Tales from Titchmarsh

By encouraging the cultivation of plants, schools have an important part to play in helping children cherish the natural world,

Good news! There is a move afoot to introduce Natural History at GCSE level into the national curriculum. I can’t tell you how pleased I am. Back at the turn of the century, when it was an uphill struggle to persuade educationalists that the great outdoors had a huge part to play in childhood development, my wife and I started up a charity called Gardens For Schools. Our aim was to give grants to primary schools so they could create gardens and nature areas.

We were overwhelmed by applications but managed, somehow, to fund around 100 school gardens each year. So popular was the scheme, and so much time did it take to sort out applications from the length and breadth of the country, that after nearly 10 years of running it, quite literally, from the kitchen table, we handed it over to the Royal Horticultural Society, where it was absorbed into its Campaign for School Gardening. There are now 11,500 primary schools signed up to the scheme, which continues to flourish and expand. But getting secondary schools involved has always been a challenge.

It is easier, by far, to interest toddlers and children up to the age of 10 or so in the great outdoors

– in beetles and bugs, worms and mud, sowing seeds, and growing sunflowers and beans – than it is to engage teenagers who have other things on their mind, much of it viewed on a screen. But of late, the issues of climate change, global warming and a need to safeguard the environment have become important concerns for the young. Their eyes have been opened to the call to address the plight facing the natural world, to learn more about it and to do their bit to ensure its continued health and survival. There is talk in the proposed GCSE syllabus of studying starling populations on the Somerset levels, of monitoring kittiwake numbers in the north-east and of enriching the dwindling population of blue butterflies in Sussex – all hugely laudable aims. But what I do hope is not forgotten is that the garden is the most accessible contact with nature for the vast majority of children who are lucky enough to have a patch of land outside their house.

There will be those, of course, who suggest that it should be sown with wildflowers and returned to nature, but this would be to over-simplify things. In order to understand how the planet works, children need to become actively involved in growing things, not simply spectating. Good gardeners are interactive naturalists who treat their soil with respect and regard their stewardship of even the tiniest patch of ground as being somewhere they can make a difference to the greater scheme of things. Where other nature lovers stand by and watch, gardeners who sow and cultivate with love and care make a real and positive difference to their surroundings, and consequently to the earth as a whole.

Back in the 1960s, I cherished an ambition to be a rural studies teacher. In my own school the subject was taught by a martinet of a man who had the bearing (and the moustache) of a regimental sergeant major. His name was Ernest Wilberforce Heath, and he ruled his class, not with a rod of iron, but with stentorian adenoidal tones and a thick wand of willow, which he would bring down sharply on the desk of any pupil whose mind wandered. Alas, rural studies disappeared from the national curriculum in the early 1970s, and with it teachers like Mr Heath who had done their best to instill in their pupils a love of the natural world and of growing things. The job disappeared before I could make a career of it. (That said, my patience with plants would probably not have been matched by my patience with an unruly mob of teenagers.)

So now we must equip a new generation of teachers to carry the torch for natural history, rural studies or whatever you want to call it. I hope they grasp the vital role that gardening – the cultivation of plants – can play. Growing things – whether they are food crops, native trees and wildflowers, or exotic plants that make beautiful gardens – is a vital part of understanding the workings of the natural world and of realising why it needs to be cherished. As Alexander Pope entreated us back in the 18th century:

“In all, let nature never be forgot.”

The issues of climate change, global warming and the need to safeguard the environment have become important concerns for the young