Transcript: How to keep your plants happy as it gets cold

This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘How to keep your plants happy as it gets cold’

Lilah Raptopoulos
This is Life and Art from FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos. We’re here today to talk about plants and gardening in the winter. You’ve probably noticed that it’s only gotten trendier over the years to have plants in your home. I’ve definitely noticed that. But the Financial Times’s gardening columnist Robin Lane Fox has always known that plants are cool. He’s been writing this column for 53 years. Robin is also an esteemed professor of classical history at Oxford university. That means he lives in Oxford so his speciality is the UK climate. But don’t worry, we’re going to talk about gardening all around the world, too.

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Robin, welcome to Life and Art. It is such a pleasure to have you.

Robin Lane Fox
Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So I have many questions for you, some of which I’ve crowdsourced from our listeners and colleagues. But before we get into the advice, I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about your garden. I’m sure you have a lovely garden outdoors. Do you also have plants indoors?

Robin Lane Fox
I do. I’m a great killer indoors. I have responsibility for two gardens. One of them I call the Kissing Fields, which is the great gardens in New College, Oxford. That’s nine acres. Anyone can come and see them any day for a fee. And I think it would be agreed they are the finest college gardens at the moment in England. And at home I have two acres of very cold ground, which I feel puts me in touch with many unfavoured readers. As for gardening indoors, none of you has killed as many plants in the past 65 years indoors as I have.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s a relief. (laughter)

Robin Lane Fox
You will have killed the same percentage. But I actually admit it. And I’ve learned which ones are the quickest to die.

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK, great. I’m curious, first, what’s your approach to winter gardening any time? Like, do you feel like the winter is a time to take a break? Is it a time to, I mean, I imagine let the soil rest? But what is your sort of general philosophy?

Robin Lane Fox
I love the winter gardening in Britain now, but I time it and I have to rely on weather forecasts. I do urge people: don’t just say I will do my garden next Thursday. Have a look and see because Thursday it may be such diligent rain. There’s no point in trying to work outside in awful conditions. I choose a good day. Lay that one aside, even if it’s a bit later than the books say. And then winter gardening is one of the greatest pleasures. The world is quiet. You can begin to see a framework of your garden if it’s quite big like mine. There are a few birds pucking around, usually other people’s pheasants on the run from being shot and you are able to think clearly without a rush. What is it I want to move? What are the effects I’m looking for? And the underlying structure shows so clearly.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

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Let’s talk about outdoors first, then Robin. You know, I know you wrote in your last column that your approach has changed this year because it’s warmer in November. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Robin Lane Fox
Well, I mean, winter gardening is the great gainer, and there are very few from global warming and just the great gainer in Britain. You absolutely have to think now of all you can have in flower from early November to the end of January and it’s quite amazing. So what would I tell you to do? I’ll tell you to look carefully at the following things: The winter flowering cherry Prunus subhirtella autumnalis. That is the greatest of all flowering trees now in Britain. What a wonderful thing. It will flower often from November, right through to the end of March. Brilliant.

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK. So as you begin to recommend your flowers, I’ll just say I will put these plants in the show notes so that listeners can look them up afterwards. So first, it’s the winter flowering cherry.

Robin Lane Fox
Yeah. You get the winter flowering cherry. Then you look into the family of viburnum shrubs, white flowered viburnums, any of them is good. Viburnum x bodnantense Dawn, it’s pink. Deben is white. They are wonderful growers. Very good to pick. But above all, you look as you never have properly before at particular hellebores. Not the Christmas roses, which are quite tricky. And I now see them on sale, God help us, for £9.90 each. It’s ridiculous. £3.20 would be about right. Go for the Lenten roses. This is my best tip. And if you can, find named hybrids, either the Ashwood varieties or I like best of all the Harvington hybrids. Now these are almost indestructible plants and they used to flower in March.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s amazing. You know, we had a lot of listeners that had questions about what sorts of herbs or vegetables they could plant outside in the winter, like which vegetables could tolerate frost.

Robin Lane Fox
Well, it’s a bit late oh, boy then, or lady, in your query. The one thing you can usually do in Britain is actually to plant garlic. Curiously, garlic can be planted almost at the third week in November. But otherwise, your cabbages, your Brussels sprouts, which I absolutely love, they should all be coming now into harvest. And you really wouldn’t get anywhere by trying to transplant or sow vegetables for winter into the ground now. That is a huge mistake. Of course, when you get to early March, that is a different story. But for the moment, either you grew those cabbages on in spring or you won’t have it in.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right, great. One reader, Ida Tuononen, who was writing from Tokyo, asked what plants would winter or over winter well, on the balcony in a pot.

Robin Lane Fox
Are we talking in Japan?

Lilah Raptopoulos
In Japan, yeah.

Robin Lane Fox
Well, OK. It depends if there’s very heavy snow. And really here I am not speaking as a Japanese expert, but one wonderful choice in Japan is the hepatica family. There is a superb book that you should get by John Massey, My World of Hepaticas, I think it’s called. And he has worked closely with Japanese growers. He describes everything: how you don’t need any heating, you can have these plants on shaded balconies and in the spring you will suddenly get these marvellous blue, pink white flowers. They are miraculous. That is one of the great books of the millennium.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Wonderful. I’ll put all these suggestions in the show notes as well for listeners. What about for people who are in the cold, like people who are in the northeast of America or in New York? What advice would you give, for example, for a balcony in New York?

Robin Lane Fox
I have a firm advice to everyone who wants a garden living in New York. Move to Britain. Or if you want to be in the EU, move to the south of Ireland. My heart goes out to you poor gardeners trapped in a high rise. But you have one great resource, the New York Botanical Garden up in the Bronx. Fantastic to see the indoor orchid show. But even the great gardeners there know they cannot really give you a wonderful show of outdoor winter flowers. The climate just is against it. So on your balcony, you are not going to get beautiful flowers for January, February. But you might have tried a few bulbs in pots. If you bought some paper white narcissi, you have the option of moving them indoors. And they are really, really good value. Of course, you missed the chance in September of putting your own bulbs in cheaply. But if you see pots of them being advertised online, get them. They’re marvellous value. They’re scented, they’re white. They stay in flower. They are so beautiful. And if the weather turns horrible in the balcony, bring them indoors and they’ll be fine there too.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Perfect. Amazing. OK, now, when it comes to indoor plants for the winter, I think maybe inexperienced listeners and readers might think that the indoors doesn’t change that much from summer to winter. But of course, at least in New York, I know we have less light, the temperature changes, the heat goes on, and it’s often a much drier environment. Do you have one big piece of advice for indoors in the winter, or are there a few things that we should really look out for?

Robin Lane Fox
Well, my first piece of advice is, don’t worry, you’ll kill it. The point is, treat them as extended florist flowers. And I think the great family to go for now are the phalaenopsis orchids. They are the most resistant to changes of temperature and keeping way for 4 or 5 days over Christmas, not watering them. They are fantastic value and I think they have some hope of surviving the New Yorkers habit until recently of being overheated.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. Olga Shimane in Sweden has a question that is actually an extension of this one, which is, any good suggestions for indoor plants in dark regions that aren’t orchids? I have loads of orchids, but some of my other plants are really suffering through the low light.

Robin Lane Fox
So what I would say is cyclamen are damn difficult but beautiful. Azaleas tend to lose their leaves. They will last longer. Poinsettias are much easier to keep going. White jasmine doesn’t flower long enough, but is very difficult to kill. But my number one, even to the lady with all the orchids whom I really admire, be sure you’ve got plenty of phalaenopsis. That was what I would go for.

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK, brilliant. So one thing I’m noticing in your response is that most of these are flowering plants. And Robin, I’ve been noticing that there’s this huge, you know, of course, boom in younger generations that are getting really into indoor planting and they’re growing fiddle-leaf figs, monsteras, pothos plants. They’re calling themselves plant daddies. They’re using apps. I imagine you’re happy to see young people interested in gardening, but I’m curious how you feel about the trends and what we’re doing right and wrong.

Robin Lane Fox
Yeah, well, this is, of course, wonderful. I sometimes feel that it’s gardening for control freaks. Do they really love plants? Maybe they do. But could I urge a close look at cacti? I can’t, I’m afraid to go into the details of cacti. It’s too difficult just on a single phone-in. But the cactus is a really, really pretty thing. And it’s a very good plant. And then really, on all the others, you know, the eucalyptus plants, you know, the ficus and all these other things. I have a very simple answer. The FT will have to have a parallel gardening columnist. We need one of the young people who loves growing what I call non-plants, really likes things that look artificial. And we could have one called answering back to Robin every Saturday where somebody who is brilliantly expert describe like, heaven help us, she likes sponging plants’ leaves. There must be more to doing life than that. I’m not an expert on this style of gardening and I’m really delighted people are coming into it. But what I most hope is that it will fire them up to get further into gardening more intimately related with the surrounding nature that we all visit.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So when you say that, what do you mean? Where do you want us to go from the non-plant?

Robin Lane Fox
Well, this is what I think. I think you’re all going to complain. I hate skiing. I cannot think whoever took to skiing, but I respect anyone who loves it. And I feel that you’re skiing over usually swaths of the most beautiful early summer flowering plants. So go back to your ski resorts and climb in the Dolomites or wherever you like, the Pyrenees or wherever you want. Adirondacks would be good, and you will see the most wonderful swath still of wildflowers at higher altitudes. And that is a life-changing experience. It will change possibly the way you think about gardens and it will get you off just sponging the leaves of an aspidistra.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. So you’re hoping that that will sort of inspire people to go from just growing leaves into growing flowers?

Robin Lane Fox
Well, I mean, I have to say, I’m not hoping. I know it will. All these leave spongers are wonderful people and they’re longing really to take a leap into something that’s more and more beautiful and more rewarding. And I’m sure they will. That’s the way I look at it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, I love that. I hope that’s true. You are also giving me courage to plant more flowers indoors.

Robin Lane Fox
Something I’d like to emphasise. You are at the moment in Britain, living in the golden age of winter gardening. It is crazy to plant the surroundings of your house with nothing for these wonderful three months that unfortunately climate change is giving us in our tiny little patch. Everywhere else climate change is a disaster. In British, Irish, north French gardens, it’s wondrous. I love it.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Robin you know, I’ve been thinking about your career and how interesting it is. You are not just one of the UK’s foremost gardening experts, you’re also, by day, an academic. You’re an expert in Alexander the Great. You wrote a book called The Invention of Medicine. I’m curious about, you know, you know so much about history. For centuries, we have kept beautiful plants. And I’m kind of curious why we do it.

Robin Lane Fox
Well, of course, there are two things you left out my current bestselling book, Homer and His Iliad. And in fact, in Homer, there are imaginary gardens of the mind, the great gardens of King Alcinous. Not even in the next life will I visit them. But they are quite brilliantly described. And my point is, here we are in the 8th century BC with the greatest poet in the world imagining this wonderful garden all beautifully laid out. And it haunted subsequent imagination because that’s the point. You could plant and garden just practically, and I really respect that. But if you also look at it through the eyes conditioned by what other people have seen in flowers, gardens and so on, you see whole layers of association. The more educated you are, the better you are at two things: garden plants and falling in love. And that should be made absolutely clear. The more you’ve read, the more interesting you are. So my two professions don’t pull against each other. And of course, plant names are in Latin, but they’ve developed very early in my life. Really I’d say both of them from the age of nine or 10. You read endlessly in the FT counselling on how to change your job and how to retire and how to fiddle about. Well, I’ve done exactly the opposite. I have done exactly the same thing in very different ways for the past 60 years, and I’m damned if I’m going to change. And my God, I’ve had a life. So my advice is find what you can do and just do it. And if you can’t make money, you may well make money by doing what you’re good at.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Love it. You said before we got on that this is your 53rd year writing the column, but you’re just halfway through. Is that right?

Robin Lane Fox
Absolutely right. Yeah. Maybe I’m going to have a midlife crisis next year.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Well, then we hope to have you on much more often. Robin, thank you so much. This is an absolute delight.

Robin Lane Fox
OK. Well, thank you. And just please, everybody winter garden, winter garden. And if you can’t, under a snow blanket in America, just switch on and think of those of us who can.

Lilah Raptopoulos
(laughter) Thanks again, Robin. This is wonderful.

Robin Lane Fox
Thanks so much.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show. Thank you for listening to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I really recommend you take a read through the show notes. I have links to every plant and garden that Robin mentioned. I also have discounts for a subscription to the Financial Times and we have ways to stay in touch with me and with the show, whether that is by email, on X, on Instagram, etc.

I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here is my talented team, Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer. Cheryl Brumley is the global head of audio. Have a lovely week and we’ll find each other again on Friday.