Speaking @ SEED: THE UNTOLD STORY
Sophie Thomson lights up the screen as ABC television’s Gardening Australia South Australian presenter, where her enthusiasm for gardening inspires people of all ages. She is also a popular newspaper columnist, national public speaker, TEDx presenter, author of three gardening books (with a fourth due out next year), broadcaster and horticulturalist.
Sophie is known for her environmental outlook, infectious enthusiasm, vitality and love of sustainable gardening. She describes herself as an “obsessive-compulsive gardener” who, were it not for the demands of her career and family, would spend every day in the garden.
She lives at Sophie’s Patch – a three-acre property in the Adelaide Hills, with husband Richard, five children under 16 and a menagerie of animals. Over the last five years they have created a remarkable garden around the old stone cottage on what was once a bare paddock. The Patch includes numerous contained spaces as well as a fully productive organic vegie patch, more than 100 fruit and nut trees and what she hopes one day will be a breathtaking, climate compatible ornamental garden. Around 15,000 people have visited her property in the last three years since she started opening it to the public twice a year in spring and autumn.
She is passionate about the role gardening can play in people’s lives as a stress reliever. With more people claiming to feel stressed in their daily lives, let alone having to deal with the challenges faced when experiencing natural disasters such as flood or fires, she is convinced that gardening has a vital role to play in individual and community health, which is being backed up by research and engagement worldwide.
She is an advocate for the worldwide Nature Play movement, which helps kids develop a lifelong connection with nature, and strongly believes in creating green backyards and green open spaces where kids can play freely, reducing their screen time in favour of green time.
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