Plants are our future

I recently received an email telling me of the forthcoming conference No Plants, No Planet: Horticulture making a world of difference. Organised by the Institute of Horticulture, the conference aims to tackle some of the most challenging issues facing horticulture today, future food security being just one of them.

The email caught my eye because last week I went along to the 21st International Congress on Sexual Plant Reproduction. Indeed! Well I wasn’t among the 200 or so influential plant scientists who attended this biennial event, held this year in Bristol, but I did attend a special evening put on to present to the general public some of the research being carried out.

Much of the research ultimately concerns food security and I chatted with scientists about their various projects. Examples included understanding the mechanisms involved in pollen tube growth to enable fertilisation, chromosomes mapping in saffron and tracking plant meiosis  (the process by which chromosomes are accurately transmitted from generation to the next).

For a gardener like me it was high-powered stuff but also fascinating for its far-reaching implications. As Professor Simon Hiscock of the University of Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences explained: “As plant scientists we think about how plants work all the time and we’re always amazed by what they can do. It’s really important that we understand flowers and how plants make fruit and seeds because we need to produce 40 per cent more food by 2030 using the same amount of land we already have.”

It’s sometimes easy as a garden enthusiast, who is immersed in gardens and gardening on a daily basis to think that finding the next must-have, long-flowering, self-supporting, drought-tolerant, scented, slug-resistant perennial is where plant science is at. And I’m not negating the plant breeding work that is done on gardeners’ behalf but it's good to be reminded that plants have a vital role in our future survival.

And with news of this forthcoming conference, it's really encouraging to know that horticulture is also addressing the same concerns in its perhaps more tangible, hands-on way by encouraging us to grow our own, consider biodiversity, not forget heritage varieties, help save bees and to look at changes in land use, the trend for community farming as well as crop adaptability in the face of climate change.

So alongside the mind-boggling minutiae of scientific research being undertaken, our own home-grown efforts still play a complementary role.

I’ll be following what reports I can from the No Plants, No Planet conference and hope to blog some of the findings and concerns addressed.

The conference takes place on 10-11 September at Writtle College, Essex. It is open to all and delegate places are still available. For full details and booking information please contact ioh@horticulture.org.uk or call 01992 707025.