Reflections on the Urban Greening Event 2 – Garden Museum, 2 February 2026

Reflections on Urban Greening Event 2 – Garden Museum, 2 February 2026

I bought my ticket with a degree of trepidation.

Over the past few years, I’ve attended many conferences and symposiums (I’m still not entirely sure of the difference, to be honest). Some have been genuinely valuable; many, however, have been death by PowerPoint. Often it’s the same speakers, saying broadly the same things, and—most critically for me—there is rarely any follow-up. What was the outcome? What were we actually trying to achieve?

Yesterday felt different !!!

There was a clearer sense of purpose and, crucially, a tangible outcome. A conference paper will be produced from the event and sent to decision-makers and fund-holders—to quote Pete Swift, “the people who form the bridge in the middle between the top-down and the bottom-up.” That clarity matters.

Some key takeaways

1. Putting the gardener at the front of the queue

A conference where the gardener is foregrounded is, in itself, a meaningful starting point.

As John Little noted in his closing remarks, “we actually haven’t changed that much yet, have we? We haven’t changed where the money goes etc etc.” That remains true—but yesterday felt like a step in the right direction.

I didn’t hear a clear commitment that funding would be redirected directly into gardeners’ wages, nor a decisive move away from capital expenditure towards long-term revenue. However, there is a growing acknowledgement—long understood within the industry—that the greatest value is created by investing in gardeners and land managers, not in layers of bureaucracy, and certainly not disproportionately in design alone.

This re-evaluation of where value sits, and how money is redistributed, will take time. But the awareness is growing—and that matters.

2. Joy, nurture and care

One practical takeaway for me is the idea of explicitly writing “nurture” and “care” into specification documents and future HMMPs.

I firmly believe that change can be driven through specification, yet I’ve never consciously embedded emotional language into mine. On reflection, this is something I intend to implement. Language shapes behaviour.

3. Long-term stewardship

Long-term stewardship came up again and again—and rightly so.

Within our current economic system, land is described as being “owned”, but in reality it never truly is. We have always been, and will always be, stewards of land. That framing is powerful, and it needs to be documented—written into policy, into specifications, and embedded early in projects.

This means having these conversations at RIBA Stages 0, 1 and 2. Early. It means having the gardener—the landscape manager—in the room from the outset, bringing this language and this way of thinking into projects at inception, not as an afterthought once budgets are fixed and ambitions diluted.

Looking ahead

A potential title for a future symposium might be:

“Unlocking Finance and Natural Capital for Horticulture.”