Today you’re known as a writer, a gardener, and an environmental activist — but how did your career start?

My career isn’t really a career — it’s a series of serendipitous coincidences.

I studied history at university, but I didn’t want to pursue the academic field. I wanted to do something more international. At the end of my degree, I went to the careers office to see where I could use languages and work internationally, and I saw an application for the European University Institute. The most exciting thing was that the interview was in Florence.

I went to Italy to do a doctorate in history, and when I arrived, I didn’t really have a subject. The European University Institute is based in a beautiful ancient abbey in the hills above Florence. It had originally been run by a Catholic counter-reformation order that was completely unknown in England. The professor said, “Why don’t you see if they have an archive, and if there’s anything interesting?”

It turned out to be a fascinating order, with links to Galileo. Like many Catholic orders, it ran into problems with abusive priests. I ended up writing a book about it.

After that, I replaced a friend of mine at the French Institute in South Kensington. Then someone head-hunted me to the BBC to make documentaries because I had good French, German, and, by then, Italian.

Your books are very different from one another. Where does the inspiration come from?

A lot of it is chance. But a big factor is that I’m interested in everything. Everything is interesting.

One of my first books was Doing Business in Eastern Europe. I was working on a BBC programme just after Eastern Europe opened up. Nobody knew how to do business, least of all the incoming businessmen.

Then I said to the BBC books editor, “You should ask me to write a book about something I really know about — like skiing.” She said, “Well, actually, we do want a skiing book.” My brother was an Olympic skier and an engineer, so he understood the technical side — how skis bend and work - so we co-wrote the next book together.

Later, the Chiswick House Kitchen Garden led to The Family Kitchen Garden, about how to garden with children, because I and my co-authors had spent years learning how to do that properly.

Another book came from pure chance — a friend found a letter in a bottle on a beach, and that became a story.

And the next one also came from chance: my aunt was an artist in Paris in the 1960s. She was murdered in 1970, and in 2021, someone rang my mother and said they’d found all her diaries and artwork in a skip. It turned out it wasn’t a skip at all — it was her entire studio, bricked up and hidden, like Sleeping Beauty, covered in ivy. The working title of the book is The Lost Studio.

There’s no plan. It all comes from things that actually happen.

Your connection to nature runs through everything you do. Where did that begin?

We were always outside. We skied from a very young age. My mother learned to ski in a field behind her house in Czechoslovakia. My brother started at three; I started at six, on huge wooden planks that you had to carry uphill.

My parents also loved diving, so we spent a lot of time at the beach. My mother gardened, and there was an abandoned corner garden near where my parents lived. My brother and I started looking after it, asking neighbours for spare plants.

At school, we did a “Save the Whales” campaign. From early on, it was obvious to me that what we were doing to nature was wrong, and it’s only got worse.

You’ve taken that concern and turned it into local action. Can you describe what that looks like in practice?

We talk about climate change, but we also need to think about air pollution, flooding, drought, and biodiversity. We don’t feed ourselves properly. We don’t have enough pollinators. Our rivers are full of pollution.

We need permeable ground, places to sit as we age, and flowers for insects. We have to make huge changes.

I don’t want to walk past fly-tipping and mattresses. I want to walk past flowers. It makes people happier — and it makes me happier too. Cycling here, I went past the first daffodils, a couple of hellebores, and the first snowdrops. It looks nice, I’m happy, and some bee will be happy to stick its nose in and get some pollen from it.

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Your local projects are now well-known. Did it all start with Chiswick House Kitchen Garden?

Again, that was completely by chance. I was walking my dog in the park and came across the walled garden at Chiswick House. It dates from 1682 and was completely overgrown and unknown. I saw workmen measuring a gate and asked what was behind it. They said it was going to be a retail outlet. Then we made a fuss and started a campaign. That night I climbed over the wall. It was ten-foot-high brambles. I asked if we could start gardening there, and they said no — we had to wait years for funding, or we had to prove that schools are interested in the project and raise some funds.

So we proved schools wanted to use it. We raised money. We set up a charity. And we showed them how it could be, beautiful and sustainable. Eventually, the authorities caught up, formed a trust, and secured major funding. At some point, we decided to walk away. We handed over our volunteers and even our grant. All we wanted was for the garden to be saved.

One of our targets was that 300 children would recognise a carrot — and eat one. The Kitchen Garden is one of our proudest achievements.

That project led to Abundance London. What inspired its creation?

Sarah Cruz and I realised how much fruit and vegetables were going to waste. We mapped fruit trees in the area and worked with schools to harvest them. Most of the fruit turned out to be in private gardens. People didn’t know what to do with it. If you have ninety kilos of apples in two weeks, you either let them rot or cut the tree down.

We now have a database of about ninety trees. For fifteen years, we’ve harvested fruit, pressed apples, and shared the produce. It’s a win-win.

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All these projects take huge amounts of time and energy. How important was support at home?

Massively. I have a very supportive husband who has always done lots of childcare and has never treated my work as a hobby. He has always treated my projects as important and as a proper job, even if it is not paid.

Who inspired you growing up to be so active and independent?

My mother always worked. My parents were refugees from Central Europe after the Second World War. My father was a car mechanic; my mother worked as a welfare assistant.

They worked terribly hard. My mother handled the family finances and was a very strong woman. She’s still running her business at 94 — an online print and antique maps shop.

Looking ahead, what are your current projects?

We’re doing a big art project with schools around a redevelopment site, the old police station. The hoardings will become a forest, with lots of insects. Each child will do an insect, and we’ll build it up collectively. It’s a way of learning about local wildlife and making something beautiful together.

And then there’s The Lost Studio, which I’m working on now.

Finally, what motivates you to keep going?

The more we are surrounded by beauty, the better we feel. So yes, I’m doing it for me — for feeling good about myself and my environment — but also for nature and for other people. There isn’t just one reason.

We’re not here for very long. I can’t save the rainforest, but I can do something locally and know exactly where every penny goes. I know that, in our micro, unimportant way, we’re effective.

All those children who came to the Kitchen Garden — some of them will have had golden days, and some of them will learn from that, and it spreads.

Coming away from the willow-weaving on Saturday, I felt that thirty people went home feeling good. They’d been in the fresh air, made new friends, and created something nice.

Looking after green space should be a statutory obligation, like health or education. People need nature, and nature needs people. That’s really it.

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