Organic Gardening Magazine

Your complete guide to gardening - naturally!

Time for climate questions?

John Walker joins a Gardeners' Question Time recording to pop questions to our top gardening ‘experts’ about carbon footprints and climate change - but did he get any answers? Pictures: John Walker

Inspiration is a powerful thing. Chances are it’s the very reason you’re now going about your gardening in an earth-friendly, organic way, and why you read this magazine. Inspiration comes from many sources. It might be a book or article you read, something you watch on TV, or see online, or hear on the radio. We gardening folk frequently get it from each other, simply by having a mooch around one another’s plots.

Inspiration can motivate and stimulate us, offer us a different way of looking at the world, even provide the answer to a nagging question. It can give us ideas we can adapt and shape for ourselves, and be powerfully enabling. But for any of this to happen, we first need to be inspired.

In April, with the help of a friend, I decided to conduct an unscientific experiment, through asking questions based on an increasingly worrying branch of science – that looking at global climate change. The experiment took place in a community centre in North Wales, in the company of 200 or so fellow gardeners and a clutch of the nation’s top gardening ‘experts’. The catalyst for the experiment was a recording of BBC Radio 4’s ‘Gardeners’ Question Time’.

GQT is broadcast on Sundays at 2pm (and repeated on Wednesdays).

Our GQT panel comprised landscaper John Cushnie, plant pathologist Pippa Greenwood, and garden designer Bunny Guinness (substituting for Chris Beardshaw), with Eric Robson chairing. It is a slick operation.

The professionalism shown by the panel, the chairman and the production team was impressive. Getting that seamless 45 minutes of gardening wisdom on to the air each week is no mean feat, and sitting before an audience, with no inkling of the questions to come, requires gutsiness.

Then came the nerve-racking bit for the audience, as the authors of the selected questions were summoned. Hearts thumped. Would it be either of us? In the end it wasn’t, though we had followed the guidelines to the letter, avoiding slugs, snails, vine weevils, ants, how to get wisteria to flower…

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