Dr. Stefan T. Buczacki is a British horticulturist, broadcaster and author.
After growing up in Duffield, Derbyshire, where he was educated at The Ecclesbourne School, he gained a first-class honours degree in botany at Southampton University, and a D.Phil. in forest science at Oxford, before starting a career in research for the Agricultural Research Council at the National Vegetable Research Station at Wellesbourne, Warwickshire. He gained an international reputation as a plant pathologist and made major contributions to the biology and control of a species of Phytomyxea, Plasmodiophora brassicae, the cause of club root disease,[1] before leaving research to become a freelance author and broadcaster in 1984.[2] He now lives in Stratford-upon-Avon.
His subsequent broadcasting work included twelve years as a panel member and then chairman of Gardeners' Question Time on BBC Radio 4, contributing to over six hundred consecutive editions. He also devised and presented The Gardening Quiz, on BBC Radio 4 and Classic Gardening Forum on Classic FM. He has also appeared frequently on British television embracing contributions to all five terrestrial channels and including Gardeners' World on BBC 2 as well as many series on satellite and regional stations. He is credited as Britain's second biggest selling gardening author, with about 50 books to his name on both gardening and natural history. His Fauna Britannica was an account of the entire wild animal life of the British Isles for which HRH the Prince of Wales wrote the Foreword. He also wrote Volume 102 Garden Natural History for Collins's New Naturalist series. He has written for many national newspapers and magazines. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Biology, a Chartered Biologist, a founder Fellow of the Institute of Horticulture, a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, Associate of the Royal Photographic Society, and Honorary Professor of Plant Pathology at Liverpool John Moores University. He is an authority on fungi and past-President of the British Mycological Society and was awarded the Society's Benefactor's Medal. He is a Fellow of CAB International, holds an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Derby and in 2007 was installed as the first Honorary Fellow of Pershore College shortly before its merger with Warwickshire College . He also has an interest in modern British political history and is recognised internationally as an authority on Winston Churchill and his house at Chartwell, described in his book Churchill and Chartwell.
Buczacki has been an outspoken critic of makeover gardening programmes on television believing it is more important to show people how to garden than to pretend to do it for them. In September 2011 he criticised Gardeners Question Time for having 'lost its way'. [3]