Matthew Biggs obituary

Panellist on Gardeners’ Question Time on Radio 4 who was honoured with a medal from the Royal Horticultural Society

A mainstay of BBC Radio 4’s long-running panel show Gardeners’ Question Time for more than three decades, Matt Biggs, who has died aged 65, became one of Britain’s most trusted gardening authorities. He styled himself “the people’s gardener”, a nod to a horticultural career that began in the late 1970s in the parks department at Leicester council.

After completing his studies at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, he began to concentrate on media work and got an early break on a gardening phone-in show on LBC, the London radio station. Between 1991 and 1996, he was a presenter of Channel 4’s Garden Club alongside the plantsman Roy Lancaster. Matt also directed and researched Grass Roots for ITV in the mid-90s. However, he loved the immediacy and intimacy of radio the most.

In 1994, he joined the panel of horticultural experts taking questions from a live audience of amateur gardeners on Gardeners’ Question Time, and remained with the show until a week before his death.

He wrote more than 20 books, ranging from A Nation in Bloom (2019), celebrating the Royal Horticultural Society’s 100th anniversary, to a children’s title, A Home for Every Plant (2023). He also lectured at the English Gardening School in London and gave hundreds of talks to garden clubs in village halls on subjects ranging from great botanists and gardeners to growing fruit and veg, plants for problem places and the wonders of the horticultural world.

Born in Leicester, with a mild form of cerebral palsy affecting his left side, Biggs was one of the three children of Ivan, an electrical appliance fitter, and Marion (nee Arthur), a schoolteacher. It was from them, and from helping out on his mother’s vegetable patch, that he inherited a “slow-burn” love for the English countryside and the natural world.

After leaving the City of Leicester boys’ grammar school with few qualifications, he got a job as a junior clerk in the Leicester city council housing department. While staring out of his office window on the 13th floor at the council gardeners working below, he realised he would much rather be outdoors. When he encountered the parks manager in the lift, Biggs asked for a transfer. He spent his first year sweeping play areas and cleaning public toilets. “I started at the bottom,” he would later reflect, “and it was the best foundation I could have had.”

He persevered, pursuing his passion at Pershore College of Horticulture in Worcestershire, where he studied for a higher national certificate. He still had to overcome 72 rejection letters from potential horticultural employers, which he felt might have been because of his physical disability. However, he viewed every rejection as a step closer to his goal of a career in horticulture.

In 1983 he was accepted on to the three-year diploma course at Kew, which, Biggs said, “opened a new world” to him, allowing him to work in environments such as the Temperate House, and he also worked at Kew as a guide lecturer and staff training officer. He then ran his own garden maintenance business before making the move into garden media.

In 2020, he was diagnosed with bowel cancer. Though he initially received a clear scan after surgery in 2021, the cancer returned in his liver and lungs. He faced his illness with pragmatic optimism and described chemotherapy as “being sprayed with weedkiller”. During his darkest days at Mount Vernon Cancer Centre in Northwood, Hertfordshire, he found strength in the view of birch trees from his hospital window and made a point of wearing brightly coloured clothes to his sessions.

In 2024, the Garden Media Guild gave him a lifetime achievement award. In his acceptance speech, he said he was fortunate to have a job he loved and that “you’ve got to go out and inspire other people and if you don’t, then all that knowledge and excitement is a waste of time”.

In April 2026, the RHS recognised his contribution with the Victoria Medal of Honour. While the award is usually strictly limited to 63 living recipients, one for each year of Queen Victoria’s reign, the RHS Council made a rare exception, and a 64th medal was presented to Biggs by Lancaster.

His faith as a member of the Christadelphian church provided support, as did a “legacy garden” Biggs instigated for fellow patients at Mount Vernon. “If I end up going out on this one, I’ll be a happy bloke,” he said. He viewed the project as his greatest achievement, a space where what he described as the “billionaires” (rich in spirit, if not in pocket) who love gardens and gardening could find healing.

He is survived by his wife, Gill (nee Mastemaker), whom he married in 1991, and their three children, Jessica, Henry and Chloe.

• Matthew John Biggs, horticulturist, born 2 June 1960; died 21 May 2026