The fashion designer on the busiest day of the week – and not owning a TV

What time are you up? The alarm goes off at 7am, as it does all week. If anything, Sunday is a busier day than normal. I’ll check the plants on the terrace and make a coffee, then I’ve got to make soup to feed the team at lunchtime: last week. it was French onion with ice-cream for afters.

So you work? I’ve just got myself into the habit. It would be good for me not to work so much. Friends say I should go out more. I love to walk around the Isabella Plantation in Richmond Park and visit the V&A for tea and an exhibition.

What were Sundays like growing up? I’d walk to my granny’s in these wonderful colourful clothes my mother made me, but I’d have to run when I passed through the park as other children threw stones at me for looking different. I’d sit by her side all afternoon as we chatted, and learn to knit mittens.

Do you shop? I potter around the garden centre. I like to find new herbs, and see what tips I can pick up. My terrace is my pride and joy. I love to sit among the camellia trees and hydrangeas, the ferns, roses, palms and lilies.

Your favourite Sunday? Watching the sunset surrounded by candles at our place in San Diego. I still have it, but it’s being packed up now that my partner [Salah Hassanein] has died.

Have Sundays changed since then? They did a while ago – he was bed-ridden for the last year-and-a-half of his life. We used to entertain together on Sunday nights. Now it’s just me. Sometimes friends take me to the pictures. There’s a complex I like in Canada Water. I sit in the front row, I love to soak it all up. Salah was a president at Warner Brothers – the man behind the multiplex cinema.

Do you watch telly? I don’t have one, we never had time, although it might happen sometime soon.

Zandra Rhodes: 50 Years of Fabulous is at the Fashion and Textile Museum, London SE1 until 26 January