Marnie Chesterton

A cherry tree...

will usually live to about 40 years.

There are some things that are just short-lived.

You know, plants sometimes live for a year and that's their actual lifespan.

So I will give our listener Liz one final word of comfort, which is that in the Royal Botanic Gardens queue, home of some of the most amazing plant scientists in the world, and these people can...

do these amazing feats of plant breeding.

And I said, have you ever killed anything?

And one of the guys looked at me and he says, the secret is that in order to learn how to grow any species, we have killed that species at least twice.

Thank you, Liz, so much for the question.

And thank you, Dr. Naomi Fraga, for the answer.

Listeners, have you got a question?

Is there anything that we can help you out with?

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Just text it or speak it to plus44 330 678 3080.

Now, we started this science show with the news that the king of mangoes, the Alfonso, has been devastated in India by a weather phenomenon called El Nino.

And we haven't really had a chance to dig into that, which I can do now with the help of the BBC's audio archives.

So according to the UN this week, the poor mango season was just the beginning.

A new phase of the El Nino weather pattern could begin in a matter of weeks.

But how does an El Nino start?

From the BBC World Service's Inside Science last week, here's Amanda Maycock, a climatologist from Leeds University, with the beginnings.