The gardening world needs greater diversity if it wants to engage the next generation

Last week saw the gardening world all a-twitter over some controversial remarks made by garden designer Juliet Sargeant, who said that the world of horticulture tends to be dominated by middle-class white people with double-barrelled names.

That may be the case, but it wasn't the core point Juliet, whom I worked with on the Modern Slavery Garden, was trying to make.

The point is that, regardless of how many Ponsonby-Smyth-Berwick-Joneses there are out out there, greater diversity of all descriptions in gardening would be a good thing. Why? Because it would make gardening a richer more interesting place – just as greater diversity (with regards to gender or race) makes everything (whether it's theatre or stockbroking) more interesting. In gardening, as in so many other things, monochrome is brittle whereas diversity creates texture, nuance, subtlety and therefore also resilience and flare.

It is precisely through accepting gardens that wrestle with the harder issues in life that we will engage a wider, younger and more diverse audience. We already know – thanks to the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) – that Britain is suffering from a "lost generation of gardeners" between their twenties and forties, because their baby-boomer parents didn't bother to teach them what do to. But, if we can engage with the great issues of our age, we can leverage the interest and attention of the millennial generation. There is plenty of evidence from American studies that suggests that this group are motivated by meaning more than money.

That is why the RHS should be commended for accepting the Modern Slavery Garden in the first place. It is a step on the road to engaging the next generation – which it will do by going to that place where meaning and gardens meet.

How fitting that by doing this it will be reconnecting with the radicalism of its founder John Wedgewood, that scion of one of the greatest anti-slavery families of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Charles Hart is a gardener and garden writer and this year is helping with the Modern Slavery Garden at the Chelsea Flower Show.