Chris Baines

John Christopher Baines (born 4 May 1947) is an English naturalist. He is a horticulturalist, landscape architect, naturalist, television presenter and author, and advises governments and organisations on environmental issues.

Baines grew up in Sheffield, West Riding of Yorkshire. He worked in the local parks department when he left school, and then studied horticulture and landscape architecture at Wye College, University of London.

Career After an early career in landscape contracting, including several years of greening desert landscapes in the Middle East and community landscaping on UK inner-city housing estates, Baines taught landscape architecture at post-graduate level until 1986, when he was awarded an honorary personal professorship at Birmingham Polytechnic in Birmingham.

In 1980, he was one of a group of local environmentalists who co-founded the Urban Wildlife Group (now the Wildlife Trust for Birmingham and the Black Country), the first of a series of such urban conservation organisations to appear in the UK that year. This was the beginning of a burgeoning urban wildlife movement with which he has always had a close association, and he remains vice-president of the Wildlife Trust for Birmingham and the Black Country.

Through most of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Baines focused on television broadcasting, and presented The Big E, Saturday Starship, Pebble Mill at One and several other networked series. The BBC TV programme Countryfile evolved from his original regional series "Your Country Needs You" and Baines was one of Countryfile 's first presenters.

Baines built the first wildlife garden ever allowed at Chelsea Flower Show in 1985, and in the same year his television programme Bluetits and Bumblebees, and his book, How to Make a Wildlife Garden, inspired many people to begin gardening with wildlife. He was also a member of the steering board for the BBC's Breathing Places campaign.

Baines is committed to urban wildlife and wildlife gardening. He works from home in Wolverhampton, is a national vice-president of the Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts. He is a former trustee of the Heritage Lottery Fund and also completed a further five years as a member of the HLF Expert Panel.

Baines has written frequently in BBC Gardeners' World, BBC Wildlife and Country Living magazines.