the interviews I've been putting together. So I'm going to play you about half of the episode and then if you like what you hear, you can go over and subscribe Deep Dive by Scribehound Gardening. You'll find it on your pod app of choice and I'll put links in the show notes for it too.

[16:03]Preview of Deep Dive Podcast

[16:04]Right, no more delays. Let's go with Deep Dive featuring the wonderful Ben Dark.

[16:10]Music.

[16:21] Ben Dark: Gardens should be high-maintenance, but never highly maintained. There should be vegetable plots and cut flower beds, but give us weeds within, chicory gone to flower, umbels in the apple trees, nothing neat, nothing edged, nothing tidy. Our garden should say, yes, I suppose we could mow. But why, when there are friends for lunch and a forgotten church to visit? Time is important beyond its squandering. We should think of our gardens as four-dimensional spaces, with time as the fourth and most romantic. In effective garden design, it is something to be played with, as much as colour or texture.

[17:06] Jane Perrone: Hello and welcome to the Scribehound Gardening Podcast. I'm Jane Perrone, your host and head of inspiration at Scribehound. Yes, I do believe that my place in the world's strangest job title competition is a dead cert. And if you're wondering, well, what on earth is a Scribehound? let me explain. If you've ever felt overwhelmed by the mass of books, email newsletters, TV shows and social posts about gardening, what we do at ScribeHound Gardening is cut through that noise to give you brilliant garden writing from 30 passionate and knowledgeable garden experts. So if you're new to Scribehound Gardening, hello, you can find us on the App Store and at scribehound.com forward slash gardening. This podcast's aim is to give you a flavour of Scribehound Gardening, the wild garlic to your free-range egg omelette of nutritious gardening content. Every week I'm joined by a Scribehound Gardening writer to talk about one of their pieces.

[18:22]And my guest today is Ben Dark. You heard his mellifluous tones at the start of this episode, reading an extract from the article we're going to discuss today. And you may recognise his voice from his podcasts The Garden Log and Dear Gardener, both of which are well worth a listen. Or you may be familiar with his writing, including his brilliant book The Grove. Little confession here, I am very jealous of Ben because he is a superb garden writer. His pieces never fail to delight, inspire and certainly make me think. And today we are going to be talking about his article, Heavenly Dishevelment, A Guide to Effortless Good Taste. Ben Dark, thank you so much for joining me on the Scribehound Gardening Podcast. We're here to talk about your wonderful heavenly dishevelment article which I think caused.

[19:22]I'm not going to say a furore in the comments, but certainly the responses were ecstatic from some subscribers. For those people who haven't had the joy, can you just, I don't know if we can sum up an article like this, but can you have a go at explaining what you were trying to get across in this wonderful piece? Well, it is an affectionate skewering, I would probably say, of one of the dominant aesthetic modes that we see a lot. This, it's gone beyond shabby chic. It's gone almost into sort of antiquarian chic. And you see it in houses full of incredible sort of objet trouvée and bits and pieces scattered all over the place. And also I see it spilling out into gardens where you have this fantastically aristocratic, oh, that old thing. And that old thing is the most brilliant little plant or something you've been gifted. And it's great beauty and great things worn very lightly with this sort of laissez-faire attitude. And I've noticed that it's been around for ages, ages and ages. It's the aesthetic of Vita Sacre de West and Harold Nicholson. You see it in their letters to each other. They're always complaining about Americans in American living rooms and saying...

[20:40]Well, of course, they've got great libraries, but their libraries aren't right. They're not covered in objects, in knickknacks, in tiki boxes and tobacco tins and an old shoe that hasn't made it upstairs. And this aesthetic has been bubbling, bubbling, bubbling away for years and years. And now with social media, I see it really hitting the mainstream and suddenly it's everywhere. And I was noticing in this world of garden writing where we're all having to build profiles and get a following that I was being well and truly trumped in my miserable hundreds by celebrity rooms, celebrity mantelpieces, celebrity bookcases that would be posting these dreamy compositions of book and art and a picture and getting millions and millions of likes and subscribers and rightly so. And I wanted to write a piece that gently poked fun at them and at myself for falling into quite a few of the cliches that are embodied in this look. So that's where it sort of stemmed from. This is not your when to plant potatoes kind of piece. You've obviously chosen to go a slightly different path from the conventional for your scribe-hound gardening columns. Where did that come from?

[22:00]Well it came from firstly with a competition there's a lot of people who know a lot more about plotting potatoes and we have to find our niche and um my niche is probably in reading a few strange books um and obscure things and not actually being good enough at any of the real core gardening skills of design of um. [22:28]Of propagation of vegetable growing so i sort of have to find another place for myself and i quite like that oblique angle um approaching approaching writing because you start and you realize all of the things that for the last month you've been privately reading and you thought it was just for enjoyment suddenly you can stick them in you've been paid for it it makes good economic sense as well absolutely it's a synthesis of all these different influences that are coming to bear on you. It's going down well with our readers. We've had so many lovely comments on your pieces. I think the first comment on this particular piece was somebody called Uyen, who just said, superb, more, more, more. Do you worry, though, that your writing is maybe a bit Marmite, that some people might find it, perhaps people who prefer the more practical side of things might find it a little bit too dense with meaning or a little bit too beyond the normal garden writing fair. Well, I can definitely see that point. I don't worry about it, though. That's the nice thing about having all of these other writers on the platform, that I don't want to repulse anyone and repel them and make it deliberately obscure and difficult for the sake of it. But also, I think there's a lot of people who like a bit of richness in their cake, and they will enjoy it. and if the others don't I don't want to um.

[23:57]To upset them i don't want to cause storming out of the internet cafe but i don't think there would be and i think actually what i found generally in garden writing is that editors are sometimes more scared of of putting people off and than than than they need to be the audience can pretty well follow along quite nicely to almost everything as long as you i don't know i suppose you have to this is this is something that i do worry about they call it air in the cake something one of my editor says to me we need a bit more air in.

[24:27]The cake you've got too many currents in there and so i suppose i do need to stop occasionally and and blow a little bit of raspberry in there but um but at the moment i think it's hitting the right the right kind of balance i hope i think it is too i mean this is the great joy of scribeham gardening that you have that editorial freedom uh me i i as head of inspiration i'm not here to tell you what to write and so for me it's just as a delight as anyone else to come across your next piece and find out what you've been writing about and it does just give that freedom of both what you say and the form as well so um you you and you've really embraced that beautifully which is wonderful to see and and I'm so glad that that kind of stuff has come out in in the uh the content that we've had already it's been great fun and the other aspect of this of course is that your mellifluous tones which some of our subscribers will know from your podcasts can be heard reading the piece as well which is great because you have got audio experience you've cut your teeth on two podcasts just remind anyone who hasn't who hasn't heard those for a while or perhaps hasn't subscribed what those podcasts were about and and why you started those well the.

[25:41]The Garden Log, which is, I suppose, the flagship podcast in the Bendark flotilla, which I don't do anymore because I'm not a head gardener, was the diary of a head gardener. So it's just the thoughts that occur to a head gardener. And head gardener in that sense of, I mean, I had three people working for me. Anyone can call themselves a head gardener. Someone came in to cut the hedges and you told them where to go, you're a head gardener. But I was a head gardener in a private estate.

[26:11]And it's all of the the conversations that i was having with myself as i was going through a day's work a lot of which is spent on your own and so i was able to to put them into a little microphone at the end of the day and that went down quite well with people now i'm not head gardener anymore because unfortunately we got dragged to copenhagen and so i set up another one called dear gardener which i hadn't done for ages um which was interviews with gardeners cut into a different format and Jane you listened to the first episode and told me that sounds like a lot of work and turns out it was a lot of work which is a brilliant concept but it was one of those kind of things where you thought if you had a team of 15 people working on this it would be you know it would be great but it's a it's a fantastic uh podcast and I do recommend anyone going back and listening to that back catalog because it's really worth worth uh checking out um but at The thesis allowed you to have the delivery practice for Scribehound.

[27:10]Exactly. Yeah. So it's nice. It's nice to be able to speak again into the microphone. It's hard though, because I never read from the script in either of those podcasts. So to try and get the delivery in that sort of nice podcasty way that we like, that makes this different from an audio book, has been a slightly difficult challenge when reading out the article. But it helps that actually having delivered enough that I can see on the page where I'm going to hit a huge stumbling bog in reading it out and think, I don't really want to record that sentence 25 times. So maybe I'll put a few of those consonants elsewhere and then you get an easier read, which tends to lead to a more flowing article anyway. So it's quite a good practice. Yes, absolutely. I agree with you there. It really does help to clarify. I mean, they always do say when you're writing to read your work out loud, don't they? Anyway, even if you're not going to be recording it just from the point of view of spotting things that you haven't spotted already.

[28:11]And as somebody who's currently reading the proofs of my book, I am just trying to do that in that you suddenly go, that sentence really doesn't make sense when you read it out loud. It's very revealing. I hate it. I hate it. But the worst is when you've got, you're regarding your audio book, you've got your audio engineer there and someone's taking a bit of your day and you come across one of your pages and you think, did I need to name all these Chinese provinces? Did I really? How many people am I offending across the world here with this horrible butchering? But I'm sure I do that as well on the scribe hand pieces because I end up sticking in a load of phrases in French, which I don't speak particularly well. So there's probably a lot of people screaming at their mic anyway. So can you give us, just going back to the celebrity sitting room I mean, can you name names here? Are there any Instagram accounts that we should be looking at for this kind of content? Who are the chief proponents of this dishevelled.

[29:03]Garden style so the the instagram um account which i sort of veil behind this fictional persona of benjamin oscuro is is sean anthony pritchard who has put his new book out inside out who is the from the same publishers as my publisher which is why i found out about him and my book was sent to him as part of the publicity and things and it's a beautiful beautiful house he's got it's got a great way of arranging flowers lovely lovely books there look really good i i like to look and squint of the Spines and see, oh, good, he's got Gombrach's story of art and things like that. Obviously, you're obviously the right kind of person. So that's a really good one. All of those things connected to the Bible of British taste, really. Anywhere Bible of British taste adjacent, you're going to find this look and find it absolutely, absolutely perfectly nailed. So those are good places to start. And I mean, in the gardens, there are so many of them. The thing is that it's become a blend. So all of these sort of living room influencers will have a garden and do a bit of vegetable and flower influencing as well. And it's all the perfect vegetable, i.e. The not perfect vegetable, the vegetable with a bit of dirt hanging around on it. It's great.

[30:15]If anyone wants to read, there's a really good novel that I read a couple of years ago that I was reminded of when I was writing this article. And it's called I'm a Fan. I think it's by Sheena Patel. And she is a brilliant debut novelist, came out in 2022, and she is skewering this sort of person as well in a much, much more foul-mouthed and angry way than I am. But she comes across the same characters with the same objects and the same ease and sticks into them. I mean, these are characters that appear across quite a lot of things that I read.

[30:52]There's a brilliant story as well by Angus Wilson called The Crazy Crowd, which is about a sort of person's entry, a sort of comprehensive boy like me. I went to Comprehensive and met these sort of people at university. And you kind of get a bit overwalled by them at first. He tells a brilliant story about a comprehensive school boyfriend going to one of these fantastically aristocratic families who don't seem to care about anything, and everything's sort of luge and sweary until suddenly you transgress one of these things that they all know and you don't, and you get in trouble for that. So I was drawing from social media and also from these literary sources and also from other books that I've been reading recently. So you can find out about these people everywhere, really.

[31:42]Wrapping Up and Future Plans

[31:42]Well I do hope you enjoyed that little sampler of the deep dive podcast check the show notes for all the details of the deep dive podcast where you can subscribe and also how to subscribe to scribe hound if you click the link in there you'll be supporting me on scribe hound so if you want to support what I'm doing these days, that's the way to go. My Patreon is still open. I'm not adding to it regularly at the moment, but it's still there for those who want to access the extra content. So you could do a week's free trial and get what you want that way, or you could just stay for a month or two so you can catch up with all the extra episodes there in the form of an extra leaf and loads of other fun stuff. All of that information will be in the show notes, but Until next time, when I'm bringing you my interview with Avery Rowe on pot drainage, I do hope you're having a wonderful week and I'll speak to you soon. Bye!

[32:46]Music.

[33:00]The music you heard in this episode was roll jordan roll by the joy drops and quasi motion by kevin mcleod - all tracks are licensed under creative commons visit the show notes for details. [33:16]

Find out what’s been happening in On The Ledge Towers since the last episode of the podcast in September 2024, and listen to a preview of my new podcast.

Want to find out more about Scribehound Gardening? Why not take out a trial subscription here: there’s more info here.
Subscribe to the Scribehound Gardening Deep Dive podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. You can listen to the rest of the Ben Dark episode here.
Say farewell to OTL mascot Wolfie the lurcher.

Want to check out my upcolming book The Atlas of Deadly Plants? Check it out via the links on the Hachette website or ask to pre-order from your local indie bookshop.
You can also still buy a hardback copy of my houseplant book Legends of the Leaf direct from me: email to place your order! You can read about what happened with my publisher Unbound here.
Info on all my books and audiobooks can be found here.
Want to support me by joining my Patreon to unlock exclusive OTL content, making a one-off donation or leaving a review? Find out more here.