William Milliken

I am a scientist, studying ethnobotany at Kew. This has meant working with indigenous people in the Amazon, recording medicinal plants. However, I also researched useful plants in Scotland, and one of my greatest achievements was Flora Celtica, because people seemed to enjoy reading it!

As well as working for Kew, I and my wife Rachel started to manage a farm in Sussex in 2016. Never having farmed, this was a fast learning course. We got a grant to restore broken-down fences, lay the hedges and manage the fields with very low input. We now have saddleback pigs, sheep, chickens, ducks and bees. Having studied the use of plants for treating livestock in Scotland (as part of a wider survey), and now having a farm which we want to make sustainable, I wanted to find out what knowledge still existed (and how it could it be used).