Guy Barter, chief horticultural adviser at the RHS, said: “Common weeds are plants that excel at growing where they are not wanted, and help them evade our attempts to eliminate them.

“There is usually a plentiful supply which we can use instead of consigning them to the bonfire or compost bin.”

Ms Pow also recommended cutting lawns less, which experts say helps to clean the air by absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and releasing oxygen.

She said she now leaves parts of her garden at her Somerset home to grow wild: “My late husband was a stickler for the lawnmower, so I had a bit of a battle on. But I did in the end convince him and now I myself leave areas of the lawn.

“I have got one particular area and literally within two-and-a-half weeks, you could see a whole range of other plants growing – clovers, yarrow, all coming into flower and growing there in our grass sward.

“They look really pretty. And you can definitely see the insects being attracted to them. That was just a tiny part of my lawn.”

Ms Pow advised that gardeners must “leave your patches and then cut them every, sort of, three or four weeks; or leave a range of different grass levels because you will see you will see different plants coming up”.

She added: “And if you’re really worried about how you look, what works really well is to mow paths through these longer areas across and look really attractive.”

The scythes or the strimmers?

Asked if gardeners should use scythes rather than mowers, Ms Pow, a former BBC, ITV and Channel 4 reporter who specialised in the environment, farming and gardening, said it was a “very good point”.

She described attending the National Scything Championship in Somerset two years ago and seeing “a lot of Poldark-type figures wielding scythes”.

“Actually, it is quite an art to use a scythe properly,” Ms Pow said. “But they are really, really beneficial. And they had a competition, strimmers against scythes and the scythers won on speed and results.

“A lot of them had their tops off. And I’m not sure whether people were watching the actual machines at work or the people doing the scything.”

Ms Pow also confirmed that she drove a Nissan Leaf electric car, although she had worried that it might run out of charge on a long journey.

“That is an issue and you do have to plan your trips. I did have quite an interesting trip to Cornwall last year and I was texting the transport minister as my journey went on to explain about the issues one faces.”

Listen to the full interview with Rebecca Pow on Chopper’s Politics, The Telegraph’s weekly political podcast, using the audio player above, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.