Gardeners! Yes you! We have a fundamental role in the future of the UK’s biodiversity, health, society and economy according to a seminal report by the Royal Horticultural Society.
The inaugural RHS State of Gardening Report published in October, makes startling reading. It points to the value of gardening to the UK’s GDP (£38bn) and several other heavyweight figures (collected from numerous sources, this is not the RHS marking its own homework), but just below these, is stuff that will make you want to redouble your gardening efforts in 2026.
Well over half of all UK adults (34 million)
Gardens are vital for wildlife
The report tells us that gardens cover 4.6% of Great Britains’ land area – over three times the size of all National Nature Reserves and support over 50 million trees and thousands of species. They provide habitat for over 40% of both bird species and mammals and more than half of butterfly, amphibian and reptile species.
While the latter’s fortunes have remained constant over the last 20 years and those of most bird species has improved thanks to our efforts, mammals such as voles and hedgehogs and butterflies show a less rosy picture (we need to try especially hard for these groups in future.)
Generally gardeners are proving fantastic custodians of vital ecosystems, however, there are issues…
Seek out the rare and unusual
Plant diversity is critical for human health, biodiversity and climate resilience but around one in three cultivated plants is under threat, and around one in six is endangered. I take this to mean these days we are growing too much of the same things ie what centralised suppliers offer us en masse (Lesson for me here: Laura’s weird plant choices are actually a positive thing. Turns out we should be growing a wider variety of plants.)
But there are other threats to plant diversity such as climate change,
Try harder with water and skills
We’re getting better at gardening sustainably – buying peat-free compost and recycling plastic pots etc, and lots of us are introducing wildlife-friendly elements to our gardens and contributing to surveys (like the RSPB’s
Community gardens are great!
The report pays particular attention to community gardens. Currently 8.5 million people have never gardened, with children and adults from lower-income households disproportionately excluded. That’s a crying shame.
Community gardening can be a real game-changer here, proven to make neighbourhoods cleaner, greener and often safer, as well as providing pollinator havens in urban areas, but funding and committed volunteers are in short supply. Could you get involved in an initiative in your area? Could it be your New Year’s Resolution?
In conclusion
So please let’s speak up for the inclusion of
This report has so many more practical insights – not least the need to properly record the activities of gardeners, because we’re far more important than most of us would have thought.
Hats off to the RHS for producing this excellent piece of work, and for committing to updating it every three years.
Never again feel guilty about an afternoon spent in the
You’ll find the full report here: https://www.rhs.org.uk/about-us/what-we-do/rhs-state-of-gardening
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3 replies on “Gardening for a better Britain”
Thankyou Caroline for sharing all that with us – it really does highlight how important we are as individual Jo Bloggs gardeners – we really are GARDENERS and important ones at that! There is so much that goes on in a garden whether you tend to it or not re wildlife and self-seeding etc it’s a constant provider for nature and I know that my life would be a sadder and duller one without it. Well done RHS, well done all garden space custodians, we’re doing our bit to save the world!
Yve thank you so much. I completely agree. Reading that report had quite an impact on me (Caroline here). Im not a gardener in the same sense as my sisters, but it made me realise that by just growing stuff and pottering out to my bird feeders, following advice on leaving wild areas and a stack of old timber etc, I am in fact contributing to a huge difference for other species on the planet. Like you, I found it very motivating. Thank you very much, I agree with everything you say. Ever onward! XX
I’m a lazy gardener (78 now) and an organic gardener by default! I don’t spray , through laziness and I’ve given up slug pellets cos I wanted a hedgehog in my garden. ( Never came about) I’m a plantaholic, but a lot of my plants die through my not planting them soon enough. However, I got my gardener to form a fedge after cutting down lots of overgrown bushes, this provides passage for any visiting foxes ( seen intermittently) or hedgehogs, provides shelter for lots of things and saves landfill. I do regularly feed the birds and have blue tits, great tits, coal tits, robins, blackbirds, starlings, house sparrows, dunnocks, gold finches, wood and feral pigeons, and magpies visiting daily, with great spotted woodpecker, green parakeets, sparrow hawk, long tailed tits , wren and young gold crest visiting occasionally. So I am doing some good for the environment!
Please stress not to use neonicotinides and to check on sprays in your sheds. Bayer are trying again to get the ban removed. Please sign any petitions against this!