Horticulture legend and nature gardening innovator Chris Baines on rewilding, biodiversity, bird feeding and parks

Horticulture Week Podcast

Chris Baines is one of the UK’s leading independent environmentalists and an award-winning writer and broadcaster.

A trained horticulturist and landscape architect, he spent some years practising and teaching landscape design but has spent most of his career a professional adviser to Government and other bodies including the National Trust, National Grid and energy regulator Ofgem.

Fornerly a presenter of BBC Countryfile, his 1986 film Blue Tits and Bumblebees is often credited with starting the trend towards gardening with nature.

Back in 1979 Baines bucked the trend in a chemical-driven gardening decade and created a "rich habitat garden" for Gardeners World. "At that stage, I just remember vividly...Peter [Seabrook] looking at me and saying..'you really think Britain's gardeners are going to be interested in that?' It was a supreme put down, really. And then they were absolutely avalanched with requests for the leaflet that I'd produced about how to create a rich habitat garden."

With his best-selling book How to Make a Wildlife Garden continuously in print for almost 40 years, a new expanded edition was published in 2023 as an RHS classic, he reflects on where nature gardening and rewilding is today.

His new book RHS Companion to Wildlife Gardening updated edition is out now.

With Biodiversity Net Gain now in legislation, Baines shares his concerns: "If the outcome of the new legislation is that more creative partnership with the Wildlife Trust and others managing the investment that's required from the developers, that would be brilliant...If it finishes up with just little patches of trees planted on, in many cases, landscape, which is rather more valuable without its trees for wildlife than it will be with trees on it, then that will be a wasted opportunity. But I'm eternally optimistic."

He discusses the pros and cons of bird feeding and the prospects for and importance of local parks in this election year.

"It's wonderful to have national parks out in the countryside, but actually most people most of the time need access to green space right where they live and work. And we need to take that much more seriously because neglect and lack of safety in those spaces puts people off going there."

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