‘But the Royal Horticultural Society is all about gardening, isn’t it?’ I hear you cry.

Well yes, it is (we are, in fact the UK’s largest gardening charity), but whilst everyone I’ve met at Wisley does love a good pootle around their own garden, it is only a lucky few that get to do this as their day job!

When I mentioned I was involved in a KTP with the RHS, I expect many of you pictured me donning wellies, picking apples and trimming wisteria.

Here is an image that has been painstakingly crafted to help you picture this…

You wouldn’t be alone either. Like many of you, when I joined, I knew of the RHS largely in the context of it being a provider of bespoke gardening advice, for its beautiful visitor gardens and its flower shows. It became clear pretty quickly that a) this is definitely not all we do and b) I would not be required to ‘don’ wellies, pick apples or indeed trim wisteria.

Here are just a handful of things currently on-going within the Science department where I am based. We produce the Plant Finder– a gardener’s bible which lists the UK growers and suppliers of over 70,000 garden plants.  We map the annual spread of a number of non-native plant pest species using data from gardens right across the country.  We investigate the effectiveness of peat-free composts and determine what’s best to plant on our roofs to help mitigate the urban heat island effect.  We compile lists of pollinator-friendly plants to help encourage wildlife-friendly gardening and conduct research to determine whether our native garden plants really are best for our native insects.

From left- right: RHS Plant Finder, Perfect for Pollinators initiative, Plants for Bugs research

 It’s fair to say that whilst RHS Science may well be one of our best kept secrets, it’s one we’d rather not keep to ourselves. This is where our KTP project comes in.  In collaboration with University of Reading, the aim is to increase the profile of scientific research at the RHS so that we are not only associated with providing gardening advice but are also more widely recognised as an important scientific research organisation in our own right.  Part of how we get there involves making our research available to more people by publishing more widely (through gardening magazines and journals read by the scientific community) and collaborating more with universities and other science research organisations – something I’ll be explaining in a bit more detail in later posts.

For now, I hope that next time someone mentions the Royal Horticultural Society,  you will not only picture us doing this: 

but also lots of this: