Pro Landscaper March 2021
Last year, our inaugural Green Issue was published before the first national lockdown was announced. Back then, at the start of 2020, the conversation around the environment seemed unstoppable. Climate change protests were commonplace and reducing our carbon footprint was a hot topic at most industry events.
One year later and we published our second Green Issue in the third national lockdown in the last 12 months. Whilst the world has changed perhaps permanently thanks to a global pandemic, we wanted to know what had changed in terms of sustainability. Had it remained at the top of the agenda or taken a tumble?
In this year’s Green Issue, you’ll hear from Tim Howell about Mitie’s Plan Zero City Landscaping Service and from Marcus Watson, who recently stepped down as managing director of Ground Control, on the need to accelerate change. Helena Pettit, director of shows at the RHS, explains how the organisation is adapting its events to lower their carbon footprint, and new contributor Christopher Martin of Urban Movement encourages us to stop using the term ‘sustainability’ – we want to change the situation, after all, not sustain it.
We took the opportunity of this special issue to launch a new section of the magazine, too – IQ. Here, you’ll find the UK Landscaper Barometer, which we launched back in our November issue. The report on the state of the UK landscaping sector has continued to grow in popularity, and we felt it deserved its own section, along with two new contributors – Eva Woode and Neil Edwards. This month features a property developer special not to be missed.
There are too many highlights of our March issue to list them all, but if you’ve seen the BBC’s new show ‘Your Garden Made Perfect’, you’ll love our feature which goes behind the scenes of the programme. We also delved into the problem of peat, with comments from Monty Don following his article in Gardeners’ World which caused many to threaten boycotting the magazine. And we challenged some of the biggest suppliers in the industry to tell us what they’re doing to become more environmentally friendly.
