BBC sounds music radio podcasts.
Hello, I'm Lauren La Verne, and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast.
Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island.
And for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast.
I hope you enjoy listening.
My castaway this week is the gardener and writer Sarah Raven.
She was a new mother and working as a junior doctor when she took on the commission to write her first book, the Cousin Garden, in 1996.
Stepping back from medicine to write about her love of gardening may sound like a new frontier.
In fact, it was a return to her roots.
Her father was a keen amateur botanist, and as a child she would accompany him on road trips in search of specimens.
Plants were completely in my blood, she remembers.
I didn't know it at the time, but my path was already set.
Her passion became her livelihood.
A kitchen table startup selling seeds has blossomed into a multi million pound company.
And that first best selling book was, was followed by many more of her own garden.
She says, it feeds me on every level.
I think about it from the moment I get up to the moment I go to sleep.
I can't imagine life without it.
Sarah Raven, welcome to Desert island Discs.
Oh, thank you so much.