The Flower Fields

There's a gold rush in Cornwall; it's been going on for over a century - producing the first flowers of spring, daffodils especially.

Like mining, it's marked the landscape, and there are networks of tiny fields west of Mousehole and in the Isles of Scilly. Smaller than tennis courts, they nestle, safe from the wind between high hedges, warm on south facing terraced cliffs. From these old flower fields, called quillets, came something even more valuable than the 'Golden Harvest' of early blooming daffodils - delicate Cornish violets, carnations and anemones. From Victorian times to the 1960s fragrant bunches of these sped overnight by
rail to reach the morning London markets.

Michael Bird - who lives in St Ives - listens while Bill Harvey works the plots his father tended. They are too small to admit machines and depend on the long-handled Cornish shovel. At Churchtown Farm on St Martins in the Scillies, Keith Low explains how the fields were created.

Michael walks the cliff gardens with the archaeologist Graeme Kirkham, who interprets the landscape they pass through, including the industry's mysterious skills and traditions. And he meets Bob Paterson at London’s Covent Garden market who remembers selling the violets and anemones that came on the Penzance trains, and hopes he might again.

Producer: Julian May

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in October 2012.