Matthew Biggs has made his final appearance on Radio 4’s Gardeners’ Question Time, bringing to a close a run on the programme that began in 1994. The episode, broadcast on Friday afternoon during Mental Health Awareness Week, was recorded at The Serge Hill Project in Bedmond, Hertfordshire.
Biggs, who has been living with cancer since 2020 and is now receiving palliative care, said he did not know how long he had left to live. He said he was trying to keep going and enjoy the programme while he could because he would lose his faculties, adding that he hated the thought of not being able to speak, smile or communicate.
His farewell carries unusual weight because Biggs has long been more than a familiar voice on the show. Over the years, he became one of its most recognisable regulars and, in recent years, a passionate advocate for gardening as a tool for wellbeing. He has spoken openly during his cancer care about the solace he has found in gardening, and that thread ran through the emotional tone of his final broadcast.
Biggs also drew on the hard edges of his own life story. He said he was born with cerebral palsy and had always been knocked down and had to get up, describing himself as someone who has always believed every cloud has a silver lining and, if there isn’t one, you make one. That resilience was visible in the way he spoke about his condition, even as he admitted the illness had taken a severe toll.
He said the hardest part had been when his mobility disappeared and he had, in his words, sort of wasted away. He added that he had lost so much weight it was “just muscle and bone,” before joking that he would not recommend it as a weight-loss diet. The line landed because it sat beside a blunt account of decline, not in place of it.
Biggs has also said he reluctantly let his garden go to his wife, Gill, and that the reluctance remains because doing so felt like letting go of his life. That detail gives his final appearance a personal edge: for him, gardening is not just a subject he has discussed on air, but a way of holding on to identity while illness strips away other parts of it. He has also been awarded the Victoria Medal of Honour by the Royal Horticultural Society, the organisation’s most prestigious award, underscoring how deeply he has shaped the gardening world he so often described.
The broadcast marks an ending, but not a confusion about what comes next. Biggs has said plainly that he does not know how long he has got to live, and that makes this farewell different from a routine departure. For listeners, the significance is not only that a long-running fixture has signed off; it is that he did so while still speaking in the language that has defined him — practical, unguarded and stubbornly alive to the pleasure of the garden even as his health declines. Related coverage on the final broadcast can be read here: Matt Biggs Gardener final Gardeners’ Question Time broadcast marks end of era.
