Plants are essential to everyone's lives. Welcome to Plantlife.
Tony Hare 1954 – 2010
Remembering Plantlife's first chair and co-founder, who died in January aged 55.
March 20 2010
Tony Hare at Plantlife's launch in 1989 © Plantlife
Tony Hare was one of five people who came together with vision and enthusiasm to establish Plantlife in 1989 and he was elected our first Chair in 1990. Andy Byfield, Plantlife’s Landscape Conservation Manager and another of Plantlife's founders, remembers him:
'Tony did not fit into the usual conservationist mould: indeed I fondly remember him in a crisply-ironed, cactus-motif shirt and with slicked hair, being interviewed for a slot on the teatime news during the road-versus-wildlife fight along the route of the proposed Winchester by-pass. He was not your usual anti-road campaigning ‘Swampy’!
Highly individual and with a wealth of interests outside conservation, Tony’s love of nature (and botany in particular) was nevertheless deeply felt, arising at an early age through saunters around the cliffs and fields of his childhood home near Cromer. His doctorate at London’s Queen Mary College was on two rare plants of disturbed places, the Least Lettuce (Lactuca saligna) and Small Fleabane (Pulicaria vulgaris), and I recall happy days studying the latter with him on the pig-poached commons around Cadnam in the New Forest. His thesis on these enigmatic subjects was key, for it shone a light on the ecological ‘goings-on’ of such ephemeral species – and very much guides the way that we manage them to this day.
Tony was increasingly worried by the relentless onslaught of modern agriculture on Britain’s wild plants – and the wild places in which they grew. Others were clearly worried as well: a conference in London in the mid 1980s asked the question “Is conservation working for plants?” The resounding answer was no, and fortuitously a small band of conservationists came together to look into the formation of a plant conservation organisation. In 1989, Plantlife was born, with Tony as one of the original founders, and its first Chair.
If the founding of Plantlife went some way towards addressing the destruction of our lowland landscapes, then Tony’s move increasingly into the media world addressed his second big worry: the inexorable ‘divorce’ of the British public from the wild flowers and landscapes that had so enriched his own life from an early time. That increasing numbers of people could not put names to common plants and animals – and indeed more often than not had never experienced a meadow or woodland in full bloom – caused him considerable distress. Television documentaries, children’s programmes, books, training courses and other media tools followed, latterly generated by his own media and communications consultancy, Tony Hare Communications.
Tony’s many friends will have their own fond memories of a remarkable and talented individual. But above all, I am sure that it will be Tony’s ever-beaming smile, and his enthusiasm to communicate the fascination of the natural world, that will be sorely missed.'