An online resource for experienced, beginner and non-gardeners everywhere – and for anyone curious to explore and understand how what we do out in our gardens and allotments affects the natural world around us.
Get my full colour guide to knowing, identifying & gently nobbling garden and allotment weeds, online and from your local bookshop.
“This is a great book. We are just starting an organic vegetable plot this year and the book has been a revelation – it’s wonderful to see what weeds are helpful in encouraging insects and wildlife and can be safely encouraged, and which should be watched carefully! It’s clear, well written and with very helpful photographs. I’d give it more than 5 stars if I could. Highly recommended.”
Amazon.co.uk 5* review, June 2018
Find out more.
Earth-friendly gardener is cultivated by me, John Walker, a British gardening and environment writer, book author and blogger. You can find out more about me, my gardening philosophy and the gentle ambition for this site on the about page.
At the heart of earth-friendly gardener is a growing collection of my published magazine articles, columns and blogposts, covering a diversity of topics: from tackling climate change to exposing gardening industry ‘greenwash’, growing using the best peat-free compost to buying less gardening ‘stuff’. I hope you enjoy reading my work, that it challenges your grey matter and, hopefully, gets you thinking differently about what you’re doing in your own garden or allotment, whatever its size.
To ensure its independence, earth-friendly gardener doesn’t carry any advertising or sponsorship.
There’s information about all of my books, including my latest, The Vegan Gardener: Using Vegan-Organic Techniques for a Planet-friendly, Wildlife-Abundant, Beautiful and Productive Garden; the new edition of Weeds: An Organic, Earth-friendly Guide to Their Identification, Use and Control, and Digging Deep in the Garden my four-book series of thought-provoking, cage-rattling essays.
How to Create an Eco Garden: A Practical Guide to Greener and Sustainable Gardening is published by Lorenz Books and is available from all bookshops and online booksellers.
I make my living from writing, so if you’re a magazine or website editor, book publisher, media producer, or an organisation looking for some fresh, thought-cultivating content, and you’re interested in exploring ideas that chime with mine, get in touch via writer for hire.
If you’d like me to speak to your gardening club, society or other organisation about the themes that run through my writing – or take part in a debate around trickier gardening topics, such as ending peat use – please go to the speaking page.
If you enjoy and value your visits here, a donation helps me to meet the costs of feeding and watering the site and helps fund future, more searching articles (which you’re unlikely to read in mainstream gardening magazines).
Praise for ‘Gardening’s own goal’
“The judges were looking for a journalist who demonstrated a clear understanding of ecological issues, but who was able to communicate that with a spark. John Walker is an exemplar in both these respects, questioning industry assumptions and marketing, and driving his arguments forward with rigour. The judges felt that gardeners who read the piece would be influenced by John’s voice for months and years to come.”
