‘I don’t see how I can possibly do my job and eat mushrooms,” says Sally Nex, a campaign advocate for the Peat-Free Partnership. “An awful lot of the food you buy in the supermarket is grown in peat: field mushrooms and little button mushrooms, salads and many brassicas, herbs in pots … all of those have started in peat.”
I’m taken aback. I’ve bought peat-free compost for years, but I’d never considered “hidden” peat. “I would imagine that most people are buying peat-free compost at the moment – certainly, you only have to go into a garden centre to see the amount of peat-free options you now have,” says Nex. “But you may not realise that an awful lot – probably most – of the plants that are on sale in that garden centre are also grown in peat.”
If you’re unsure of the problem with peat, here’s a quick primer. Peatlands cover just 3% of the Earth’s surface, but store twice as much carbon as all the forests in the world. In the UK alone, peatlands store more than 3.2bn tonnes. Alistair Griffiths, the head of science at the Royal Horticultural Society, says: “Nothing else, other than the ocean, stores that much carbon for that length of time – tens of thousands of years.”
However, once damaged, peatlands rapidly release that carbon, transforming from a carbon sink to a carbon source. Globally, peatlands have been damaged by drainage, conversion to agriculture, burning and mining for fuel. But in the UK, where 80% of peatlands are damaged, Nex says that more than 90% of the extracted peat is used in horticulture. “The 1,000 hectares [2,500 acres] that are being extracted in Scotland, the 1,000-plus that are being extracted in Northern Ireland, the extra 384 hectares in the Somerset Levels – that’s what I want to stop,” she says. “These are peatlands that are bringing down our climate emissions and protecting our local communities from flooding – or would be if they weren’t being drained and dug up.” About 760,000 cubic metres of peat is used in UK horticulture every year.
The environmental case against peat is so stark that it is hard to believe it is still legal to bag it up and sell it to gardeners. Efforts have been made to ban it for decades. In 1999, the UK set a voluntary target for the horticultural industry to be 90% peat-free by 2010; by 2011, it was at 32%. A new target was set that year; in 2020, that too was missed. In 2022, the Conservative government announced it would ban peat sales and in 2024 a private member’s bill was introduced. A week away from its second reading, a general election was called and the bill was dropped.
Labour’s 2024 manifesto pledged to protect peat bogs and its October 2025 carbon budget and growth delivery plan stated: “We will legislate a ban on peat and peat-containing products.” Before campaigners could start celebrating, it added the kicker “when parliamentary time allows”. The government’s environment improvement plan in December repeated the commitment – and the caveat.
“The policy has enormous support right the way across the board, but it’s too big to just shuffle in and too small to give it its own space,” says Nex. “It’s not as big as cost of living or the NHS and all of the things that we’re battling against at the moment, but it must be the most widely supported piece of legislation that hasn’t actually made it into law.” The Liberal Democrats and the UK’s Green parties have long supported a ban. This year, environment ministers from England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland agreed that any legislation would apply to all four nations.
Campaigners keep piling on the pressure. Two years ago, more than 100 businesses, NGOs and supporters, including Chris Packham and the Guardian columnist Alys Fowler, signed an open letter to Keir Starmer. This February, the Peat-Free Partnership handed in a petition to No 10 calling for legislation; it has now been signed by nearly 18,000 people. A government consultation in 2022 found that more than 95% of the 5,000 respondents supported a ban, while 80% of the public backed it in a 2024 RHS survey.
Frustration is the main feeling among campaigners. Griffiths says: “We’re in the middle of a climate and biodiversity crisis – the government just needs to get on with it. We’re so close, but we need to get over the line.”
In the absence of a law, many businesses have taken matters into their own hands. Dobbies, Tesco, Waitrose, Lidl, Co-Op, Morrisons and Iceland now sell only peat-free compost. Griffiths says there are 124 totally peat-free plant nurseries around the UK, while B&Q’s Verve plant range recently became peat free. If you’re unsure, ask, says Nex. “It’s really good if we ask awkward questions and double-check whether or not things are peat-free before we buy them. Otherwise, garden centres don’t think people are interested.”
The RHS is spearheading the move to peat-free. Since January, its five garden centres and RHS Plants online sell only “no new peat” plants. This means that they sell only plants that were grown entirely peat-free or, in the case of older specimens, contain peat that was extracted before the end of 2025. From this year, all RHS flower shows are no-new-peat, too, including the flagship, Chelsea, which took place in May.
Not everyone was happy. Tim Penrose of Bowdens nursery, which has exhibited its hostas at Chelsea every year since 1996, had his application turned down this year over peat issues. “We met the peat-free policy 100%, even though we didn’t particularly want to,” he says. Penrose claimed he was blocked from exhibiting because he didn’t attend “anti-peat” seminars. He staged a protest in a Superman costume.
Penrose says he is not the only one with mixed feelings about peat. “All of a sudden, lots of people are creeping out of the cupboards and saying: ‘I’m not happy, too.’ Carnivorous plants will not grow in peat-free. We get thousands of plants from Holland, which isn’t interested in peat-free – what do we do then? I think peat-free could become a very big issue. A lot of the exhibitors are in their 70s and 80s. They don’t want more hoops to jump through.”
In response, the RHS said: “Despite the RHS repeatedly offering Tim Penrose support, as we have done with hundreds of nurseries, Tim would not engage with RHS or the process to transition to peat-free. This matter is currently subject to legal action.”
Bunny Guinness, a landscape architect who has won six gold medals at Chelsea, also detected discontent at this year’s show. “Loads of people in the Chelsea pavilion were saying to me: ‘I’m not coming back, you can’t grow this without peat.’ It’s just ridiculous.” According to HortWeek magazine, two nurseries have already said they are not exhibiting at Chelsea in 2027 due to the peat policy, while others are concerned they won’t be able to meet the conditions in time.
Guinness says that peat is “the perfect growing material. The alternatives require more fertiliser, more water – they’re shipped across the world. There’s no comparison. Substitutes don’t establish well and it puts people off gardening. It seems to me bonkers.” Nex describes such objections as “misinformation” and “scare stories”.
Guinness blames social media for “vilifying” peat. “This hate campaign against peat is very harsh,” she says. “No one in Europe is banning it; it’s only us on the back foot. Given that the alternatives are less sustainable, banning peat is not the right answer – it is virtue-signalling.” She says she is not downplaying the environmental impact of peat in horticulture: “Everyone wants it to go eventually, but we must have something to replace it with.”
Griffiths, who has been growing without peat since 1999, when he was the head of science at the Eden Project in Cornwall, says we already do. The RHS has invested £2.5m into peat-free research, part-funded by the government, at hundreds of nurseries. “For a very long time, the alternatives to peat were bark, wood chip, wood fibre and coir [coconut fibre],” Griffiths says. These do have their own carbon footprints, from the energy used to produce wood fibre to the long distances coir travels (although it is lightweight and transported by boat). “But peat will always have a bigger one due to its ability to store carbon for tens of thousands of years.”
These substitutes, he says, are “like the electric car: not the final solution, but the stepping stone. Ideally, in the near future, we’ll use more locally sourced alternatives.” One of the big hopes is paludiculture, or moss farming. He lists some of the others: cellulose fibre, cork, hemp, miscanthus (silvergrass), rice, vermicompost (from worms), frass (from black soldier flies), seaweed, willow … “There have been improvements in quality and consistency of peat-free compost,” he says. “They are much, much better than they were. If you water little and often, you actually use less water than before.”
What about carnivorous plants – Venus flytraps and the like – many of which naturally evolved to grow in peatlands? “We’ve been working over the last three years with the Carnivorous Plant Society,” says Griffiths. Chester zoo, for example, now grows more than 2,000 carnivorous plants entirely without peat. Plus, “any legislation is not a guillotine measure”, says Nex. She envisages a phased ban, requiring most growers to replace peat within two years, but allowing five years for trickier customers such as carnivorous plants and rhododendrons.
Another sticking point is seedlings. David Denny, the head of research at the Horticultural Trades Association, says: “With plug plants [potted seedlings] and young plants, there are mechanical issues for the seedlings to germinate, so growers use very small amounts of peat, then they’re moved to peat-free.” Griffiths admits that this is difficult to avoid, as the UK buys about 60% of young plug plant material in Europe, where peat is still widely used. However, he says, “Germany, Belgium and Switzerland are pushing forward on peat-free. The RHS has visited 10 young plant producers in Europe, all trialling peat-free materials.”
While critics feel the UK will be disadvantaged by a peat ban, Nex takes a different view. “The UK is the world leader in peat-free and we should be bloody proud of that,” she says. She cites trials carried out by Coventry University, in collaboration with Devon-based Riverford Organic Farmers and Cambridgeshire-based Delfland Nurseries, which has developed a peat-free seedling mix. Griffiths points to Kernock Park Plants in Cornwall and Seiont Nurseries in Caernarfon, two peat-free young plant producers. “Seiont is now 100% peat-free and exporting to Europe. With investment, you could have more growth.”
Still, Denny says the Horticultural Trades Association does not support legislation. “The industry is leading with solutions on this. It’s not waiting for the government to ban it,” he says. “It is reasonable to expect the industry to have transitioned away from peat by 2030.”
Nex agrees that growers have made great strides. “A lot of the industry has gone peat-free already off their own backs. They’ve had to pay for the trials. They’ve had to shoulder all of that burden. Yet they’re not able to see the full return from their investment because they’re forever having to compete against cheap, peat-grown, low-cost plants. Once we’re all peat-free, that completely changes. That includes imports, so that we’re not undercut.”
She also says the most progress was made when there was a “genuine threat” of legislation: “Between 2022 and 2024, peat use went down really steeply.” Griffiths says that while he has had many “challenging conversations” with growers, “when the government announced the legislation element several years ago, those conversations got a lot easier. But we’re beginning to go backwards now. Some growers are reverting to peat because they don’t believe the legislation is going to happen.”
As the plastic bag levy, the sugar tax and the bottle-cap law have shown, legislation can make the difference between good intentions and real change. And it doesn’t even mean giving up mushrooms. Peat-free ranges are already available at Sainsbury’s, Riverford and Abel & Cole. If a ban finally comes into force, other retailers will surely follow – and even Nex will be able to eat them with a clear conscience.