Speaking Part 2 · PeopleIn the Sep–Dec 2026 reported set
Describe a Person You Know Who Likes to Grow Plants
In short
“Describe a Person You Know Who Likes to Grow Plants” is a common IELTS Speaking Part 2 cue card. You get 1 minute to prepare and should speak for 1–2 minutes, covering all four points below. This page gives you a Band 9 model answer, an idea map so you can make it your own, the Part 3 follow-up questions with answers, and the vocabulary examiners reward.
The task card
Describe a Person You Know Who Likes to Grow Plants. You should say:
- •Who this person is
- •What they grow
- •How they learned to do it
- •And explain why you think they enjoy it
Band 9 model answer
The person I'd like to talk about is my landlady, Mrs Oyelaran, who lives in the flat below mine and has turned what was a fairly grim strip of concrete behind our building into something genuinely remarkable. She's in her late seventies and she's out there most mornings before I've even had coffee.
What she grows is a bit of everything, which is part of what makes it interesting. There's a proper vegetable section — tomatoes, peppers, runner beans up canes, and a lot of herbs I couldn't name. Then there are the things she grows purely because she likes them: roses along the back wall, and this enormous fig tree in a pot that she insists shouldn't survive our winters and somehow does. And she grows a fair amount of scotch bonnet chillies, which she gives away to half the street and which are, I can confirm, considerably stronger than they look.
She learned it entirely from her mother, growing up in Nigeria, where she says every household grew at least something because it would have been strange not to. But she's had to relearn most of it here, because almost nothing she knew transferred — different soil, a completely different climate, a growing season about half as long. She told me she killed everything for three years running before she worked it out, which I found oddly reassuring. These days she also watches an alarming number of gardening videos, which she has strong opinions about.
As for why she enjoys it, I think there are a few layers to it. The obvious one is the produce — she genuinely eats out of that garden for a good part of the year, and given what vegetables cost now, that isn't nothing. But I don't think that's the real reason.
The reason I'd give is that it gives her a stake in the future. She said something once that has stuck with me: at her age, most things are about maintaining what you've already got, but a seed is a small bet that you'll be around to see it come up. She plants bulbs in October for March. I think that matters more to her than she would ever admit out loud.
And it's made her the centre of a small community, almost by accident. People stop and talk to her over the fence, she hands out surplus tomatoes, the children from the ground floor flat have their own little plot that she supervises. For someone who lives alone, that's a lot of daily human contact that she has essentially grown for herself.
Make it your own: three angles
An older relative or neighbour with a garden
The most natural fit, and it lets you talk about learning passed down through a family — good for past tenses and for the "how they learned" bullet.
A friend who keeps houseplants
Perfectly valid if you have no gardeners around you. Focus on the care routine and what they get out of it rather than the scale.
Someone who grows food to save money or eat better
Opens a strong practical angle and connects directly to the Part 3 questions about food and self-sufficiency.
What the examiner is listening for
The 'why they enjoy it' bullet is where the band is decided, and the obvious answers — it's relaxing, it's healthy — are worth very little. The model gives a genuinely specific reason (a stake in the future) and an unintended one (community), which is exactly the kind of developed reasoning Part 3 will then demand. Present simple for habits, past simple for how they learned, and plenty of concrete nouns.
Part 1 warm-up questions
- Are there many plants in your home?
- Did anyone in your family grow vegetables when you were young?
- Would you like to have a garden?
- Do people in your country enjoy gardening?
Part 3 follow-up questions & answers
Why do people enjoy gardening?
I think it offers a few things that are genuinely hard to find elsewhere. It's physical but unhurried, which is unusual. It gives you visible results over weeks and months rather than minutes, so it rewards patience in a way most modern activity doesn't. And there's a control element — you can't do much about the world, but you can decide what happens in four square metres of it, and I think that's quietly satisfying.
Is it important for children to learn where food comes from?
I'd say it's genuinely important, because a lot of children now have no mental link between a carrot and soil at all — food arrives in packaging and that's the whole story. Growing even one thing changes that: you learn that food takes months, that some of it fails, and that it's seasonal. That tends to make people both less wasteful and a bit more willing to eat vegetables.
Should cities have more green spaces?
Almost certainly. Beyond the obvious pleasantness, they do real work — they cool cities down in heatwaves, absorb rainfall that would otherwise flood the drains, and there's solid evidence linking access to green space with better mental health. The difficulty is that land in cities is enormously valuable, so parks are usually the first thing sacrificed to housing, and that's a short-term trade that cities tend to regret.
Do you think growing your own food is practical for most people?
For most people it's a supplement, not a solution. Unless you have real space and real time, you might grow herbs and a few tomatoes, which is genuinely worthwhile but isn't going to feed you. What I think is underrated is the community garden model, where a shared plot makes it viable for people with a balcony and no more — that scales in a way individual gardening doesn't.
Has interest in gardening changed in recent years?
It's risen noticeably, and the lockdowns were clearly a turning point — a lot of people discovered it when there was nothing else to do and then stayed with it. Cost has played a part too, with food prices where they are. What's changed most is who does it: it used to be seen as something for retired people, and now there's a large group of younger people doing it on balconies and windowsills.
Why do some people find caring for plants difficult?
Usually because the feedback is so slow. If you overwater something it doesn't complain for two weeks, by which point you've no idea what you did wrong, so people never learn the connection. It also requires consistency rather than effort — most plants die from three weeks of neglect, not from anything dramatic — and consistency is much harder than enthusiasm.
How does contact with nature affect people?
The research is reasonably convincing: time in green space lowers stress markers and improves mood, and even a view of trees seems to help. My own sense is that a lot of it is about attention — nature asks nothing of you, which is rare, and lets your mind settle in a way a screen never does. Whether that's the nature itself or simply the absence of demands, I couldn't really say.
Useful vocabulary
| Word / phrase | Meaning |
|---|---|
| to have green fingers | to be naturally good at growing plants |
| to take root | to start growing; to become established |
| a plot | a small piece of land for growing things |
| the growing season | the part of the year when plants grow |
| homegrown | grown at home rather than bought |
| to thrive | to grow strongly and healthily |
| to tend to something | to look after it regularly |
| surplus | more than you need |
| self-sufficient | able to provide for yourself |
| to bear fruit | to produce fruit; to produce results |
More cue cards
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