Prue Leith on food, gardens and how she learned to tell a petunia from a dahlia (original) (raw)

As headlines go, it was pretty dramatic, even by the _Daily Mail_’s lively standards. “Bake Off star Dame Prue Leith swaps self-raising flour for zero gravity”, the paper exclaimed the day before House & Garden spoke to Dame Prue, “as she stars in new science-fiction film opposite Blondie singer Debbie Harry.” It’s the sort of story that has you checking the date to make sure it’s not 1 April: TV chef and post-punk icon team up for space flick! And yet when we ask her about it, Leith herself confirms that it’s pretty much true, if not such a big deal. Invited by marketing gurus and old friends Vin + Omi to record a short cameo for a film about humanity (personified by Debbie Harry) leaving a ravaged planet Earth in the future, Leith acquiesced. “To be absolutely honest, I’m not sure I knew what I was doing. I think I have a one-line starring part.” She laughs. “I think [the _Mail_] think it’s a whole movie, but it’s a tiny little thing.”

It’s typical of an open-minded willingness to experiment that explains how at 82, Leith remains such an accomplished multihyphenate: a chef, a TV and radio presenter, a novelist, an author of recipe books, a designer, a businesswoman and, of course, one half of the judging panel on The Great British Bake Off. And in fact, she has added yet another string to her bow this month: the occasion for her lively chat with House & Garden is that Leith has recently been announced as a judge for B&Q’s Gardener of the Year competition. Across four competitive categories open to the public this summer, Leith and a team of experts will assess everything from traditional formal gardens to vegetable plots, high-concept planting to all-rounders, to crown the UK’s best gardener and award them a £10,000 prize (plus three runners-up who will be given £1,000 each).

Leith is now a keen gardener herself, but it wasn’t always so. Growing up in Johannesburg in the 1940s and 50s in a house with “a lovely garden” – plus a gardener to tend to it – her mother gardened, but she wasn’t hugely interested in planting herself. “I remember being given a little veggie patch, and I was encouraged to grow my own beans and things. I didn’t last more than one season.” It was only when she had small children of her own that she realised how useful green space could be in giving them room to roam. “I would take the children to the supermarket with me, and they’d lie down on the ground and scream like only two year olds could do, enough to make you want to murder them! Then I noticed the difference between taking them to the supermarket and taking them to the park. As soon as they were through the gates of the park, they ran off and they would be happy as Larry.”

A house in the countryside quickly became an escape from crowded Paddington, where the family lived in a flat at the time, and Leith honed her skills, developing a garden over the next 45 years. “I started to learn the difference between an oak and ash, a petunia and a dahlia, and then I got absolutely hooked on it.” There were, of course, some rather steep learning experiences along the way: to copy a parterre pictured in the endpapers of a cookery book by the American chef Robert Carrier, Leith trimmed and planted 2,000 cuttings in a mixture of sand and soil. “The cat thought this was the best litter box, and scratched half of them up.” On another occasion, she cut down a huge fir tree to use as a Christmas tree in the double-height hall of the family home. “I didn’t like conifers. I thought they were dull,” she explains. The tree was splendid, but she only realised the next spring that it had been planted as one of three, and that getting rid of it had thrown the garden out of balance visually. “I ended up planting another one. It took ages to grow.”

“It’s not like cooking”, she says, “where you do it in the morning, and you’ve eaten it by the afternoon.” Then she pauses to think. “Well, it is in the sense that it’s creative. You’ve got a lot of leeway to do what you like.” Moreover, Leith is adamant that it’s as important to teach children gardening as it is to teach them how to cook – or, more accurately, to teach them how the two are inextricable. “That idea of food being taught as a proper subject… wars are fought over food. Food is really important to the economy, it's important to jobs, it’s important to health and happiness, and sustainability. And kids should know about food miles and provenance and look at the difference between organic and non-organic and so on.”

Food is, of course, the underlying factor that informs a huge amount of Leith’s work and life. Over lockdown, she published her first vegetarian cookbook in 25 years in collaboration with her niece, Peta Leith, an ex-pastry chef at The Ivy. “I wanted to do a baking book, as Peta’s a much better baker than me, and it would be fun to do. But then the publisher said, ‘Look, there are so many baking books now. Every Bake Off winner produces a baking book; Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry produce one each every year. There’s just too much competition, you don’t want a baking book.’” Inspired by Peta’s own vegetarianism, they decided to go in a different direction.

Leith also writes novels, in which food features heavily (“I’ve got a novel on the go but, frankly, it’s going much slower than anything I’ve ever written before”). She is also working on an updated edition of her autobiography, Relish, and a “tiny” cookbook called Bliss On Toast. And then, of course, there is the reason she is such a household name in the first place: The Great British Bake Off, whose thirteenth series she is off to film the day after we speak.

There are naturally huge restrictions around what Leith can and can’t reveal about one of the world’s most hotly anticipated TV competitions. What she can speak to is how much she’s looking forward to seeing fellow judge and sometime handshake-granter Paul Hollywood. “I’m looking forward to seeing Paul because…” She pauses. “I’m slightly looking forward to seeing him. I really like Paul, so I’m looking forward to seeing him, but I know that he has been riding his racing bike and going to the gym and doing his Japanese exercise stuff with nunchucks, or whatever they’re called.” As such, she has a self-deprecating caveat: “He sent me a picture of himself in Mexico or somewhere, looking so brown. He’s lost a lot of weight, and I put on half a stone, so now I’m going to look even more like his overweight mother.”

We do, of course, emphatically disagree. But whatever the case – nunchuck workouts aside – it will be a pleasure to see Bake Off back on Channel 4 sometime this autumn, with all the requisite sugary pun-based silliness we’ve grown used to. Before then, though, there are gardens to be judged.

The B&Q Gardener of the Year competition is now open for entries until 20 June. Anyone can enter via diy.com/gardener-of-the-year.

The dainty, delicate beauty of auriculasGallery12 PhotosBy Clare Foster