HortWeek Podcast

Trees, arguably, have never been so popular and Sarah Lom, chief executive of the Tree Council is enjoying their moment in the sun.

Applications to the Tree Council's small grants fund [under £500] have doubled in the last 12 months. National Tree Week at the end of 2023 reached an estimated 30 million people and a schools programme is helping engage younger people, helping ease their 'eco-anxiety' along the way:

"We even got to deliver a lesson at Number 10 [Downing Street] ...which was a fabulous opportunity for the pupils to see the garden there, the beautiful London plane trees."

Tree Council relies upon a network of volunteer tree wardens around the UK, has a £2m program funding108 different projects with Network Rail.

The organisation encourages community groups to use local or their own nurseries for a supply of "bio-secure trees". And this community activity may have more benefits than one might imagine:

"There is evidence that trees planted with love and care do better. We're five years into a hedge planting trial with Network Rail at Hadley Wood in North London...and five years in, the hedges planted by the volunteers are four meters tall and have 96% survival rate, whereas those planted by the contractors are two meters tall - that's half - and a 64% survival rate," all of which is a boon to the well-documented benefits of trees - pollution mitigation, urban cooling, flood mitigation, well-being uplift and so on. A full report on the findings is to be produced in due course.

But climate change and changes to previously dependable seasonal patterns has led her to wonder whether National Tree Week (which encourages people to plant trees in their communities), shoudl be made later.

"The warmer autumns means the trees become dormant later, the early spring brings them back to life sooner."

As concern grows over the UK's ability to meet Government tree planting targets, Lom says: "They didn't meet their targets, but the good news is that the nation did plant 40% more trees last season than they did the season before. And the aim is that will escalate year on year on year, but it takes time and everyone has to play their part. I know when I've spoken to nursery, they've said, we need time to be able to generate the stock."

As local authorities wrestle with extreme pressure on council budgets Lom insists that having a tree strategy should be a priority:

On plans for 2024 Lom says the schools programme will continue, tree survival studies and work with DEFRA looking at establishing a methodology for tree survival and tree establishment will all figure.

Tree Council is also collaborating with Oxford University on a mistletoe mapping project, a keystone species with complex interactions with trees.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Youth Environmental Service, which is backed by the National Heritage Lottery Fund, has won backing for a 'national service' for the environment.

Dubbed a "green jobs guarantee" for a post-secondary school-age young people. Programme director Billy Knowles explains:

"The Youth Environmental Service is an organisation that we set up with the idea that what would happen if every young person had the opportunity to do a year of paid environmental work.

"It's a great way to give something back, it's a great way to develop skills, and it's a great way to build connections to all of the other young people who are also worrying about the same problems [climate change, nature degradation and biodiversity collapse].

After more than two and half years of campaigning, delegates at a Royal Parks Guild Annual Discovery Day voted 48-6 in favour of the idea of a green jobs guarantee.

Knowles acknowledged some do not like the idea of national service because they think it would be mandatory, but he said it would be volunteer-based and would pay living wage for a year's work. The first pilot New To Nature pilot helped 97 young people into work and a new pilot will focus on the North West.

One of horticulture's key challenges, Billy says, is improving access and diversity:

"Sometimes we aren't sensitive enough to the variety of different needs and challenges there might be. A great example of this is physical access. If you're a young person who's grown up living in a city, and you might come from a sort of socioeconomically disadvantaged background, parents haven't got a huge amount of money to spend there, you might not have your access to your own form of transport, you might be used to taking public transport. How are you then going to go out and work in a sort of fairly rural role and an opportunity that would be fantastic otherwise, but you just can't physically get to?"

The scheme aims to create "10,000 paid opportunities per year for young people working across nature, net zero and circular economy organisations and the Labour Party has already shown support for the plan. But Billy says "neither party has any real clear idea on how they're going to do that. What we offer is the answer to that question, how you create those green jobs and you start building that workforce.

"The policy isn't to fund every single one of the 10,000 jobs, it's to fund a small number and to create the framework around which other organisations are able to create their own.

"We're not building something that we want to last for two years, we want this to last for 50 years, and so what we need to do is have a really strong base and a strong foundation from which we can do that. And we need champions within parliament. We need champions within the civil service who can help us make that happen."

Find out more at www.youthenvironmentalservice.co.uk.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lee Stiles, Lea Valley Growers' Association secretary, has been outspoken about the state of the UK protected salads sector, which saw market failure in 2023, with empty supermarket shelves and reduction in UK production.

Stiles sees energy, labour and prices as the big three problems facing UK tomato and cucumber growers. Until recent years energy and labour were more controllable, he says, but those factors have fallen away and now "price is king", regardless of anything else. Government policies seem to work against each other in areas such as labour, though Defra strives to do the right thing.

With an increasingly high profile in the media, he has not had to pitch a story for two years. The media wants to know what is happening on the ground rather than what the BRC, supermarkets or the Government is saying, so Stiles gets daily calls from around the world.

And on the ground, he predicts there could be more empty shelves this year due to ongoing issues in Europe and North Africa with viruses and market prices. One certainty, he says, is that production volumes from British growers have not increased: "There will be a gap. Retailers will either pay more or have empty shelves."

But he adds that there is a fine line between warning about problems and "spooking" the retailers and the public: "UK growers are stable now after two years of decline and small business closure." He says the is the same as in Europe. Few can invest in new machinery and are just concentrating on keeping their heads above water.

Government help for smaller producers has been too little too late and any help "avoids the underlying problem of low prices". Meanwhile primary producers are not making money he says, intermediaries deal with the retailer, so loyalty and service standards matter less:

"We're 10 years into a supermarket price wa and it seems to be getting worse. There's not enough profit in the supply chain at the moment which means the trend for British producers closing will accelerate, reducing self-sufficiency and food security."

He would like to see loss leader legislation to stop retailers selling at less than the cost of purchase. It is used to protect producers in France, Canada and Germany, for instance.

But regardless, Lee says, whoever comes in next politically, "will inherit quite a mess".

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Melanie Asker was recently promoted to managing director of Greenwood Plants, supplier to new-build property sector, but increasingly, commercial work and infrastructure.

Listed at no 27 in HortWeek's Top 100 Ornamentals Nurseries ranking, the nursery grows "pretty much everything you can think of" but, a 'G' range comprising the "top 350 plants across most of our orders".

2022 was a record-breaking year for the grower, a year when it changed from an owner-led firm and introduced a management team, developed a new business strategy, a 5-year growth plan and brought sustainability "to the fore of all our corporate values and all we wanted to achieve".

While nurseries and garden retailers continue to wrestle with the prospect of going peat-free, Greenwood Plants made an early decision to get ahead of the curve and has plans to be 100% peat free by the end of 2023:

"It's progressing really well. It's got its challenges, I'm going to be totally candid about that. It was a really big decision for the business - we debated it really heavily at the start of last year... We decided we needed to be completely committed to it for it to work so we had to jump in with both feet which is what we've done."

"It sounds like the change is all about the growing media... but the bigger change is about how we cultivate and grow our plants, that's where the real, resetting of the mindset comes in and that's what we're going through at the moment." With ericaceous and other plants that struggle with peat-free compost, "we just have to tackle them one by one", she says.

She also reflects on the move to peat-free in the context of the general horticulture sector, clients, the supply chain and the wider marketplace.

• Watch HortWeekTV's Peat debate which explores all sides of the argument here

Greenwood was named "Sustainable Business of 2022" by the Central South Business Awards, largely down to Greenwood's comprehensive and ambitious sustainability plan which incorporates water efficiency, recycling, peat-free, community 'payback', energy efficiency and renewables, plastic reduction and sustainable packaging.

The nursery has also placed a greater focus on biodiversity benefits lately and in a fast-changing world, the nursery endeavours to "keep abreast of everything from a topical and trend perspective" maintains "as open lines of communication as possible" with clients to help them do that.

Melanie outlines other business initiatives including "Greenwood Choice" sales and collection outlet and speaks about her enthusiastic involvement as a founding member of Women in Horticulture which aims to provide networking opportunities for women in the industry and share ideas.

And finally, she has to make her choice, from a very wide selection, of her Desert Island Plant.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Roisin Wilson is business development director at HSK Gardening and Leisure, which is a specialist importer of 'Jurassic' plants from the Antipodes, specifically Dicksonia antarctica tree ferns from Australia.

It is a tightly regulated activity, but Roisin explains that the tree ferns it imports from Tasmania are 'rescue' tree ferns that might be otherwise cast aside by loggers.

Big plans are afoot at HSK and Roisin talks about the recent rebrand of the company and a shift towards "concept gardens" which takes inspiration from IKEA's approach to retail providing a "garden in a box" providing "instant impact, instant garden".

These 'Jurassic' concepts will be retailed through independent garden centres and bigger chains, with a focus on educating them on the concept, how it works and how to sell it. Roisin feels it is an "untapped market" and the ideal way to reach reluctant and perhaps younger customers - "the gardeners of the future".

She also believes there are opportunities to access new markets in Europe "and what was really interesting when I was at [IPM] Essen [in January 2025], there were no tree ferns, no big trees. There was one stand that had two tree ferns, but other than that, there were no tree ferns anywhere. And that was really, for me, that was quite

striking."

HSK is also adding more species and took in its first shipment of Dicksonia squarrosa from New Zealand in Janaury 2025: "We are currently growing them on and probably will do a release of those in the summer once we know that they are all you know very very happy and growing beautifully in this country."

As a relative newcomer to horticulture, Roisin gives her perspective on the sector. Upsides include the people-focus of the sector. But she highlights the need to promote women and encourage and develop young people and she celebrates the work of the YPHA in doing just that.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.