Alan Titchmarsh issues urgent 'do not' warning to UK households with a garden

Alan Titchmarsh has issued an urgent warning to UK gardeners - urging them: "Do not." The ITV Love Your Weekend star appeared on BBC Breakfast, where he issued a stark reminder about biosecurity, in an interview which aired this weekend.

The former Ground Force star, 75, was quizzed by host Ben Thompson on the need to protect Britain’s “food crops but the rest of our plants”. The gardening guru warned Ben, who was in the Media City studio in Salford in Greater Manchester, that “biosecurity is a real and present danger.”

He warned that one of the main functions of the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) was to manage the nations borders for plants, explaining they “monitors the passage of plants between Europe, the rest of the world and this country.”

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They job is to “make sure that we retain plant health in terms of both pests and diseases," he said. He warned that biosecurity threats were an “ongoing problem and a lot of work is being done in that area to make sure safeguards are put in place and that we don’t import.”

“It’s vitally important that when people go on holiday, they don’t chuck a cutting in their bag. Don’t do it.” Titchmarsh said. Instead, he recommended gardeners around the UK to buy their plants “in this country from reputable suppliers”."

Even if they are foreign in origin, he added that those plants would “have been quarantined for a good year to make sure they are free of pests and diseases”. “Then you know not only are you buying something for your garden that won’t affect it, but you’re also not bringing something into this country that we’d hitherto managed to keep out,” Titchmarsh added.

He told UK households: "It’s important that all of us take part in plant safety and biosecurity.”