Chris Baines awarded the Victoria Medal of Honour

Our congratulations to Companion Chris Baines, who has received the highest recognition in British horticulture – the Victoria Medal of Honour, bestowed by the Royal Horticultural Society. The medal dates back to 1897, there are only ever 63 at any one time (the years of Victoria’s reign) and the back catalogue is a century-long who’s who of horticulture.

FROM HORTICULTURAL HERESY TO HORTICULTURAL HONOUR

Wildlife gardening pioneer, Chris Baines is to be awarded the Victoria Medal of Honour by the Royal Horticultural Society.  The VMH is the highest honour in UK horticulture, first established in 1897, and restricted to 63 recipients at any one time – corresponding to the number of years  of Queen Victoria’s reign.  Chris has been championing wildlife gardening since the 1970s.

Chris is one of the UK’s leading independent environmental campaigners - an award-winning writer and broadcaster who studied horticulture at London University’s Wye College in the late 1960s.  He is a landscape architect and worked in the landscape contracting industry, both in the UK and the Middle East, through the 1970s, whilst also teaching landscape design and management to post-graduate students.

Chris created a Rich Habitat Garden for a BBC Gardeners’ World TV makeover in 1979, almost 20 years before the emergence of Groundforce.  His series Your Country Needs You was the model for BBC Countryfile, and Chris was one of its original presenters.  The book that accompanied his BBC series The Wild Side of Town won the UK’s first prize for conservation literature in 1987 and his environmental investigation series The Ark, made for children’s ITV, won an International Wildscreen Award in the same year.  His more recent crowd-funded film documentary The Living Thames won top prize in the 2019 UK Charity Film Awards and has since won awards at film festivals across four continents. 

In 1985, Chris created the very first wildlife garden at Chelsea Flower Show, and his book How to Make a Wildlife Garden was first published in the same year.  At that time, the Royal Horticultural Society was so confused by the concept that his Chelsea medal was wrongly inscribed “for his WILDFIRE garden”.  The RHS now publishes the fourth edition of his book as the RHS Companion to Wildlife gardening.

Chris’s enthusiasm for engaging people with nature on the doorstep is well known.  He was co-founder of the UK’s first urban wildlife group, now the Wildlife Trust for Birmingham and the Black Country: he established International Dawn Chorus Day, celebrated annually across the northern hemisphere on the first Sunday in May, and now in its 39th year;  he led the campaign to protect Britain’s street trees from damaging cable-trenching in the 1990s, advised on the green infrastructure of the Millennium Dome and the 2012 London Olympics; he Is the Patron of both the Countryside Management Association and the Wildlife Gardening Forum, is an adviser to the National Trust on gardens and nature, and has been President of the Thames Estuary Partnership for more than 20 years.  As a Trustee of the National Lottery Heritage Fund at the turn of the century, he had particular influence over its Urban Parks and its Landscape Heritage programmes.

Professionally, Chris likes to describe himself as a broker of unholy alliances.  In the past he has judged awards and chaired independent environmental advisory boards for major companies in the water, minerals, energy, housebuilding and construction industries.  Since 2012 he has served as independent chair of the National Grid’s Stakeholder Advisory Group, tasked with landscape enhancement and nature recovery as an integral part of the multi-billion-pound energy infrastructure upgrade and the UK’s move to renewable energy.

Chris says:  “As a horticulturalist who trained in the 1960s, when wildlife was generally dismissed as a weed, a pest or a disease  I could not be more delighted to receive the VMH, and to join more than a century of my inspirational horticultural and landscape heroes – Christopher Lloyd, Dame Sylvia Crowe, Gertrude Jekyll, Miriam Rothschild, Peter Seabrook, Percy Thrower – even His Majesty King Charles III.  Gardening with nature is now seen as mainstream horticulture – a credit to all those who have been on the 50-year journey with me”