Peatlands sequester twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests and are vital ecosystems with essential roles in water management and biodiversity support — but they are under threat. Most have been damaged due to peat extraction and other human activity, contributing to climate change. British horticulturist, journalist and author Alys Fowler joins me on the podcast this week to share why peatlands are indispensable and why gardeners should reconsider their use of peat moss.
I have admired Alys and her work and talent for a long time. She was a regular presenter on the BBC’s “Gardeners’ World” and she hosted the BBC Two series “The Edible Garden.” She’s also authored many books on plants and gardening, including, in recent years, “Eat What You Grow: How to Have an Undemanding Edible Garden That Is Both Beautiful and Productive” and “Grow, Forage and Make: Fun Things to Do with Plants.”
Alys Fowler is a horticulturist and journalist. She has authored a new book on peatlands and the people who care for them. Photo Credit: Roo Lewis
Alys’s new book is “Peatlands: A Journey Between Land and Water,” in which she takes a close look at the birds, animals, plants and insects that live in peat bogs. She lives in North Wales next to a huge peat bog, which informs her writing. She also visited the Flow Country in Scotland, the remote Border Mires in England and the Brecon Beacons mountain range in Wales to create an intimate picture of biodiverse peat bogs and the people who care for them.
Alys says extracting peat has a huge environmental impact and releases an untold amount of carbon dioxide. It’s why she has been a peat-free gardener for decades. Even if gardeners grow the biggest trees, if they still use peat moss, she says, it won’t right the equation.
The peat in the peat bog can be meters deep, but to get to that point takes thousands of years. A healthy peat bog is completely saturated with water and grows 1 millimeter deeper a year or 1 meter every thousand years. The living layer is sphagnum moss, and it continues to sequester more carbon each day.
But 80% of peat bogs are considered damaged. They may have had drains installed. The top layers may have been extracted. A road or building may have been built over it or near it.
“The amount of carbon that’s being released is genuinely jeopardizing our climate,” Alys says.
Alys Fowler’s new book “Peatlands.”
Get to Know Alys Fowler
Alys grew up in a rural farming community. Her mother had a small landholding where she raised chickens to sell their eggs locally. Orchards surrounded the garden.
Alys called it an absolutely textbook idyllic childhood outside. “Even when it was raining, you really had to persuade her to be allowed to stay in the house,” she says of her endlessly curious mother.
Alys’s father, now retired, was a doctor. “There was this funny mixture of her kind of attention and his science,” Alys says.
By her late teens, when she was working out who she wanted to be and what she wanted to do, she knew it had to be outside, though she didn’t want to be a farmer. She decided she wanted to be a gardener, following in the footsteps of her mother, a passionate gardener.
“Once I said I was into gardening, she went all out, making sure that I knew what that could possibly mean,” Alys says.
When Alys was 16, she got work experience in the orchard department at Kew Gardens outside London for the summer, and she knew she found her people.
“It was full of my people — young people who were really, really into plants and really, really into understanding plants and how they interacted,” she recalls.
As a botanical garden, Kew considers how plants grow in the wild and how to grow them in plant communities.
Alys applied for the Kew diploma so she could continue her studies there. Only one spot a year is offered to an 18-year-old, and Alys earned it. However, she had to get two years of experience elsewhere before she could take on her Kew apprenticeship. She went to the Royal Horticultural Society garden in Wisley, in Surrey, England, for one year, but wanted to spend her second year in a large city. She applied to the New York Botanical Garden and convinced them to take her on as an apprentice — even though NYBG didn’t have an existing apprenticeship program for her to join.
Alys lived in the East Village in Manhattan and spent her spare time in community gardens. She credits most of her garden style to that year in New York.
The New York Botanical Garden.
Photo Credit: Vadim Anvaer / Getty Images
She returned to Kew for three years and went on to earn a master’s degree in environment, society and science.
The two tracks she saw ahead of her were to be a plant nerd, learning everything there is to know about a genus or type of plant, or to go into garden design work. But neither option appealed to her. She wanted to pursue the question of why people love gardening.
“I really wanted to understand why, as a species, we need to do this kind of form of practice around nature,” she says. The closest field she could find to pursue that answer was geography.
After a stint as a street sweeper in Hackney in Inner London, she found work as a journalist at a trade magazine called Horticulture Week. Being aware that print publications were threatened by online media, she sought long-term stability by applying to be a TV researcher for the BBC.
“In a way that I still don’t quite understand, I ended up on camera,” she says. “And initially, I hated it.”
However, she did love the fact that being a television presenter gave her access to more people and their gardens. “That kind of fed this need of mine to kind of talk to people about why they care,” she says.
She wrote for The Guardian, a British daily newspaper, both while working for the BBC and after. When her television roles ended, she leaned into writing and teaching. The publisher Rupert Lancaster attended a presentation Alys gave at a gallery on paintings that help to understand the British journey of gardening, and he invited her to tea. He thought she could write about things beyond gardening.
Alys decided to write a book on canoeing the canals of Birmingham, where she was living. The canals were remnants of Birmingham’s origin as an industrial town.
“Although they have been abandoned by industry and us, they weren’t in any way abandoned by wildlife,” she says of the canals.
The manmade canals are inhabited by a strange ecology made up of all sorts of plants from all over the world that have blown in and been flown in. She details what she observed in her book “Hidden Nature: A Voyage of Discovery,” which is also a memoir that shares her coming out story.
Canada geese along the Birmingham Canal.
Photo Credit: Kstphotography / Getty Images
Going Peat-Free
Kew Gardens became peat-free more than 30 years ago.
“When I went to Kew, it was just the given,” Alys says. “Kew’s motto is, ‘We won’t destroy someone else’s habitat to make our own.’ … The stuff that grows on a peat bog cannot grow anywhere else. So they had this hard and fast rule that they would be peat free.”
However, the Royal Horticultural Society, to this day, continues to use peat.
“I, at 19, was really struck by this,” Alys recalls. “I was like, here they are, two institutions, both of them absolutely phenomenally good at growing plants to an incredible standard. And one lot says, ‘You can’t do it without peat,’ and the other one says, ‘You must not do it with peat.’”
She realized it’s not enough to ask people to go peat free and tell them that it’s really important for the environment. “People really need to know why,” she says.
After 12 years working for The Guardian, Alys quit so she could spend a year studying to write “Peatlands.”
A lake at Kew Gardens in London.
Photo Credit: Leonid Andronov
Understanding Peatlands
Peatlands can be found all around the globe: in the tropics, frozen, in Russia, Eastern Europe, the United Kingdom, Africa, Australia, the United States and Canada.
“The reason why you find peat around the globe is because it is a way of the earth system storing carbon,” Alys explains. “So whenever the system started to heat up, the bio-geoengineering system that is earth needed to find a way to bank carbon for a long time so that that heating up process wouldn’t run out of control.”
Two primary ways earth stores carbon is in forests and in seaweed. Forests store a tremendous amount of carbon in soil, but peatlands — peat bogs and fens — store more carbon than any other soil system, Alys says.
“Essentially what the earth is doing is using the peat bog to make an air conditioning unit,” she says. “I think that’s the best way to think about them. They are cooling the earth and keeping it also humid and making sure we have good, clean air to breathe.”
A peat swamp forest.
Photo Credit: Boonsom / Getty Images
How Peat Extraction and Plastic Pots Created an Industry
We need peatlands to remain as carbon sinks and stores. But for various reasons, including peat extraction for gardening and agricultural uses, peatlands are being destroyed.
“When a peat bog or a fen is drained and is no longer wet, the peat starts to break down and it releases carbon dioxide,” Alys notes.
The use of peat for soil amendments and growing media — called “compost” in the U.K. — is a relatively new practice.
A cross-section of an Irish peat bog showing heather and other plants on top
Photo Credit: Stephen Barnes / Getty Images
“We haven’t been making peat compost forever,” Alys says. “It’s really short, short history. It became really a big commercial thing in about the 1960s when garden centers and plastic pots became a thing.”
Plastic pots are much cheaper to ship around the country than terracotta pots, so the creation of plastic pots spurred an industry of making plants in one place and selling them somewhere else, Alys points out.
“We are environmentally in a very tenuous point in our timeline,” she says. “Digging up a bit of peat bog to grow a petunia is like — I mean, honestly, they will look back at us in the future and think we were like the Romans, that we were just mad.”
Plastic nursery pots are much more economical for shipping compared to terracotta pots, and their rise spawned garden centers.
Peat Alternatives
For her gardening needs, Alys uses peat-free compost from Melcourt. (It’s available in the United Kingdom only.)
She also sieves compost at home and uses leaf mold and composted bark mulch to make her own potting mix. And she practices soil blocking.
“I actually think pure leaf mold is the most magical seedling stuff ever,” Alys says. “It’s really low-nutrient. It really holds on to moisture when it needs to. But once it’s really fine, it’s very free draining.”
Coir is a peat alternative made from the husks of coconuts that can be a good substitute for gardening purposes but Its production and transportation still raises environmental concerns.
Alys advises considering the soil food web and its importance to the health of your garden and your success growing vegetables and flowers. Each garden has a hyperlocal microbial community, and making seed starting mix or potting mix from your own garden will improve the soil food web that your seedlings are raised in. When transplanted, the microbes in the potting mix will communicate effectively with the microbes present in the garden.
Alys says if you want to do some radically good and exciting environmental gardening, make your own potting compost with what’s on hand at home to shorten the gap between the microbes that you are bringing in to your garden and the microbes that exist in your soil.
“Once you can get them down to a very kind of hyperlocalized level, you will start to see the health of your plants just improve so quickly,” she says. “So that’s a good bit. It’s cheaper or free. It’s good for the environment, it’s good for future generations and it’s really good for your own soil.”
Coir is made of coconut husks. It is an alternative to peat moss.
Banning Peat Moss Products
The United Kingdom is supposed to have a peat product-ban, taking effect in 2027 and becoming fully implemented in 2030. But Alys doubts it will be enforceable.
“Many governments understand that getting their peat bogs restored is such an easy climate win, that it makes more sense to restore them than it does to extract them,” she says. “So you definitely are seeing an impetus in a lot of governments to just get the restoration work done. And in order for a bog to be restored, it has to be re-wetted, and you can’t extract peat from a re-wetted bog.”
Preserving peatlands is essential to mitigating climate change.
Photo Credit: Mordolff / Getty Images
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Alys Fowler on peatlands and the reasons for going peat-free. If you haven’t listened yet, you can do so now by scrolling to the top of the page and clicking the Play icon in the green bar under the page title.
Are you a peat-free gardener? Let us know in the comments below.
Links & Resources
Some product links in this guide are affiliate links. See full disclosure below.
Episode 116: Understanding the Soil Food Web, with Dr. Elaine Ingham
Episode 226: The Magical World of Moss Gardening
Episode 238: Peat Moss: Examining the Challenges of Its Ongoing Use in the Face of Climate Change
joegardener Online Gardening Academy™: Popular courses on gardening fundamentals; managing pests, diseases & weeds; seed starting and more.
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joegardener Online Gardening Academy Master Seed Starting: Everything you need to know to start your own plants from seed — indoors and out.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Beginning Gardener Fundamentals: Essential principles to know to create a thriving garden.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Growing Epic Tomatoes: Learn how to grow epic tomatoes with Joe Lamp’l and Craig LeHoullier.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Master Pests, Diseases & Weeds: Learn the proactive steps to take to manage pests, diseases and weeds for a more successful garden with a lot less frustration. Just $47 for lifetime access!
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Perfect Soil Recipe Master Class: Learn how to create the perfect soil environment for thriving plants.
Alys Fowler on Instagram | @alysf
“Peatlands: A Journey Between Land and Water” by Alys Fowler
“Grow, Forage and Make: Fun Things to Do with Plants” by Alys Fowler
“A Modern Herbal” by Alys Fowler
“House Plants: Love, Care and Repair” by Alys Fowler
“The Thrifty Forager: Living Off Your Local Landscape” by Alys Fowler
“The Thrifty Gardener: How to Create a Stylish Garden for Next to Nothing” by Alys Fowler
“Eat What You Grow: How to Have an Undemanding Edible Garden That Is Both Beautiful and Productive” by Alys Fowler
“The Edible Garden: How to Have Your Garden and Eat It, Too” by Alys Fowler
“Garden Anywhere” by Alys Fowler
“Hidden Nature” by Alys Fowler
“Abundance: How to Store and Preserve Your Garden Produce” by Alys Fowler
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Milorganite® – Our podcast episode sponsor and Brand Partner of joegardener.com
Disclosure: Some product links in this guide are affiliate links, which means we get a commission if you make a purchase. However, none of the prices of these resources have been increased to compensate us, and compensation is not an influencing factor on their inclusion here. The selection of all items featured in this post and podcast was based solely on merit and in no way influenced by any affiliate or financial incentive, or contractual relationship. At the time of this writing, Joe Lamp’l has professional relationships with the following companies who may have products included in this post and podcast: Milorganite, Soil3, Territorial Seed Company, Proven Winners ColorChoice, and Dramm. These companies are either Brand Partners of joegardener.com and/or advertise on our website. However, we receive no additional compensation from the sales or promotion of their product through this guide. The inclusion of any products mentioned within this post is entirely independent and exclusive of any relationship.
