Gemma and Aisling were invited to speak to some of the incredible people behind the new Carbon Garden at Kew Gardens in London which opened in July 2025. This is part 1 with part 2 to follow in two weeks.

This extraordinary new space explores the story of carbon and how important it is to life on Earth. More than just a beautiful garden, this project communicates the scale of the climate crisis while celebrating the remarkable power of plants and mycorrhizal fungi as our planet's natural allies. With 35 carefully selected trees and 6,500 beautiful plants, the Carbon Garden is one of Kew Gardens' most ambitious garden projects in recent years.

The garden is filled with lots of brilliant features including a rain garden and a stunning central pavilion, which has been inspired by fungi and made with natural materials. Some of the planting also takes inspiration from the climate stripes, which were created by Professor Ed Hawkins at the University of Reading.

Each of the guests were unique, fun and above all so passionate about what they do. It was lovely to hear their story in person.

In part 1 we chat to

Richard Wilford – Designer of the Carbon Garden and Head of garden design at Royal Botanic Gardens Kew

Kevin Martin – Head of Tree Collections at Royal Botanic Garden Kew

Laura M. Suz – Senior research leader in mycology at Royal Botanic Gardens Kew

Resources:

Kew Gardens - https://www.kew.org/kew-gardens

Kew Gardens Carbon Garden - https://www.kew.org/kew-gardens/whats-in-the-gardens/carbon-garden

Climate stripes - https://showyourstripes.info/

We really hope you enjoy this episode and leave loving the weather a little bit more.

If you want to hear a little more weather and climate chat - please hit subscribe, like and share with a friend.

You can follow us here…

Instagram - @fortheloveofweather - https://www.instagram.com/fortheloveofweather

BlueSky @4loveofweather - https://bsky.app/profile/theloveofweather.bsky.social

Subscribe on Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/@ForTheLoveOfWeather

Please welcome award winning climate activist Laura Young aka @lesswastelaura to the podcast.

If you haven’t heard of Laura, she is the person that changed the law in under 500 days to ban disposable vapes in the UK. She is also an award winning climate activist as well as being named in the King's Foundation's 35 under 35.

Laura talks about her current PhD research on enhancing Scotland’s resilience to climate change. Her research explores both physical changes to the environment as well as the negative physiological impact and financial burden that are often overlooked after the initial weather event.

She has a wealth of knowledge and ideas about nature based solutions to the changing climate. But it is not just her ideas on nature based solutions that are intriguing but also her community led initiatives of sharing resources, like a tool library.

She is passionate about using the community around you and coming together to make it a better place for everyone with less waste.

We feel very lucky to have chatted to Laura and were so inspired by how she sees the world and the future. She was just such a pleasure to chat to and we look forward to seeing what she brings to the future.

If you want to hear a little more weather and climate chat - please hit subscribe, like and share with a friend.

You can subscribe on Youtube -

https://www.youtube.com/@ForTheLoveOfWeather

Please welcome to the podcast, meteorologist and weather presenter Clare Nasir. Aisling and Gemma have wanted Clare on the podcast for many years so this podcast feels extra special. She brings to life the joy and journey that weather has brought her along.

Clare started her career at the UK Met Office, training to be a meteorologist before moving to a broadcast meteorologist role. She has since worked for every major UK channel, covering weather but also bringing climate communication to a new level. She is a voice of authority, calm and sense and loves to share her knowledge with the next generation offering her time as a mentor. In a full-circle moment, Clare is now back working with the Met Office, presenting weather forecasts as well as their climate videos.

In this episode, we chat with Clare about her remarkable career and the work she's doing as a mentor and consultant for startups focused on sustainability and adaptation. We also discuss the UK heatwave of July 2022, when the UK recorded 40°C for the first time on record. Clare shared how it felt deeply personal and how the communication around this event was different, with attribution science allowing us to make direct links to climate change.

Clare is an accomplished author of several books, including the children's book 'Colin the Cloud' and 'What Does Rain Smell Like?' We honestly don't know where Clare finds the time to do everything she does but we are big fans.

We really hope you enjoy this episode and finish it loving the weather a little bit more.

If you want to hear a little more weather and climate chat - please hit subscribe, like and share with a friend.

You can subscribe on Youtube -

https://www.youtube.com/@ForTheLoveOfWeather

Tara Thompson is a communications specialist working with world-leading Earth Observation scientists, ensuring expert facts are at the forefront of the climate conversation in policy making and within the media.

In this episode Tara tells us about a recently launched Biomass satellite fondly called ‘Space Brolly’ because of its incredible 12 metre long antenna.

Tara tells us about how this is the first time precision data will be collected for global forests, with the Biomass satellite making continuous passes of the Earth’s lungs.

Biomass is capable of seeing through the trees canopies, using advanced P-band radar technology. This technology can be used to measure the structure and carbon content of forests providing an understanding like never before on how much carbon is sequestered by forests. This data will be vital in informing better climate policies and how do we best protect the world’s forests.

Tara is optimistic about the future of climate change and how all climate science is helping to shape a better world. In our ‘get to know me round’ we learn Tara’s favourite season as well as reflecting back on a childhood in the west of Ireland, where her first spark of joy for the weather was born.

We really hope you enjoy this episode of the podcast, and leave loving the weather just a little bit more.

If you want to hear a little more weather and climate chat - please hit subscribe, like and share with a friend.

You can follow us on Instagram @fortheloveofweather and on X and BlueSky @4loveofweather. If you would like to follow more about Earth’s satellites check

https://www.nceo.ac.uk/ and https://space4climate.com/

You can subscribe on Youtube -

https://www.youtube.com/@ForTheLoveOfWeather

In this episode we chat to Alice Stevens, creator of welly walks. These are bright yellow tech wellies that people can walk around in. Depending on the weather, the wellies would say different poems, sensing the weather with low tech barometric sensors to understand the weather at the moment. She is also the creator of rain trail which uses paint to reveal illustrations that would only appear if it rained. She has many more projects in the pipeline such as ‘blissful rain, isinit?’, a dialogue around using positive language around rain.

Alice is a Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design at Arts University Bournemouth and is currently doing a PhD in the intersection of British Weather, Creative Practice and Ecolinguisitics. This is a field of language that studies that explores the relationship between language, human societies, and the natural environment and says that if we hide away in building we lose connection and conversation about the weather and climate.

She leaves us with some poignant thoughts about the importance of using positive language around the environment, for example talking about 'blissful rain'. She is working on a new installation ‘WeatherKin’ that will be used in bus shelters that shares other people positive memories of rains.

You can find Alice on LinkedIn https://uk.linkedin.com/in/alice-stevens-222667a0.

We really hope you enjoy this episode of the podcast, and leave loving the weather just a little bit more.

If you want to hear a little more weather and climate chat - please hit subscribe, like and share with a friend.

You can follow us on Instagram @fortheloveofweather and on X and BlueSky @4loveofweather.

You can subscribe on Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/@ForTheLoveOfWeather

June 2025 started off cool but is set to be a record breaker for parts of the UK.

At the time of recording there was still a few days to go in June but some regions will have their hottest June on record, tumbling a 49 year record.

During the summer of 1976, there was a well documented heatwave and up until now was the hottest June on record for quite a few regions in the UK.

There are a lot of fun facts in this short podcast including a little chat about 'swullucking'!

We really hope you enjoy this episode of the podcast, and leave loving the weather just a little bit more.

If you want to hear a little more weather and climate chat - please hit subscribe, like and share with a friend.

You can follow us on Instagram @fortheloveofweather and on X and BlueSky @4loveofweather.

You can subscribe on Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/@ForTheLoveOfWeather

For the love of weather podcast is back with a new series. This first podcast is a hero-gram to climate scientist Prof Ed Hawkins.

Climate scientist Professor Ed Hawkins is an expert in climate change communications. Ed was surprised when his visualisation of a warming world burst into life when his climate stripes #showyourstripes were used in the 2016 Rio Olympics.

#showyourstripws is a simple and unique way of using colour to visualising climate change through warmth and colour.

One of Ed’s many climate projects was undertaken in 2020 when he set up a project to transcribe and digitise millions of paper rainfall observations. This was undertaken by thousands of volunteers, the results of which would feed into and ultimately make climate models more accurate.

It was a project he thought would take a very long time to complete, but with the help of lots of volunteers they managed to complete it in just 16 days; the results have been phenomenal.

Ed chats about his brilliant ‘warming stripes’ - #showyouratripes , which are a simple and unique way to breakdown complex science into simple colours to highlight a warming world and an incredible strength of spirit to keep going to find new ways to tell the story of climate change - a story he cared about deeply.

The warming stripes are available for lots of countries and cities around the world and you can find them here - https://showyourstripes.info/

We really hope you enjoy this episode of the podcast, and leave loving the weather just a little bit more.

If you want to hear a little more weather and climate chat - please hit subscribe, like and share with a friend.

You can follow us on social media - @fortheloveofweather

You can subscribe on Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/@ForTheLoveOfWeather

You can find Ed on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/edhawkinsclimate/?originalSubdomain=ukand on Bluesky - https://bsky.app/profile/edhawkins.org

In this new episode of For the Love of Weather podcast we chat with meteorologist, weather presenter and author Sean Batty, who dives into his debut children’s book “The Worst Christmas Weather Ever.”

This is a beautiful story that explores real events of climate change through the adventures of Santa Claus and focus’ on children as the hero’s.

Sean emphasises the importance of hope and offers practical solutions to climate change while encouraging positive action.

If you would like a signed copy of his book - https://www.seanbatty.co.uk/store/p1/TheWorstChristmasWeatherEver.html

And you can follow Sean on socials @SeanBattyTV

For a signed copy of Sean’s book, visit his website.

You can follow us on Instagram @fortheloveofweather and on X @4loveofweather.

We really hope you enjoy this episode of the podcast and leave loving the weather a little bit more. See

In this episode we chat to the brilliant Sarah Kent - a meteorologist and founder of Wild Soul Coaching.

Sarah lives on a narrow boat and has done so for the past 2 years, navigating UK waterways.

Her curiosity about the world around her as a child led her to science but she bas always had the soul of a philosopher.

We get a practical insight into life on a boat and how being a meteorologist comes in handy. But we also learn about what really means to live a sustainable life and to be in each moment of a day.

Through her coaching Sarah empowers women to live extraordinary lives, and to make decisions that put positive ripples out into the world. In this episode she also reminds us that time is precious.

If you would like to find out more about Sarah's business Wild Soul Coaching you can find her at https://www.sarahlkent.com/

You can follow us on Instagram @fortheloveofweather and on X @4loveofweather. We really hope you enjoy this episode of the podcast and leave loving the weather a little bit more.

This is the second episode from the Blue Earth Summit 2024. Please check out our instagram feed @fortheloveofweather to get a flavour of what we got up to.

We captured and shared as many speakers and guests as we could and yet again we were blown away by the amazing conversations we had and most importantly people’s willingness to give us their time to talk about what they were passionate about.

The Blue Earth Summit is held over 3 days and plays host to 5,000+ decision makers, industry pioneers, provocative thought leaders, sustainability trailblazers, insightful solutions and boundary-pushing start ups. It’s the place to explore, meet, learn, collaborate and take action.

In this episode of the podcast we speak to Avery Johnston from KPMG, Blue Earth Summit co-founder Linley Lewis, Ben Pollack from Climate Cartographic and interviewer Hannah MacInnes.

Avery Johnstone is a manager in KPMG's Global Decarbonisation Hub. KPMG are doing work around story telling to bridge the gap between the decision makers in big business today and young people that are going to inherit those roles in the future.

Avery has a powerful ethos about business and climate change. She says that that you don’t have to be a full time activist to impact change. People can use their autonomy, skill and education to make a difference - ‘Mobilising everyone is what we need’.

You can find Avery Johnstone on LinkedIn.

Linley Lewis COO & Co-Founder of the Blue Earth Summit. Linley and the founders saw an opportunity to bring his love of the outdoors and sustainable business and co-created the Blue Earth Summit.

Linley talks a little about climate fatigue and how the Blue Earth Summit is designed to inspire and connect through motivational speaking while creating a space for sustainable business, start up’s and philanthropy.

You can find Linley on LinkedIn.

Our third guest is Ben Pollack a Co-Founder & Strategy Director of Climate Cartographics.

Ben felt he needed a change in his career and drew on his love of the outdoors to harness his data skills to develop impactful visualisations of ecology and the environment. His business offers a design service for companies wanting to make impactful visualisations through using 3D modelling.

Check out their website climatecartographis.com to find examples of their work. Ben is also on LinkedIn.

Our final guest is Hannah MacInnes an interviewer at the Blue Earth Summit.

Hannah talks about how important it is for all ages to be represented in climate from very young to very old.

She remarks on the changing nature of audiences, mainly with audiences becoming younger but that we can still learn from older members of society and how it is deeply engrained in them to live within their means while having a huge respect for nature.

You can find Hannah MacInnes at @hannahmacin.