April 29th 2020
Veteran garden writer and broadcaster Peter Seabrook has written an open letter to the Prime Minister calling for garden centres and nurseries to be allowed to re-open (text courtesy of Horticulture Week):
"Please, please, please make a special case and allow garden centres, retail nurseries and gardens to open this weekend. "I ask, in the interests of our physical and mental well-being, when so many of us are in lockdown.
"This is National Gardening Week and the first May Bank holiday is critical. There are so many things to be done this weekend to set gardens up for the next nine months.
"Now folk fully understand social distancing at supermarkets, it must be safer to have controlled shopping in the open air and if we are to plant the million trees you recommend, to clean the very air we breathe, we need the plants and equipment.
"No one knows better than I, having lost my wife of 60 years to coronavirus on Good Friday, what a blessed relief it is to be out in the garden, hearing the birds sing, enjoying the spring flowers, growing some fresh food, shedding a tear and getting physically tired.
"If garden centres remain closed, literally millions of plants will die and Britain’s gardens will be the poorer."