The Infinite Monkey's Guide To… Gardening

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

Is your cash working hard for you right until the very moment you need it?

It could be if it was in a Wealthfront cash account.

With WealthFront, you can earn 4% annual percentage yield from partner banks until you're ready to invest, nearly 10 times the national average.

And you get free instant withdrawals to eligible accounts 24-7, 365.

4% APY is not a promotional rate, and there's no limit to what you can deposit and earn.

And it takes just minutes to transfer your cash to any of Wealthfront's expert-built investing accounts when you're ready.

Wealthfront.

Money works better here.

Go to WealthFront.com to start saving and investing today.

Cash account offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC member Fenra SIPC.

Wealthfront is not a bank.

The APY on cash deposits as of December 27, 2024 is representative, subject to change, and requires no minimum.

Funds in the cash account are swept to partner banks where they earn the variable APY.

The national average interest rate for savings accounts is posted on on FDIC.gov as of December 16, 2024.

Go to WealthRun.com to start today.

Want to stop engine problems before they start?

Pick up a can of C-Foam motor treatment.

C-Foam helps engines start easier, run smoother, and last longer.

Trusted by millions every day, C-Foam is safe and easy to use in any engine.

Just pour it in your fuel tank.

Make the proven choice with C-Foam.

Available everywhere.

Automotive products are sold.

Seafoam!

Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best store.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theatre, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

You're about to listen to an episode of the Infinite Monkeys Guide 2.

Episodes will be released on Wednesdays wherever you get your podcasts.

But if you're in the UK, you can listen to new episodes first on BBC Sounds.

I'm Robin Inks.

And I'm Brian Cox, and this is the Infinite Monkeys Guide to gardening.

Gardening.

Finally, after love and murder,

it's lovely now.

We're back in the garden.

We're surrounded by the beautiful flowers.

And there's not going to be a lot of pragmatic advice.

No, I'll be honest with you.

We've left that to Gardener's Question Time.

I could have been the new Alan Titchmarsh, you know.

Yeah, well, you were offered it and you said no, didn't you?

And now he's got me to thank for that career.

Yeah, he was the first choice for Alan Titchmarsh, but eventually they gave it to Alan Titchmarsh.

It was going to be Alan Titchmarsh's Wonders of the Solar System, and it was going to to be me on Gardner's Question Time.

You both got that northern sense of wonder, haven't you?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Anyway, we're going to skimp on the information that you'd have on Gardner's Question Time, but not skimp on the information on the quantum behaviour of croquet.

That's the only sport that you like, isn't it, Croquet?

Oh, no, I like watching darts and I like snooker.

I like any of the solitary games.

I like the games with existential anxiety in them.

Talking about existential anxiety, we're also going to talk about the immortality of mixed fruits.

As many people listening may know, and if you don't know, the mortality or immortality of fruits has been like a stick of rock.

It's run through all 29 series.

Can you imagine facing it?

If you were a fruit, you'd have to face, wouldn't you, the existential challenge of immortality?

To a Blackberry that has seen so much life and so much death and so many of its friends turned into jam.

Yeah.

I think

it would actually be a terrible tragedy to be an immortal Blackberry.

I think it would.

Brian has been very much looking forward to today's episode as there is nothing he likes more on a Sunday morning than popping on his Wellington boots, rolling up his sleeves and then watching his gardener clear the ivy off his statue of Tycho Brahe that's mounted in his rose garden while he sips a little montrchego you've left a bit near the nose.

Yeah and actually the nose is gold on my statue.

Yeah, solid gold.

Well we start with horticultural comedian Ed Verne.

finding out what really defines a plant from plant scientist Jane Langdale.

I think we can say that a plant is a multicellular organism that is in the lineage most closely related to green algae.

I'm surprised it's that complicated a definition, really.

What do you want to say?

Something that's alive that's not an animal.

No, I was going to say that.

It's not an animal.

It's not a vivo virus.

So it's not a fungus, it's not an animal.

Not a vivo virus, it's not an alive.

And the alive virus is animal.

It's not a fungus thing, it's a bit of a tricky one for me.

I always thought that a fungus was a plant, and now I've been told I'm an idiot.

They obviously covered that in third year.

I dropped out during second.

So if you're vegetarian, you shouldn't eat fungi.

That's exactly what I was thinking.

That means these mushroom soup-eaten vegetarians are hypocrites.

Fungi are more closely related to animals than they are to plants.

That's true, I think.

So the common ancestors.

So

we share a common ancestor with a fungus.

So the split between plants and us came before fungus and us.

Correct.

So, Ed, why do you.

Fungi, fungi, what's the correct term, actually?

Fungi, isn't it?

Fungi.

Fungi.

Is it fungi or fungi or fungi?

Depends on your

preference.

It depends on whether you're ordering an Italian pizza or not.

It depends on, you know, are you a plant or a plant?

I'm a plant.

He's obviously a plant.

Plant?

About nine minutes into that episode, Brian got antsy and started screaming, where's the physics?

Where's the physics?

Because physics is everything at the heart.

Well, it's the start of everything, I suppose.

Well, no, it's everything, ultimately, I suppose, isn't it?

No, but it's everything in a very simplified form.

You know, for real complexity, I think you need biology.

Yeah.

It really depends on your definition of complexity.

Agreed.

Anyway, we brought in Jim Alkali and Jane Langdale to consider the intelligence of grass and its quantum superpowers.

To have grass, for instance, described as a quantum computer, that suddenly you know changes a view of a garden in quite a general, it's quite a narcissistic quantum computer because it only has the one particular measurement it does, but still these

grass is a narcissistic quantum computer.

Well, it's not like what else are you going to find out?

Right, grass is that means what other questions are you going to throw into that quantum computer?

You've just found out it's just grass.

It just remains grass.

It's all got all that intelligence, so smart, could do all that quantum behaviour.

And what does it do?

It just remains growing.

Ridiculous.

It should use its quantum computing abilities for other things.

Like what?

Well, I don't know.

Finding out the kind of questions Jim's got in physics.

Some really hard stuff.

Grass.

You think your lawn should do physics?

Is that what you say?

And because it doesn't, it's a narcissist.

Well, I just think it's lazy.

It's lazy.

It's interesting, Jane, though, because Robin's prejudice against grass

reveals.

I've never gotten against it.

But it reveals that there is an idea that you just plants.

You know, we looked at the title of this, the monkey cage, and you say, well, plant, you know, they're complicated organisms, extremely complex, aren't they?

They are, and they've had to evolve quite intricate ways of being more plastic than we are, for example.

So, you know, if we get hit and knocked over and our arm gets taken off, it won't get put back on.

But if you take a branch off a tree or a plant, it'll just grow it again.

It's plastic.

It takes whatever the environment throws at it.

It can't run away and it just re-changes its growth program depending what's happening.

So if the light's coming from one side, it it grows towards it.

If the light's coming from above, it grows up.

If it senses gravity, if it's upside down, it will turn around and go the other way.

And it's actually what's very interesting about plants in that whole thing of phototropism

is that it turns.

I went out for a day with a guy called Tristan Gooley, who's known as the Natural Navigator.

He's a very interesting bloke, maybe you should have him on.

And what phototropism does, because in, say, in Britain, for instance, the sun is always just to the south, plants in general grow towards the south, and it turns every tree virtually into a compass.

If you ever can't find your way, you can see it's more thick, lush growth on one side.

It's quite handy.

You did learn something.

I did learn something.

My first novel is going to be called The Narcissism of Grass.

That has got Booker Prize written all over it.

Well, it will have Booker Prize written all over it because I'll go to all the bookshops and write it all over it to try and increase its sales.

Film's going to be great.

Starring Roger Mower.

Oh, Roger Mower.

Roger Mower.

I mean, you could have just made it simpler and just made it Patrick Mower.

Patrick Mower.

Who's actually name is Patrick Mower?

People remember from Emmerdale.

Wonderful actor and also certain episodes of The Sweeney.

But you're not here to hear this tittle-tattle because at the end of each episode, we always harvest the audience's opinion.

And on this occasion, we wanted to know which plants would you remove from the face of the earth and why.

It's a bit harsh, that.

It is a bit harsh.

Yeah.

Roses, the answer is

they are a shocking cliche, and no other flower has a chance on special occasions.

Robert Plant, why did you leave Led Zeppelin?

The

Echinacea to annoy homeopaths.

Yes!

That wouldn't annoy homeopaths because if it didn't exist anymore,

the increase in the nostalgia makes it more potent.

For almost a decade, one question hung heavy over Brian's head.

When is a strawberry really dead?

Once his gardener started working on his fruit patch, he started to fear that strawberries would never die.

But just as Brian worried that the strawberries would take over like deadly but delicious triffids, Phil Jupitus was fearful of another vegetative takeover.

Here he is with forensic botanist Mark Jones and ecologist Kate Jones.

It was a bit confusing that one, wasn't it?

Dr.

Jones?

Dr.

Jones?

Dr.

Jones.

Dr.

Jones.

Dr.

Jones me, Dr.

Jones.

Just thinking about looking around a typical garden, because there are certain things that we immediately might imagine we've mentioned before in the kind of intro things about Japanese knotweed and that kind of thing.

Strawberries.

Strawberries.

Indeed.

We know a lot about strawberries on this show.

We know, for example, that they were first bred in Brittany around 1750, across of a North American and Chilean species.

So much as a strawberry can be both alive and dead, which we've discussed at length on this show, a strawberry can be invasive or non-native and a linear combination of the two.

Well, the strawberry can be invasive, but in this particular case, it's not.

It's, as you say, derived from two non-native species.

But actually, the garden strawberry is quite a sedate plant.

It's never been known to go out and ravage the British landscape or to actually have its wicked way with our native wild strawberry, Fregaria vesca, which is a lovely wild plant, which is actually decreasing quite significantly in the UK, sadly.

I love that the image you created there initially of this kind kind of marauding strawberry plant there is like some kind of triffid invading Wimbledon during the final nights.

It's a lovely Phil you are someone who travels well around the world and is a perpetual touring comedian and poet.

Do you see yourself as an invasive species?

I see all comedians as invaders, basically culturally.

Spending a lot of time as I do now in Scotland, certainly the invasion of Edinburgh every August by thousands of them is something that is quite quite apparent to the locals.

What the comedians have done is they've cross-bred over the years

to provide a much more resilient strain lately.

And they'll gig everywhere, lofts, cellars.

It's very difficult to get rid of them.

Anyway,

my favourite invasive species, to tell the truth now, I like the grey squirrels.

Because I know that they wiped out the red ones, but I'm colourblind, so I didn't care anyway.

But they've they've got different kind of...

Their ears aren't the same either, though.

I mean, it's not the case of like watching snooker in black and white, the difference between squirrels.

There's structural differences, wouldn't you say?

Yeah, they're they're smaller.

The red squirrels is much smaller and they've got little cute tufts.

And the grey squirrels are like a gorgeous.

The narrative, the narrative, cute.

You had to say cute tufts.

Grey squirrels, madam, are gorgeous in their monochrome way.

Yeah, but they're they're vicious and you know, they've got carrion pots.

If you hold a peanut, hold a peanut at the top of your thigh in Greenwich Park.

What have you been doing in?

Outside of the leg, outside of the leg.

No, but not there.

You don't want to put them there.

For listeners at home, you don't know that accidentally the peanut mine became quite lewd.

Didn't they wipe out the red squirrels or reduce the numbers?

Was it a disease that they carried rather than?

Yeah, squirrel pox.

The grey squirrels have got this disease.

So they used to think they out-competed them for food, but actually they just wiped them out with a horrible disease.

In series 23, we asked the question, which is better?

Bats or flies?

Is it which are better or which is better?

Well, who are better?

We give them a white space.

We don't know about the who, because yet again, we still don't know if there is anything it is like to be a bat.

But that via echolocation.

Or ADHD, perhaps.

Yeah.

Well, we found ourselves on a tangent when entomologist Erica McAllister and Professor Kate Jones started arguing about mosquitoes and just how many it would take to kill you.

You've been under a mosquito net, haven't you?

Didn't you end up with a bat in your mouth or something?

Yeah, it was the bat that was trying to kill me, not the mosquitoes.

If the holes were big enough for a bat to get in, I didn't, it got in through the bit that you get out of, so I couldn't get out.

So it was protecting me from mosquitoes, but it didn't protect me from the bat.

I'm Kate Jones.

I'm professor of ecology and biodiversity at University College London.

And I guess if I had to say my favourite favourite fly,

I would probably go for the most dangerous animal on the planet, which is a mosquito.

It's not, it's not, you know, it's not.

I thought mosquitoes were the most dangerous animals.

They transmit, they're vectors, but a mosquito itself, she doesn't kill you.

So you can't blame her.

She's just being a mother, doing what she's put on the planet to do, and you're having a go at her.

She's being manipulated, full stop, by the fl you know, everything going on.

Those plasmodium, no one has a go at them.

It's not just plasmodium, is it though?

It's all the other things that take advantage of her.

She's obviously like dengue fever, chicken gunya.

I know

it's for a virus, but you know, a few things, a few things.

But mosquitoes do a lot of good as well.

Seeker, and she's it's not her fault.

No one cares about this.

I'm worried about this with fleas as well, because more fleas die during the plague than humans.

Again,

I say, no one cares about that.

And these sort of things, you know.

This is a fascinating thing to see entomology playing the victim card, which I've just.

Well, I worked out if you, if you, like, the only way a mosquito could kill you personally is to exanguinate you, so drain you of blood.

Now, it would take about 414,000 mosquitoes in one feeding event to drain you of blood enough for you to die.

And we physically don't have that much skin.

Let's not forget that one of the good things mosquitoes do is to pollinate plants.

And in fact, we learned that they're the most important pollinators of cacao.

So remember that next time you eat a bar of chocolate.

It's an interesting mosquito thing.

Again, so often as human beings, we view certain creatures as being a hindrance or being an annoyance.

And then you actually go, well, if they were removed from life on Earth, then suddenly there's no Mars bars for you.

Yeah, and this episode was a battle between bats and flies, the other big pollinators.

And Erica went on to sing the praises of flies.

She does love flies.

There's a lot of flies that only give birth to one young at a time.

And these flies are found on bats.

Are they?

Yeah.

Yeah, no, that's why I met Susie, because we were checking out for flies on bats.

Who's Susie?

My little fruit bat from.

Oh, I see.

And honestly, you don't pay attention.

No, I do.

But

it's such a pity because suddenly there was common ground and then

she blew it.

It's the perfect second reel of the movie.

Hey, they're getting on.

Oh, no, in this Mills and Boone romance, they've fallen apart again.

These are wingless flies living on bats.

And they give birth to one.

They give birth to live young, so the flies themselves get pregnant.

Wow.

Yeah, they've got internal lactating glands.

What?

Tits on the inside.

And they will nurture.

I don't know if I'm allowed to stay there for radio 4.

Yeah,

just say it.

Also, if that is not going to be sampled within the next year by someone, a tits on the inside is undoubtedly it might not be a Christmas number one but I could see it being an Easter number five.

So

the life cycle of the bat flight, what's it called, by the way?

There's two fam well we're arguing because we may sink them into one family, but there's the Nick Terrobeards and the Strebs, Streblidae.

And they

most of them, if they've got wings, they won't have them for long.

Some, arguably the weirdest bat, weirdest fly I think I know of one is that when she gets pregnant, she then sticks her head in the side of the bat and she rips off her wings and her legs, and then she basically invaginates her abdomen over her body.

So she looks like an inverted pear

just looks really weird.

But yeah, and she will then give birth to maybe four or five young.

These flies,

their offspring, is like 40% of their body weight.

That's true for bats too, actually.

We have common ground.

We've got do right a paper on this.

One of the things that's very important to know if you ever meet Erica McAllister is she hates the term creepy crawly, but she will then tell you the creepiest and crawliest stories about flies and in particular maggots.

Right, actually, I know I can't tell this story, it's quite annoying.

All I can say is that the end of the story, she went, and weirdly, the man didn't do anything about it until the maggots were moving around inside the sack.

That's all I'm going to say.

Vivid.

Yeah.

In the next episode, we'll be looking at extraterrestrial life.

We don't know there is any, of course, so it'll be a very short episode.

No, we're going to be looking.

So it's going to be a very long episode.

Looking forward.

It's going to be quite the opposite.

We're going to be looking for extraterrestrial life, so that could go on for an eternity.

Or, well, not an eternity, at least till the heat death of the universe.

Yeah.

I mean, I presume the heat death of the universe is going to be the end of life, isn't it?

That's very, very accurate.

Yeah.

Well done.

You've read it.

So there we are.

Next week, Aliens.

Yeah.

The Infinite Monkey's Guide to Aliens.

all the episodes we took clips from are available on BBC Sounds and you can find all the details of those in the programme description for this show in the infinite monkey cage

Till now nice again

Hello, my name's Greg Jenner.

I am the host of You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy show that takes history seriously and then laughs at it.

And I just wanted to say that if you like laughing, if you like learning, if you like history, or if you hated history at school, well, we are the show for you.

Yes, every episode I pair up a top historian with a fantastic comedian, and we have a lovely, funny, fascinating chat about a different subject from world history.

We do stuff you did at school, and we do stuff you've never even heard of.

So if that sounds like fun, you can check out our back catalogue and our new series on BBC Sounds.

Just type in you're dead to me and hit subscribe.

Thank you.

Bye.

Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.

Each week, I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past.

In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed, from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg brothers.

Listen to You're Dead to Me Now, wherever you get your podcasts.