Ruth Hayes

Ruth is a Contributing Editor for Homes & Gardens, and formerly gardening editor of Amateur Gardening magazine. She is horticulturally trained, with a qualification from the Royal Horticultural Society.

Her work for Amateur Gardening, the world's oldest weekly gardening publication, involved matching gardening tasks with each season, covering everything from sowing and planting, to pruning, taking cuttings, dealing with pests and diseases and keeping houseplants healthy. She is an expert in ornamental plants and edible crops, and everything she writes about and photographs is in her own garden, a mature plot in the south of England, that has been a work in progress since her family moved there in 2012.

Ruth's main interests are gardening for wildlife and organic gardening, as she firmly believes you don’t need to ‘nuke’ pests and problems with toxic chemicals, nor use peat composts to produce the garden of your dreams.