One Summer Lucy Houliston, aged just 6, set herself the mission of raising awareness of weeds as plants that deserve love and attention, just like everything else. And so The Weed Trust was born.

She also had a passion for insects, she remembers having pockets full of woodlice!

Adult Lucy is now working in urban ecology and she shares the story of The Weed Trust and where it has led her.

We went together to the Eden Nature Garden to meet Benny Hawkesbee, who describes himself as a wildlife gardener, he greeted us wearing his favourite dandelion teeshirt!

There will be bees, beetles and frogs along the way!

Independent podcasts like Our Plant Stories depend on their listeners for help with the costs of making the podcast such as the hosting platform and the editing programme.

Using the Buy Me A Coffee platform you can make a one off online donation of £5 and that money will go towards making more episodes. Everyone who buys a 'virtual coffee' will get a shout out on the podcast.

The support of listeners means a lot to me.

Buy Me A Coffee

Every month I will make a plant story but stories often lead to more stories and I end up publishing Offshoot episodes. So if you 'Follow' the podcast on your podcast app you will never miss an episode.

It also makes a real difference if you can spare the time to rate and/or review an episode after you have listened. Spotify and Apple look at these ratings and it helps to get the podcast promoted to other plant lovers.

Our Plant Stories is presented and produced by Sally Flatman

The music is Fade to Black by Howard Levy

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:

OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy