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RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2013: Digging up your own food is 'far out', says Ringo Starr
What is a former-Beatle doing, year in year out, at a gardening show? It was the burning question Catalina Stogdon had to ask Ringo Starr, when she met him at the Chelsea Flower Show.
"I used to come to have a look around the gardens, but now I can come and be of some use," he tells me.
He is supporting the Herbert Smith Freehills garden for WaterAid – the charity which ensures that clean water is available to those who most need it in the world. The theme this year was India, so Ringo, nodding back to his earlier Maharishi days perhaps, donned the obligatory garland.
I was expecting him to be taciturn and provide one-word answers to every question – he rarely seems to give interviews these days – but the very opposite was true. He was relaxed and chatty and does not look anywhere near his 72 years of age. He is still the cheeky chappie it seems, who revealed to me that with gardening: "if you look at beautiful things, you get into a beautiful mood."
No more the thrills of his crazed Rock and Roll days with the Beatles. Now, he tells me, that his first "gardening thrill" was digging up his very first potatoes at the first house he bought, "with acreage" back in 1965.
"Where I came from," he says, "we didn't have a garden. When we dug up that first potato it was one of those memories you never forget," he says.
"You have dug up your own food – it's far out."
He admitted to not being a big gardener himself, but "big at talking to my gardeners".
Do you think plants grow better with music played to them? I asked him. "I do. I have been known to talk to them, but I wouldn't get mydrums out to play to them!" I have heard of a report that claimed that plants grew better to heavy metal music. "You would think that they would shrink away," says Ringo.
Returning to the potato theme, I thought that if there was a time and a place to ask him this, than it now or never: "If you were a vegetable, what would you be?"
"We'll, I love potatoes," he says.
"And Paul McCartney (with whom he is said to be on good terms now, but relations have been certainly strained in the past)?"
"Oh, he would definitely be something exotic".