Caroline Beck - Freelance Journalist & Flower Grower
After pretty much drifting through school, Caroline ‘got wise around twenty’. She took her ‘A’ levels at night school, studied English and History at Northumbria University where she ‘met wild professors and read for three years’, before taking a Post Grad in Radio Production. She got her first garden when she was twenty five and started working as a Senior Broadcast Journalist for the Today programme on the BBC, where her first interview was with a junior minister called Tony Blair. It was around this time she also started writing for many of the biggest garden magazines, including Gardens Illustrated. Caroline eventually became immersed fully in the gardening world, writing about them professionally and personally tending an allotment in a small Dales village where she grew flowers, herbs, fruit and vegetables for over twenty years (it became known as The Inedible Allotment). Still writing regularly, she also runs Verde Flower Co from a Victorian Walled garden in Northern England. Growing over 200 varieties of scented flowers, foliage and herbs for wedding flowers, workshops and local deliveries, with an overriding emphasis on sustaining the land as well as the bees, butterflies and birds. Caroline’s episode “My creativity disappeared like scotch mist” In this absolutely riveting episode Caroline opens up about her traumatic childhood and how escaping an unsafe house turned her into a tree-climber, wanderer and solitary child. We hear a shocking tale of taking showers under the crop sprayers (yes, really!) and the devastating, life changing, yet possibly lifesaving, outcome that had. There are lessons about rejection, resilience and creativity; tales of ‘long-legged public school boys’ and more than one hilarious impression. When Caroline discovered her dream secret garden in 2019 she describes the ‘sunny uplands’ she could see ahead of her, but then of course 2020 happened and everything changed almost overnight. Like everyone in this industry, her weddings and workshops evaporated and she tells of other ways she found to sell her flowers, how viscerally it affected her and how she withered without people. And of course there are some fabulous recommendations which we’ve included below, with links.