Putting down roots: Plants, people and their stories

The Lantana camara that I'm used to is in Morocco, in Sidi Ali, so north of Morocco. It's got a beautiful flower. The main flower is an umbel, a round cone of little, tiny four-petaled flowers that can come in yellow, red and pink. It's not only visually beautiful, but also very fragrant. It will change colour as it ages. From yellow to red and orange to red. You know how old the flower is from the colour. I don't remember seeing the berries to be honest. I think you are just marvelled by the flowers.

It's interesting because I was reading up on it like you've got to be careful because it's been planted in so many places and it just invades everything. So you've got to be careful what you plant and where.

The plant that I chose was aloe vera, and the reason is because my grandad really loved the plant and it's a healing plant that has helped me throughout my life. I think it came from Antigua, which is where my grandparents are from, and I've been using it as a medicinal plant, and my grandad taught me how to use it. That's why it's important to me because I take it most of the time and use it cleanse the body.

My granddad really loved the Natural History Museum. And he would always bring any family we had over who came over from the Caribbean or America, he'd always take them to the Natural History Museum. And any of the small kids would love it.

That's really why I'm really grateful that you took my little seedlings from my grandad's plant and they're going to be in the Natural History Museum forever. So I'm like, woo!

 I chose the wild strawberry. It's called Fregaria Vesca. And it's from the Rosese family. And for me this is very special. It reminds me a lot of my childhood. I come from Scandinavia a long before we had tarmac roads up in the countryside. Far away from civilization, literally, into the forest where there were farming communities, horses and cycling.

And when we were children there used to be wild strawberries growing on the roadside in the ditches. And they were a bit dusty, of course, because of all the gravel roads, but we picked them and we put them on long straws, like grass straws. And proudly carried them home and rinsed them off.

And sometimes we ate them on the roadside as well. And then we had to pick more and more and more. But those were days, they were warm, summery days. And for me, and the swallows were flying high above. That meant it wasn't going to rain. So with all these things and the smells of cut hay because we used to help out as children with the hay making.

So yeah, very fond memories of that. I hope that this wild strawberry will be able to grow as well as I found it when I was a child.

The first one I planted myself, it's calle culantro, and our local name in the Caribbean is shadow beni. Until about a couple of months ago, I'd never actually seen it written down. So I was calling it shadow beni, and that's what everybody in the Caribbean calls it. Nobody ever sees it written down.

I think it comes from the French. And it's used vastly all over the Caribbean for seasoning food and in drink - for making cocktails, for seasoning meats and for seasoning fish. It's your go-to plant. And it's been magical in my entire life. That's all I've ever heard. I've only ever seen it dried. It's only until recently when I went to the Caribbean that I actually saw a proper tree of it and it was magical. Yeah. So having it selected is fantastic.

I chose rhubarb as my favorite plant. Surprisingly, it's actually a vegetable, which I didn't know. I thought it was actually a fruit, as a lot of people did. Anyway, but I chose it because, growing up, I spent a lot of my holidays in Cornwall with my grandparents. They had lots of rhubarb growing in their garden.

And we just have very fond memories of eating a lot of rhubarb. Rhubarb and custard, and rhubarb fool. Rhubarb coming out of our ears, but it was lovely. It was lovely. Pink was my favourite colour as a child as well. So I love the colours of the stems. They're often white and pale pink. Some of them are dark pink. I think that's also why I probably liked it a lot.

Rhubarb's not just great in cakes and making crumbles or having it as rhubarb and custard. You can make rhubarb shower gel, jam, gin, tea, you name it. You can have it all made of rhubarb, which I think is lovely.

I think it smells lovely as well.

Lily of the valley, memories from my childhood, one of my mother's favourites. Heavily scented, dew in the morning in the little cups, just ready for fairies, growing in abundance in the spring and then suddenly disappearing. I had no idea where they'd gone. Once they were established there were copious amounts that we could make into buttonholes, corsages. We could make posies. We used to put them in the house and they scented the room out beautifully. The leaves were strong and framed the flowers, allowing us to arrange them. When I tried to grow them in adulthood, I was not so successful. But my mother always brought me plenty of lilies of the valley.

Sunflowers are beautiful flowers, but my memory is just munching on sunflower seed after seed after seed. And from a young age, I learned how to peel them quite easily and quite quickly. But there was a memory of me and my aunt and when I was very, very young, about four, because I didn't know how to peel these seeds, but I loved it because it's so delicious, I'd ask her to fill a whole kind of, well, teacup full of sunflower seeds. And she'd be like patiently peeling them for me and filling up this cup. And I'd down it all in one go, which was a fun memory.

They are messy to eat – you do leave a trail behind you, but they are a lovely plant.

 Purple shamrock, Latin name Oxalis triangularis, also known as the love plant. I instantly fell in love with this plant the first time I saw it when I moved back to Kensington and Chelsea about 12 years ago. And a few years later, by magic, it started growing in my garden. Such a beautiful plant with its three purple leaves, known in Irish legend by St. Patrick as a symbol of the Holy Trinity. Native to South America, it belongs to the sorrel family and is edible with a citrus flavour. It also has some medicinal properties that you could look up if you like.

I chose ginger as my plant because it has really fond memories of when I was a child growing up. My Dad would always make us drink lemon and ginger if any of us had a cold. I do the same now with my daughters when I think about it. Anything to do with a cold, I'm 'okay get the ginger', but I also use it in my cooking, it's really nice in curries.

The other plant I chose was Moringa. Moringa is used throughout the Caribbean and Central America as a medicine. It grows like a weed in the Caribbean, really. It just grows everywhere. Everyone grows it. Everyone has a bush in their garden and people chew the seeds. I do myself. I chew six Moringa seeds every morning and it helps to keep my blood pressure down.

My doctor keeps saying, why is your blood pressure so low these days? It's the Moringa. And I've been planting Moringa myself. And this year, I think I'm going to plant it early enough to get a nice plant. So there you go.

I chose radishes because I have a real respect for radishes. During lockdown, my partner and I decided to grow vegetables. I've got a field in Suffolk and we planted loads of different veg. We'd never done it before, so it was trial and error. We planted lettuce, cavilo nero, carrots, spring onions and radishes was one on the list.

And what we didn't realise is, because it was lockdown, we couldn't go there all the time, because of restrictions. The very first time we went back after planting, I think it was like six weeks or something since we had been there, and the radishes don't stop growing. They were huge. I'll try and find some photos, but they were absolutely ginormous.

So I would say to anybody who wants to start to learn to grow vegetables and fruit, start with radishes because you'll definitely get a really good crop. I mean, you have to cull them because they will just keep growing and growing. But yeah, first time growers get some radish seeds and see how they go.

Agapanthus, lily of the nile, a very strong memory of my adolescence in the Isles of Scilly and my training for floristry. These were little fantastic fairy hats. They grew wild. They were in white, pink, and blue. They had structure in the hedgerows. They were something I could pick and I could make a flower arrangement with. I could make wedding bouquets.

They were seen as a flower of fertility.And they're easy to grow as long as they're well watered. The leaves are fantastic structure that you can make loops and hoops with. They were beautiful.

I chose ancient grains - the kind Egyptians would have eaten. What we're eating now as a people is making us very ill. But previous centuries were eating very, very healthily. Apparently a lot of them have a lot of spiritual and intellectual properties to them that aid in your health.

This world is consumer driven and sugar driven to a degree. I've never come across any of these ancient grains. I've never seen them grown and apparently a lot of them you can actually eat the plant part as well as harvest the grains, so that's like a twofold thing, so it's kind of that would be awesome if that was to come back.

I feel people are starting to get more educated because there is more knowledge out there, which is awesome.

Moroccan mint. I chose this because it's used in teas and it's a refreshing drink. And the reason I chose it is because I have memories of my grandma, or Lalla, as it was called in Arabic, in Morocco, pouring the tea from up high, and just the sound of the pour, you knew tea was ready. And the smell that wafted in the house!

My grandfather loved his tea, so he was always, 'is it tea time? Is it tea time?' That's a lovely memory for me, because I get the smells and the tradition. My grandfather loved these kind of ring doughnuts that you would eat, like Moroccan doughnuts, with tea so they were always a treat.

So, yeah, they are lovely memories.

I have chosen a hydrangea because we lived in a little basement room in the sixtiesin Kilburn. And as a child everything just seemed like a concrete jungle. There were hardly any greenery. This is from a child's point of view. I was probably about 10, 11, something like that. And the only thing that bloomed in the garden was a hydrangea bush.

And as a child, through a child's eyes, I always remember seeing nothing there. And it used to snow a lot. And then come summer, I'm guessing it was the summer, these hydrangeas, this bush, just came from nowhere. And then it had loads and loads of flowers on it. And it was just amazing, beautiful and pink and massive big bunches.

I didn't know what it was called at the time, obviously. And I was so excited, you know, and I was calling everyone, come, come, come look at this, look at this, look at this. So yeah, it was really nice to see lovely bunches of flowers in this concrete jungle. As I said, there was nothing else there other than that one plant.