What would be your top plant recommendations for supporting food chains in smallish Yorkshire gardens with room for at least one tree? 

Plant native species as they will have many more insect associates and so support other creatures that eat insects, especially birds. It’s hard to beat apples and pears for a small garden: fabulous flowers, of course fruit (both for you and the blackbirds on the windfalls), and plenty of insects that eat them (even the cultivated forms). 

Other small native trees would be field maple and sallow; the latter has wonderful catkins in early spring that provide nectar for bees, moths and (yes) birds. For non-woody plants, again use natives where possible; often the commoner species have the most associated insects. If planting garden forms, be cautious about ones that flower for very long periods, because that probably means they are sterile and not producing pollen, nectar or seeds.

How do you think we can include detritivores and other often-overlooked vital creatures in our gardens in messaging aimed at gardening in a ‘wildlife-friendly’ way?

Garden messily: the enemy of detritivores is the over-tidy garden.  If you remove all the dying vegetation, then that takes away their food.  And compost as much as you can. Green bin services are good for getting rid of things like hedge cuttings, especially if it’s privet or leylandii, but if you take all the dead plant material out of your garden you’re starving the decomposers.

How do you see the playoff between needing to ‘re-green’ space as quickly as possible and ensuring we maintain regional biodiversity?

We have somehow adopted the view that nature needs a helping hand. Most of the time it doesn’t.  Planting trees may speed up woodland development by a few years, but try scattering tree seed (if there’s no nearby source) and then letting nature do what it did quite happily for millions of years before we showed up. Greening will be just as quick and biodiversity will do better than in intensively managed plantations.

What do you think the future of Yorkshire’s wildlife looks like?

This could go one of several ways.  Worst case: we fail to protect – or even destroy - our existing patches of nature-rich habitat, don’t allow nature to get back into the depleted areas, and let pollution and climate change do their bit unchecked, and then the future will be grim.  

But I am an optimist and we know what to do and how to do it. Our own Blueprint for nature recovery sets it all out and it really is achievable, so I think we will see much more land, water and sea managed with wildlife in mind. 

There will be genuinely wild rivers, with beavers on them in many places; there will be swathes of farmland that both produce food and also provide good habitat; and there will just more wildlife everywhere. 

What is your most special ‘wildlife moment’ and why?

There’s a lot of competition here. Maybe seeing the brilliant blue flowers of Alpine forgetmenot high on the slopes of Mickle Fell (and afterwards discovering I was in the Danger Area!)? Or tracking down England’s last surviving Lady’s slipper orchid in its top-secret location from clues in books and articles – nearly 60 years ago, in the days before we were not told not to visit the site! 

But it’s going to be a moth moment: opening the ‘trap’ in the morning and suddenly spotting . . . . what? My first Clifden nonpareil? Convolvulus hawkmoth? Or the first Yorkshire Frosted Green since 1879? 

If you haven’t experienced that excitement, find someone to go out with at dawn on a summer morning, or better still get your own kit and take up natural history’s most addictive activity – mothing.