16
Examination of witnesses
Lilidh Matthews, Tayshan Hayden-Smith and Lee Connelly.
Q127 The Chair: Good morning, and thank you very much for coming today. We met a couple of you in Islington a while back, but it is great that you can actually join us in the House of Lords. In answering the first question, would you say who you are and what your experience in gardening is? The question is: why should young people get involved in gardening and horticulture?
Lilidh Matthews: Thank you for the question and thank you for this opportunity. I have worked throughout all different parts of horticulture. I worked in viticulture, fresh produce and cut flowers, but my main focus has been ornamentals.
I am here representing the Young People in Horticulture Association, which started in January 2020 when Natalie Porter and Mollie Higginson were at a conference where the presentation left them a bit nervous for the future. A lot of assumptions rested on the fact that people age into gardening. As digital natives, they were concerned about the fact that there are a lot of decades in between. Those reaching gardening age would be the generation that had had more screen time than green time, so there would be no nostalgic memories to reactivate in later years. With that age gap, they then recruited, and went from three people to now almost 500 members, under-35s in horticulture. The organisation is really about progressing horticulture and preparing the industry for necessary changes, particularly for the new type of customer and the new workforce we need. The initial group made massive changes, uniting the voices of people in horticulture. That is our space; it is where we are.
In terms of why people should work in horticulture, get involved in gardening and so on, we asked our members for the top reasons why they work in horticulture. They came back with three main answers: people, plants and environment. Actually, we had two other answers: mental well-being and mental health, and, if you combine those, they far surpass every other answer. There are a lot of future solutions. By investing in these young people, you invest in future solutions to future problems for the country, not just in the environment but in health. That is why people should work and get involved in gardening and horticulture.
Tayshan Hayden-Smith: I was born and raised in Ladbroke Grove, North Kensington. I am here today and in the horticulture industry, because when the Grenfell Tower fire happened I lived just beneath it and took to the streets in frustration, anger and sadness to seek solace and understanding. People were obviously very sad and angry. Side by side with one another, we expressed ourselves creatively. Some people chose art. I stumbled across a barren, derelict bit of land, a raised bed owned by the council. It was unloved and did not look like something I could feel proud of. I started to do a bit of litter picking. That slowly became turning it into a beautiful garden. We planted seeds of hope post Grenfell through guerrilla gardening.
I do not really know what brought me to that garden or why I started to put my hands in the soil and get stuck in, but at that point I experienced the healing and unifying powers of nature, which I am now a massive advocate for. I did two or three years of guerrilla gardening in the community, where we took over five different spaces in Ladbroke Grove. Previously, I played football, and when my footballer friends walked past the garden I was a bit ashamed and embarrassed. They did not really know why I was in a garden, wearing gardening boots, not football boots. I asked myself why I felt ashamed and embarrassed, and why this was not something taught at school or something that I was ever exposed to. That inspired me to set up a non-profit called Grow2Know, which I hope is a vehicle where we can implement change through physical space.
There are two branches to what we do. One is educational, partnering to deliver workshops, programmes, events, lectures and talks and, in any way we can, build bridges and connect people and partners. Wherever it is, we really want to bring people to the same table. We also work in garden design: how we can look at space and, through place-making and place-keeping, turn ideas into reality. I have two young children so the future is very important to me, as it should be to everyone. The reason why I think it is important that we bring young people into horticulture is that we do not quite realise the opportunities of the horticultural industry. In other industries, some of it is all about profit and how it can generate income. This is a really good opportunity to educate and to think about profit, people and planet all at the same time. I have a very big interest in ensuring that everyone is a gardener. I think we are all gardeners.
Lee Connelly: I am known as the Skinny Jean Gardener, mainly because I wear skinny jeans. I am a “Blue Peter” gardener and a children’s gardening author, designer, speaker and presenter. Over the past 10 years in this industry, I have become the leading children’s gardening educator in the UK. Most recently, I founded School Gardening Success—in the last two years—which gets into primary schools to teach children how to grow their own food and look after wildlife and, most importantly, support primary schoolteachers to make this happen, because the biggest missing pieces are teachers getting support for it.
Out of everything I have done in the past 10 years, my biggest achievement, and what I am so proud of, is that I am father to my daughter Olive, who is eight. I always look at her as my inspiration for thinking about what children will learn and how they will grow up in future—our future generation. I want her to become a gardener, just like all of us sitting here, and like all of her class as well and all of her school, so that we have a healthy generation who know how to grow their own food.
Why should young people get involved in gardening? For me, within schools there are five reasons. First, there is physical health. Young people take more responsibility for their health and diet by growing their own food. If they get to see that tiny seed turn into an actual plant, they will eat it and be more involved in it. Secondly, there is mental health, which Lilidh touched on. There is a strong correlation between happiness and the feeling of being connected to the natural world, which is really important. Thirdly, it builds social skills. I started gardening only 10 years ago, when I was 24. If I had had gardening when I was younger, I would have been more sociable. I was quite a nervous child. I have seen in schools how it brings kids together and inspires them to make friends. Even recently, at a school I went to at the start of this week, there was a child who probably did not get involved as much with the class, but the gardening club has brought them together.
Fourthly, there is the behaviour of young people. Giving children and young people responsibility for growing food and plants improves behaviour.
Finally, there is learning. There is so much you can fit into gardening and horticulture: literacy, science, numeracy and knowing where your food comes from, as I said at the start. I was 24 years old and honestly thought that potatoes grew on some little tree in a field somehow. I had no idea. I got all the way to 24 years old not knowing how plants grow. I want something different from what I experienced for my daughter and a whole new generation.
Q128 Baroness Fookes: I am a former teacher, admittedly in another century. I am particularly interested in how well schools encourage young people to learn about plants and gardening. Lee, you have great knowledge of what is going on, so can you tell us?
Lee Connelly: It really varies. I have two examples from different schools I visited this year. At the start of this week, I visited an amazing school that has just started a gardening club run by two teacher assistants. They had no knowledge of gardening; they had the passion to put effort into it, but they had no direction. That is the biggest problem with a good proportion of schools at the moment. There is no direction for where they will go with their gardening education.
On the other hand, there is a school in Ashton Keynes that has a forest schoolteacher who gardens with a class every day. It has an amazing education system around bringing gardening and growing into the school. It has a wildlife area and an allotment. It does everything around outdoor learning. It varies in schools all over the country. Last year, I went to a school just outside Birmingham and it was like going to a farm park. I could probably have taken my daughter there. It had goats and allotments, and was doing so much. Five minutes down the road, there was just a tarmac playground in a school with no gardening experience at all.
Baroness Fookes: Do you liaise with the RHS? I believe it has a scheme for encouraging gardening in schools, but I do not know how widely it reaches.
Lee Connelly: The RHS has an amazing school campaign. I think it now covers 50% of schools around the UK. Our biggest problem is that we need teachers to be supported a bit more. As much as organisations such as School Gardening Success, the RHS, Grow2Know and many others do, there is no funding or time for teachers. Those are the biggest things for teachers. We expect them to teach children how to grow their own food but do not give them enough time to research or the funding to do it. The school I visited at the start of this week had no money to grow any plants. They had all that passion, and everyone knows the positives for kids in growing plants and their own food, but no time or money is put into it.
Lord Colgrain: Do you tie into the agricultural county shows? I was president of the Kent show for five years and we had a day in the spring every year when 3,000 children from local schools came in. They had the opportunity to do the most basic things; they could pick up a chicken or stroke a lamb. Everything was explained to them. The teachers were enormously enthusiastic, as were the parents who were prepared to fund them to do that. Would that sort of captive audience be useful? Maybe you are doing that already.
Lee Connelly: You are right. That is really great. It comes with positives and negatives. You get all these children and you get them excited. I have been part of something similar, where we have 10,000 children gardening in one week. We visit schools and get them involved. Then, all of a sudden, once they get back to the school, there is no progression. It does not continue. You get all these children excited about growing, but you do not actually do anything afterwards.
Lord Colgrain: There is no follow-through.
Lee Connelly: Exactly. There is no follow-through. We really need teachers to be supported a lot more. There is a lot of passion from the teachers. A lot of them know the positives. They just want support.
Tayshan Hayden-Smith: At the moment, gardening is predominantly an extracurricular activity. It competes with the curriculum, so any time that teachers have to deliver gardening clubs or activities is usually their own time. If they want to put it into the school curriculum, all of a sudden they have to shift the curriculum they are already delivering. We have to look at how we make it complementary to the curriculum. There must be some way to make gardening part of the national curriculum. You could bring numeracy and literacy into the gardening realm, so that children learn about things through nature, or we could create space for gardening and horticulture in the curriculum itself.
As an example, we work with a school in North Kensington that had the most amazing teacher. She is a really enthusiastic gardener and ran a gardening club. We partnered with Penguin to do a Peter Rabbit garden and the kids love it. She left the school in the last month. All of a sudden, the school is like, “Oh no, what do we do?” The problem is capacity and resource. We have to act urgently to create resource and capacity for teachers to be able to deliver gardening in schools.
Lilidh Matthews: We asked our members currently working in horticulture what was their earliest memory of horticulture and who influenced that. The majority age that everyone put was five years old. That touches perfectly with what Lee said. Then there is a huge gap, a chasm of time between when you touchpoint with horticulture and then reach a career. There is nothing in between in the education system to link people or which understands where the opportunities are and that it is a viable career choice.
Baroness Willis of Summertown: How much is the question over gardening one of outdoors versus indoors? If it is an urban school completely constrained by space, is there an indoor version of what you do?
Lee Connelly: We can definitely do indoor versions of it, but getting children outdoors is the most important thing. That gets them learning in a different way. To use my daughter as an example, it is when I ask her to do her homework inside compared to us going outside. During lockdown, we taught maths through garden design in our own garden. It is easy to do that with children in school; it just needs time to allow it to happen.
I have now been in this industry for 10 years. We are always talking about how we can get young people into gardening and school leavers into the horticulture industry. We have been talking about it for 10 years. I feel that if we can get children gardening at primary school we will have a really big generation coming up in the future who know about gardening and horticulture, and that it can be a career option. It is just about putting the work in now in primary school education.
Baroness Willis of Summertown: I completely agree with you. My point was more about places such as Singapore, where they have so little green space in the centre, but are doing incredible things working with children on window boxes, internal gardens and green walls. Is there scope in that, especially thinking about our weather? Otherwise, it becomes a very seasonal activity, whereas by the sound of things, we should be encouraging children to do this the whole year round.
Lee Connelly: I think it is the mistake of us in industry to think of it as a seasonal thing. Children can get outside in the winter. There is so much we can do around wildlife over the winter as well. Within our school plan, a lot of the winter is based around getting children outside, looking after hedgehogs and birds, or thinking about frogs and seeing what they do in our ecosystem.
Yes, we can do stuff inside. An example is that I meet a lot of children who do not get outside much at home. They might live in a tower block and only have a little windowsill to grow stuff on, which is perfect, but we really need to look at the school as the epicentre of getting children outside and growing.
Tayshan Hayden-Smith: I have two things to add. We need to rethink what a classroom is, and the idea of a classroom being four walls that children sit within, and see it as an opportunity. Whether you call the playground a classroom or a garden that you have built a classroom, you can really get the children thinking about the opportunities that nature offers. Secondly, the garden we built in the school is essentially an asset for the community. We are looking to pilot that. It confuses me why schools generally stay within their own lane. One school will use their own space and rarely interact with another school. Actually, where a school has resource and assets, other schools that may not have so much opportunity could feed into that.
It is all about connecting schools together and sharing spaces and extending that out to the community. Schools are an amazing opportunity. In half-terms and holidays, they are open spaces. Look at playgrounds, for example. If we could turn them into beautiful gardens or spaces for children to play, engage and connect, especially in inner-city areas, they become spaces that the community can use. All of a sudden, you are getting to know your local community and schools. It is all about sharing and making the most of what is available.
Baroness Walmsley: What you said earlier, Lilidh, about your members who went into horticulture having started an interest at the age of five really justifies Lee’s and Tayshan’s focus on primary schools. What you said about what happens when a teacher who is enthusiastic and knows things leaves the school indicates a gap. What in-service training is available for teachers if they want to do something like this with their children? What other resources might be available from outside sources such as the RHS to help a teacher who does not really know much about gardening to enthuse children in that way? I know qualifications will be available in secondary schools—the T-level and A-level. In primary schools, teachers have to wear a lot of hats. Is there anything in the way of in-service training and other resources to help teachers teach what you teach children?
Lee Connelly: Loads. There are so many resources that I could spend all day listing them. Actually, that is a problem because there is also so much confusion. There are so many people coming from different directions. The easiest way to get children learning is to get it in the curriculum. That has been talked about for such a long time, but it is very easy to do. It would be so easy to fit in all these subjects, especially at primary school level. If you want to look for resources, you will find them but there are a lot of different people saying different things, which is confusing.
Baroness Walmsley: If it were in the curriculum, it would be in teachers’ training, or at least in their in-service training.
Lee Connelly: Yes, exactly. You also would not have the problem of relying on just one teacher to run the allotment or garden. That is where we get a lot of failure. Another school I went to last week had an amazing garden last year. The pictures looked beautiful. Then that teacher left and it turned into a wild west of plants and weeds. Every teacher having it in their training would be perfect. They want it as well. As I said earlier, they know what children get from learning outdoors. I can give an example of what my daughter is doing. I love her teacher, who is brilliant, but they are growing beans in bags on the window. That is not gardening but it is their only connection to gardening. They see a bean grow on the window. It is all they have. As an industry, we need to change that and support teachers.
Baroness Walmsley: Do teachers need better signposting to resources? In your experience, have you come across any particularly good resources that are really valued by teachers? Can you recommend any?
Lee Connelly: The RHS does a lot. That is brilliant. As I said, you need a teacher who really looks for it and has time for it. I know a lot of teachers finish marking work at 10 pm. Then we expect them to research gardening. That is where it fails. Some brilliant teachers make time for it. We have forest schoolteachers at some schools who lead it as well. It is the teachers who have no time that I want to concentrate on and support. They have the passion, but they just do not have the time or direction for it.
Q129 Lord Colgrain: Lilidh, you touched on this in your last answer. Are careers in horticulture attractive and accessible to young people today?
Lilidh Matthews: To start with, I will touch on the last question as well. After primary school, there is a complete gap. Really, it skips secondary school altogether, until you get to the point where you can get a formalised qualification at A-level, or an equivalent through the other schemes. You mentioned T-levels; there are also apprenticeships. Apprenticeships have been rolled out and they are really good for people who know specifically what they want to do. The T-levels coming in this autumn will be good for people who are more academically minded and still trying to work it out.
To answer your question, there are still a lot of barriers to making it accessible. It is hard to find the qualifications, or to find out where they come from in different places. A lot of great organisations offer qualifications, but there is no career progression. You do not know where they all lead on to. It almost needs a rebrand throughout the entire education system. A lot of perceptions around horticulture as a career are not valid. That needs to be changed throughout the education system, all the way up to the point when you get your qualification.
Tayshan Hayden-Smith: I had the same feelings post Grenfell, when I was in the guerrilla garden hiding in a bush from my mates. I was like, “I don’t want to be seen in this garden, because I’m not the typical gardener”. But that is not true. It goes to show the perceptions I had, as someone not involved in the industry. That feeling is shared, especially in younger generations. Gardening is seen as a luxury where it is all prim and proper, and everything needs to be perfect. Obviously, at the time I did not know much about the industry itself but I knew that to have a garden you had to have money. A lot of my friends did not even have access to space.
Touching on what Lilidh said, the perception of horticulture is that it is quite unattainable and unachievable, so even before engaging a teenage audience, or secondary school and beyond, we need a perception change, making gardening for everyone and accessible to everyone. In the same way that people we lost at Grenfell were not deemed worthy of good-quality healing space, we need to say that everyone is worthy of beautiful healing space. We need to start there. That will, hopefully, drive interest and excitement. We do not want to go into territory where we make horticulture and gardening so rigid and formal. It is very playful, it is very creative and it is very expressive. It is about finding a balance in creating interest and giving people positive pathways into employment and careers, and it being mutually beneficial for everyone, because maybe we will have better communities, a better industry and a greener world, hopefully.
Lee Connelly: We are so uncool. Horticulture is still so uncool.
Lord Colgrain: That is the football boot analogy.
Lee Connelly: Tayshan is the coolest person here. Because we have not put in the legwork beforehand for young people, when they get to the time they have to pick a career, horticulture does not really come up on the list.
Lord Colgrain: What about gardening television programmes? There seem to be a lot of those. Do they resonate with young people?
Lee Connelly: No.
Tayshan Hayden-Smith: I do not think so in the way gardening and horticulture are sold or marketed. I do not think that is by accident either. It is by design. From bottom to top, we really have to shift that narrative. There are changes. The RHS is responding to those in conversation and in the idea that gardening is a necessity not a luxury. The Chelsea Flower Show being the World Cup of horticulture is not too helpful in having those conversations, but things are changing, and I see positive ways forward in that. As Lee said, it is about selling it in a different way and making gardening exciting. It is about the power of growing something and eating it. Kids love that. It is just about putting it in front of them in a digestible way. Yes, it needs a rebrand.
Lilidh Matthews: I completely agree with everything about the rebrand, emphasising the benefits I mentioned before. People who work in the industry do so for a reason: they really care about what they do. The key words that I mentioned resonate with the younger generations. That is what they are passionate about, really showing that it can benefit them. Also, there is the perception side of things compared to actually working in the industry. You are not just doing work where you deal with plants. There are so many other career opportunities related to that. It is not just about dirt under the nails or driving a tractor.
Tayshan Hayden-Smith: The horticulture industry is quite rare in the sense that we can openly say that we can look at it in a very collaborative way, whereas other industries are quite competitive. We need to explore those opportunities and see how we can connect with others.
Baroness Willis of Summertown: I completely get all that. What is the one thing you would do to change that perception? We are aware of the issues, but it is often quite hard. You are our communicators, working at that coalface, so what would you do to change that perception?
Lilidh Matthews: My main thing is that you have the touchpoint at primary school, and it works really effectively in a lot of cases, so move it into the curriculum as well. We already deal with a lot of subjects that include horticulture. It is a science. You eat it. You study it. There is art as well; you draw with it. It links to almost every subject.
Tayshan Hayden-Smith: I completely agree. To give a slightly different answer, community space is also important. There are those who do not have access to that space. Those spaces can be conduits into which we bring schools, communities, residents and local organisations. They can be the crux of connecting everyone.
Baroness Willis of Summertown: More community space for gardening.
Lee Connelly: Like me, many people I know got into gardening in their mid-20s or 30s. It takes time to learn how to grow things and how to become a gardener. You do not see many of the people on telly or in the media until they are in their mid-30s, coming on to 40. If we have the generation coming up from primary and all the way through secondary, we will have younger presenters and younger people in the media to promote horticulture, which can only be a good thing. If we do not do the legwork beforehand, that will not happen.
Baroness Willis of Summertown: Your suggestion would be to get more young people into the media who could speak about horticulture.
Lee Connelly: Yes, because they will have that knowledge from school and go straight into it.
Baroness Willis of Summertown: Yes, I get that. Those were all excellent answers; I am writing them down. Do you think the word “horticulture” is itself a bit of a problem?
Tayshan Hayden-Smith: I think so, in the sense that when I first got into guerrilla gardening, I had no clue what any plant was. I thought the names were all Harry Potter potions. Horticulture falls into that category, slightly. If we are looking at a real rebrand of horticulture, everything needs to be on the table for rethinking, to see how it could best connect with other people.
To extend what Lee said, the reason why young people want to be footballers or artists is that they look at those people and go, “Oh, that’s achievable for me because they’re from where I’m from or they have similar experiences. I can relate to them”. But look at the media currently, whether that is TV or online spaces. I watch “Gardeners’ World” because I have a vested interest, but I will not go, “Oh, I can relate to Monty Don or Alan Titchmarsh”, in the same way that others can. I do not have acres and acres of land where I can do all those different things. It is all about representation and strategising how we can feed and excite a different audience in horticulture.
Baroness Willis of Summertown: That is a really good recommendation. The issue is how we get the large media companies to take it on board.
Q130 Lord Carter of Coles: I suppose this is part of shifting the narrative. Tayshan, what role can guerrilla gardening or perhaps community gardening—I am not quite sure which to emphasise—have in educating young people? Particularly given that the nature of guerrilla activity is largely anarchic, how do you get it to move at scale?
Tayshan Hayden-Smith: I always have to say “allegedly” when talking about guerrilla gardening. We have gone from guerrilla gardening to what we do now at Grow2Know, going from something quite radical, although I do not see it as radical, and against the grain to something more formal and structured that feeds into the structures and systems where we can get funding and use that resource. More needs to be done to allow a platform for that.
There is a perception of community gardens as a patched-together space with a few sleepers and a sign that says “Allotment”. Looking at ways we can support those spaces and make them beautiful and amazing would be another access point for communities on the ground to go, “This is something I really want to be involved in”, rather than something that feels half-hearted or half-funded and resourced, as amazing as they are. The more people we can excite about horticulture and the more opportunities there are, the more people we will get into the industry.
Lord Carter of Coles: You all talked about excitement. How do you keep people engaged and make it exciting? Do you have any views on that, Lee? You are obviously playing your part, very much.
Lee Connelly: I have a show called the biggest gardening entertainment show in the world. It is about communicating gardening differently. As mentioned earlier, the name “horticulture” is an issue. Guerrilla gardening has changed quite a lot as well. When I first started 10 years ago, it used to be about throwing seedballs over your neighbour’s fence without them knowing. It has changed a lot. It is about rebranding how you put it out to children and young people in their language. At the end of the day, language is changing. As an industry, we need to lean into that.
Tayshan Hayden-Smith: It is about mischief and playfulness. We cannot afford to take that away from gardening and horticulture. There is already so much that children and people in general have to absorb that there is a need for something more playful, creative and mischievous.
Lord Carter of Coles: Lilidh, would you agree that there is not much mischief in horticulture?
Lilidh Matthews: There is definitely mischief in horticulture. I agree. Green spaces are incredibly important. We all know that. The more green spaces there are, the more they save the NHS money. Some £111 million in avoided health costs is saved in the UK by having green spaces and gardens. It is undeniable that putting your hands into the soil and dealing with plants is beneficial to you and to everyone else.
We are dealing with lots of different people coming into the industry and exploring it from the perspective of both customers and young people. A lot of people are looking at it. Of the people moving in and exploring gardening for the first time, some really want to go for it, to learn and do all the detail with their space. You also have people that do not have that space and come in through house plants, grow your own or exploring those spaces. Some people just want decorations and to brighten up a space. There are lots of ways to be playful with that.
Baroness Willis of Summertown: On the one hand, I hear that we need to include this in the curriculum. On the other hand, I hear that we need to make it more playful. Do the two go together? I certainly do not remember being at school and thinking that things on the curriculum were playful—quite the opposite. Maybe I was a bit of a rebel, but I can see kids being really taken with “guerrilla gardening”. It is cool. I worry about the education aspect, if only because the way we teach plant sciences in schools is so boring that it puts everyone off ever doing plant sciences again. I want to revisit that playful-cum-education bit.
Lilidh Matthews: In plant science, you study it on a piece of paper but you do not actually hold a plant. How can that be playful? How can you explore it if you just look at a picture? Most schools have a tree outside or something that you could take students to go and talk about. I appreciate that there are time limitations, but walking around the streets and seeing what is there is very accessible to everybody.
Baroness Willis of Summertown: I agree. It would be good to rebrand plant sciences teaching to bring horticulture into it. That is a big issue. I am still worried about this playful thing and that we will have a whole load of children who think it is an academic topic and not for them.
Lee Connelly: School should be fun, though.
Baroness Willis of Summertown: It depends which school you are in.
Lee Connelly: Every day I pick up my daughter from school, and on the way out we talk. I ask her, “What have you been up to?”. She says, “Maths, science, English”, and that is all I get from her. But if she has been outside and growing something, we have a conversation for the whole 20-minute walk back home. She does not stop talking about it. I find out what she has learned from it. That is an amazing thing.
Baroness Willis of Summertown: I will try to wrap this up, but I am interested to explore it. I get it about age. When you get to the edgy teenager age, it becomes a very different conversation. That is where I am particularly interested in the slightly left-field way of gardening.
Tayshan Hayden-Smith: They can definitely go hand in hand. There is an opportunity in horticulture, gardening and nature. Let us call it nature because that widens the scope. There is a lot to be said for teaching teenagers and young people to be present and not have to take in loads of information. What about forest bathing, or walking through their local park or spaces? There are loads of ways and opportunities to make it playful that complement the academic work that needs to be done. It is just about creating capacity for that.
Lilidh Matthews: I made a point before about most people being five years old when they had their first touchpoint in horticulture. For the most part, they said it was their grandparents who showed them that. These are people working in the industry. We also asked them about horticulture heroes. Undeniably, the majority of responses mentioned someone in a management position immediately above them as someone who had guided them. Why can we not recreate that in the education system and combine that inspiration?
Q131 Baroness Walmsley: I always think that gardeners are optimists. It is not just, “If the crop fails this year, maybe next year it will be better”, but that every month of the year, there is something to look forward to. In May, I look forward to the wisteria coming out. Very young children are into instant gratification. How do you inspire children to be patient and wait for what will happen next with what they plant?
Lee Connelly: That is the most beautiful lesson we take from this. I always say that we are in a world where I could probably order something on my phone right now and it will be delivered outside, ready for me. Children grow up with that technology and instant thing around them. Gardening and growing your own will never be quick or fast. When I first started, everyone was asking, “What do children love to grow?” The answer was radishes, because they grow fast. I do not know a child who likes radishes—I do not like them either. Just because they grow fast does not mean children will eat them. Taking time to grow a plant and watching it grow into something beautiful or that you can eat is what gardening and horticulture can teach a child. It is important to keep that there and make it part of the lesson.
Q132 Lord Sahota: I want to change something and perhaps you can help me. It is not a problem or barrier just for young people; it affects the minority and diverse community as well. The only people I know in the West Midlands who grow their own stuff do so on allotments. They grow vegetables, onions and things like that. Perhaps there is no gardening by youngsters from the minority community. There is no encouragement from family or perhaps the cultural background. I do not tend to see many children from minority and diverse backgrounds coming into gardening. Can you help me with that? First, am I wrong in my assumption, or is it true? What problems or barriers are there in the horticultural sector to the young from diverse backgrounds?
Tayshan Hayden-Smith: As a youngster, I was that person who had no interest in gardening or horticulture. I was lucky to have the influence of my mum, who was amazing and showed me appreciation for nature. It is usually that and, as Lilidh said earlier, heroes who spark the initial interest. Yes, there is a lack of interest. As I said, the reason why young people from all backgrounds want to be a footballer, music artist or painter—whatever it may be—is that they can go, “Oh, that person looks like me. They can relate to me. They come from the same place or area that I do”.
It is not just a racial or cultural barrier, there is age as well. Horticulture is perceived to be a hobby for older folk. Like I said, we need to be able to rebrand it in a way that makes it interesting for younger people and not something unattainable. It can be done with limited space, in communal spaces or in schools. The key thing is creating more access points. Up until recently, access points have been limited. The industry has almost become a bubble, where opportunity is limited. It works for certain people but not others. This is an opportunity to see horticulture as a way of benefiting society and the environment. These are things that can really support the long-term health of communities in our nation and the world, and the sooner we see that opportunity, the better.
Lord Sahota: Perhaps if families from minority communities did more gardening or were going to a garden centre, the children would follow them and show some interest.
Tayshan Hayden-Smith: Again, it is about capacity. A lot of people are in survival mode. I am lucky that I had my mum. We were in a council house, she was a single mother of four, but she would still stop on the street and go, “Look at the beautiful tree”, “Can you hear the birds singing?”, or “Can you see that beautiful sunset?” I am pretty sure that a lot of my friends did not have that influence. While at the time I told her to be quiet and got up to my mischief, it has now come back round and is probably what brought me back to a garden at a time of need.
There are parents and families out there literally working from nine to five or seven to seven, getting home, and worrying about food on the plate. There is no other time or space to be able to go, “Let’s go out to the park”, or “Let’s go out into the garden”. It is very much on the periphery. We need to be able to create capacity for people in the community; people I know do not have access to space—people living in blocks, towers and estates. It is about creating access points and seeing the opportunity in communal spaces. I like to call gardens the common ground because of the opportunity for everyone to come in and be part of it.
Lord Sahota: This is something we need to work on to bring in ethnic- minority children. Do any of the others have views on this? Have you seen that there are not many children from minority communities coming into gardening?
Lee Connelly: It is parents’ fault, and their parents’ fault. The education never went down the line. I know loads of grandparents who gardened with their parents and then, for some reason, did not bother to do it with their own children. Now we are here. Yes, starting children younger is best. As I said, we will then have a generation that gardens in future.
Lilidh Matthews: From a career point of view, the location of access to green spaces or those jobs is important. A lot of those spaces require you to drive and that is a massive barrier to entry. Most young people in cities do not drive. Public transport to get to some of the rural locations does not exist. Some 13% of our membership said that they chose their career in horticulture because it was a local job to them. It is quite interesting that they almost fell into it in that way.
The highest percentage of people in the industry were career-changers. They actually had no interaction with horticulture at all until they found the job and decided to take it on. That is also a massive barrier for us as an industry. Then, 20% of all our responses were from people who came through the family. Information had been passed from generation to generation. There were comments from our members that they cannot progress in their career because they are not a family member or they need to wait for someone to retire before they can step up. There are barriers in that sense as well. We are an incredibly supportive industry and people work well together, but lots of barriers still hold the industry back. Tayshan mentioned collaboration. There is collaboration to be able to do lots of things. You have lots of voices and different people to go to, but you do not really know where to go to progress.
Tayshan Hayden-Smith: We did a Chelsea Flower Show garden last year called “Hands Off Mangrove”, which touched on the cultural and historic stories of the Mangrove Nine. One thing about gardens is that they enable us to have the common love to pull down barriers of culture and history, and have conversations about what would otherwise be quite sensitive topics. That is quite unifying. Some of the work we are trying to do at Grow2Know looks at that, especially in Ladbroke Grove, which is such a cultural melting pot. We can use plants, gardens and space to share stories and understanding, connecting cultures, so that we are not so out of the loop about where everyone is from, what their practices are and what they do. It is finding more common ground.
Lord Sahota: When my father came here, he had been a farmer. He said, “Stay away from farming. It’s hard work”. Sorry about that.
The Chair: That leads into a question raised by other sectors in horticulture. Most farms are quite remote to the communities you are talking about. Is that a major barrier or could it be broken down with people? It is the hell of an ask to get somebody to move so far away.
Lilidh Matthews: Personally, I have moved for every job that I have had in horticulture. It is a big ask for people and not everyone is prepared to move. Location is a big thing and, particularly as we lose more and more rural transport links, it is a limitation.
Baroness Walmsley: The Prime Minister just announced that everybody should have the right to go to a green space, or a blue space, within 15 minutes’ walk of where they live. Could that make a difference?
Lee Connelly: It is easy to say, isn’t it? I think so, too. It would make a massive difference to a lot of people. Like I said, the mental health benefits from having green space and being able to use it to grow something, or just being out there as a family, can really bring people together. I always say that gardening and horticulture make real memories for families. If you have that space, you will make a real memory together as a family.
Tayshan Hayden-Smith: Sometimes the location and distance from green space is not always the major influencing factor in how someone interacts with it. Some people do not have that capacity; socioeconomic background definitely plays a big part in the ability to interact with green space. We should not ignore or dismiss the other influencing factors on access to green space and nature. Whether you live five, 10 or 15 minutes away, some people will not have the capacity, interest or access point to engage with it. Therefore, they completely miss the opportunity.
Baroness Willis of Summertown: I completely agree that you can be within 15 minutes. That is in our COP biodiversity targets, so I hope we will follow through on it.
I want to go back one step. Horticulture therapy is really successful for mental health. As we know, it is one of the used mechanisms. All the evidence base shows that it is most successful when you have a trained therapist with you. Just giving people access to green space does not actually give them what they need. Do we need more people like you who are able to be out there showing people what to do to garden?
Lee Connelly: Definitely. There must be a connection to green space as well. As you say, it is easy to have it there. As we said about an hour ago, if there is no direction in why people are there or what they do there, it is pointless having it. It makes no sense. It will just be left and overgrown in a few years’ time. You might have a forest sitting 15 minutes round the corner from you that no one cares about. There has to be a connection and someone who leads and directs it.
Tayshan Hayden-Smith: It is about finding a balance between hand-holding and just allowing people to be. You do not want to completely impose on them and go, “This is what you need to do”. There needs to be space for that, as well as going, “Here’s a green space. This is a safe space for you to enjoy and be present in”. It is finding a balance.
Q133 The Chair: We are right up against time. Finally, if you could ask one thing of the Government, what would it be?
Lilidh Matthews: I have an immediate ask and a longer-term one. My immediate ask is based on the fact that there is so much confusion about how you progress your career and where you go for information. I know that the TIAH scheme was mentioned in one of your previous panels, but that does not include ornamental horticulture. It includes only edible horticulture and agriculture. Why can it not include ornamental horticulture as well? That would immediately give us the opportunity to show career progression, what the opportunities are and everything else around it.
I know that my second answer will take slightly longer, but we definitely need to integrate horticulture into the curriculum all the way through. We have the gap in the middle between primary school and opportunities such as apprenticeships, T-levels and all the other degrees you can do. There needs to be some thought as to how that could be done in collaboration with the industry.
Tayshan Hayden-Smith: For me, it is all about getting horticulture and gardening on to the curriculum and into schools. Putting it in the national curriculum is your solid access point for future generations. Also, look at communal space. I said before that we lost people at Grenfell because they were not deemed worthy of access to good-quality healing and beautiful space. That is important. It is not just space. It is thought behind it that is considered and collaborative. We need to look at how we can use communal space for opportunities for beauty and to heal, unify, empower, educate, learn and play.
Lee Connelly: I am really happy that the curriculum gets mentioned so much. I do not think there is a person in our industry who does not agree that horticulture and gardening should be in the curriculum. If we do not do this work at an early age, we will be here in 10 years talking about how we can make gardening and horticulture cool and bring in more young people. We will still be in exactly the same position unless we get that generation to come through. We will also have a healthier generation, which will help all other aspects of public services and everything. Getting gardening and horticulture in the curriculum is paramount to the success of the industry.
The Chair: Thank you very much. I cannot say that the committee has the youth element on its side, but thank you so much for giving evidence today.
