Professor Stefan Buczacki is Past-President of the British Mycological Society and holder of its Benefactors’ Medal and also one of the country’s best known horticultural writers and broadcasters. His extensive practical knowledge is underpinned by his scientific expertise – he gained an international reputation as a plant pathologist before leaving full-time research to become freelance in 1984. He has published many thousands of newspaper and magazine articles and over fifty gardening and natural history books, including Collins New Generation Guide to Mushrooms and Toadstools and New Naturalist Garden Natural History.

Professor Stefan Buczacki is equally well known as the presenter of many hundreds of radio and television gardening programmes and as one of the country's most experienced non-fiction authors with well over fifty published titles on natural history, gardening and biography, many for HarperCollins. He is a graduate of the Universities of Southampton and Oxford and holds distinctions and awards from many scientific societies as well as honorary degrees.