John Miller is a nature writer, outdoorsman and a board member of both the Atlantic Salmon Trust and Curlew Action. We sat down with John in his beautiful reclaimed wood garden room / shed / office / man cave to talk about his book ‘What’s in a Year’, living seasonally, and the broader topics of understanding nature, conservation and the Natural History GCSE.
Links
– John Miller’s website
– Jon Miller on Instagram
– Wild Food People on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook
– About Wild Food People
– Attend a course with Wild Food People
– Get in touch with us
– Richard on Instagram and Twitter
– Amy on Instagram and Twitter
Richard P: Hi everyone, this is Richard from Wild Food People. This is a bit of an intro to this episode. We have as a guest this week, John Miller. John Miller's new book, What's in a Year? A Countryman's Tale Through the Seasons, is how we started this conversation, but everything just carried on from there because John is a really fascinating guy. He lives intentionally in a beautiful corner of England where he has a real connection to the landscape and the nature there.
Richard P: This conversation reflects that. We went from talking about the book to talking more broadly about conservation, the issues with salmon farming, and the ecological effects of that. We talked about the Natural History GCSE, our connections to the wild, connections to food, and why all of those things are important. I think you're really going to enjoy this episode. You can find links to everything we talk about in the show notes on your podcast app. If you want to show support for the show, please go ahead and like and review it. Right, I'm going to shut up and leave you with two men talking in possibly the finest man-cave, escape corner, or garden room you could find. It's a beautiful place. Are we in Wiltshire here?
John Miller: We are in Wiltshire, but we're in a special little place in Wiltshire at this very moment.
Richard P: Yeah, this particular room we're in.
John Miller: This room has taken me 35 years to put together. There's a fishing lodge I know from Scotland. I've been there with the same mates for 30-plus years, and I always wanted to replicate that down here. This is it. I can't go fishing anymore—there are no more salmon up there—so I come here, and we can plan things.
Richard P: So this is a physical space that can take you somewhere else.
John Miller: We always talk about a "sense of place." This is my sense of place. I should mention, so people listening understand: it was originally a man-shed, but then my wife noted that her girls liked coming here, and my teenage son’s mates liked coming here. So now, it's just "the shed." I loved building it. If you want to replicate something old, it's about the smells—the smells of those old fishing huts. You can't get that with modern wood. By using reclaimed timber, every time I come in here, I catch the scent of it.
Richard P: If only this were a scratch-and-sniff podcast! It’s a great place, and it’s a reflection of your personality. This is only the second time I've met you. We originally met at a secret place somewhere in the North of England—we're not allowed to say exactly where. It was part of the Why Moorlands Matter event, and we were both invited up there to share our views and to learn.
John Miller: Yeah, to learn. To learn what is living there in the spring, because everyone always talks about August the 12th. But wow, the rare birds, the nests we found, the chicks... it's just an amazing place. We all just have to talk more. We have to get away from this "us and them" mentality.
Richard P: That's the thing we find in our work. The more you talk to people, you realize they might not be aligned with what you originally thought. If you keep drilling past that point and further into the conversation, you find common ground. You might even change your own views. But it has to be a long conversation; it can't just be a brief interaction on Twitter or X.
John Miller: You also have to build a relationship. So much of the debate these days is online, where there is no relationship between the people arguing. As you said, it's only the second time you've met me, but coming into this room helps you know me a bit better.
Richard P: Give us a quick rundown of your life. You were born somewhere, and then what?
John Miller: I was born in High Wycombe in 1960, 65 years ago. I had a lovely childhood. My father was an actor who always described himself as an "out of work actor." He had a few big films, but money came in sporadically. I had no pocket money, so I spent my time out shooting rabbits or poaching pheasants. The thought of going on a formal pheasant shoot or salmon fishing was out of reach. That's partly why I collected old books—I'd just read them and dream of catching a salmon in a named pool.
John Miller: I've always been rich in the countryside, but I spent my career in IT. I worked a lot in America, particularly in Texas for Dell Technologies. When that came to an end a couple of years ago, I finally thought, "How can I give something back to nature?" It has always grounded me. After a long, circuitous route, I'm back to my roots.
Richard P: Did you have an off-ramp in your head as you were leaving that career?
John Miller: Yeah, the off-ramp was a garden tool business I built called My Garden. I actually just sold it last week. It was based on old-fashioned D-handle tools, the way they made them in Victorian times, but I never had much time for it and eventually got a bit bored. After selling it, I just started writing. I became a trustee of the Atlantic Salmon Trust and Curlew Action, and started writing on Scribe Hound.
John Miller: I kept seeing extraordinary things around the country and felt I had to tell people. The "new normal" is so bad compared to the normal I grew up with. People talk about biodiversity and climate change, but they don't talk enough about bio-abundance. We have so few sparrows now. Why do we worry so much about naturally rare things when we are losing our everyday sparrows?
Richard P: So much focus goes onto one thing that everyday losses slip away unnoticed.
John Miller: Writing is a lovely thing because you get to empty your head. You don't do it as a rant; you go through it carefully, and it becomes a wonderful way to share.
Richard P: I get that itch in my brain while driving. I get an idea for an article, and it will eat away at me until I write it down. If I don't get the chance before the idea drifts away, I feel a sense of loss.
John Miller: Exactly. You just see something and want to share it. Just this afternoon, there was a massive row down in the garden. We have about 50 pairs of jackdaws nesting in the lime trees. A buzzard came in to take the young, and the entire flock went nuts. The buzzard was trailing this poor fledgling across the field, hardly able to fly with all these crows attacking it.
John Miller: Seeing those amazing things every day is a privilege, but the majority of people don't see it. I told BBC Wiltshire today: you drive along the road, and most people just see a green field and a brown wood. They miss so much. I'm trying to get people to see more of what's there.
Richard P: I've heard you use the phrase "sporting naturalist." Can you explain what that means to you?
John Miller: It sums me up well, and it highlights some of the things I dislike about shooting today. When I go shooting, I'm there to see everything; the shooting is just the cream on top. If you've been on a shoot where the only priority is killing a bird, and that person doesn't understand the bird, the nature, or the plants around them—they shouldn't be there.
John Miller: In Germany, you need a license that requires a deeper understanding. Here, you can just jump in. I think we need a system that ensures people appreciate everything around them. And, of course, that extends to eating what you shoot.
Richard P: That is a contentious issue. I've said before I'd be happy if there was a knowledge test—on safety, natural history, and context—in order to access firearms for hunting. If you're not interested in that, stick to target shooting.
John Miller: When a doctor signs off on your license and the police interview you, all they want to know is if you have a locked gun safe. There's nothing about whether you understand the life cycle of what you're shooting.
Richard P: You see it at a club level—wildfowling clubs won't let you out until you can identify a bird flying at 70 miles an hour in a gale. There's a big difference with wildfowling because you are harvesting a completely wild creature, rather than a farmed pheasant.
John Miller: You appreciate the wild birds more, especially as a naturalist. I only go pheasant shooting a couple of times a year now, and never on big days. I prefer stalking here in Wiltshire; you can see fallow, roe, and muntjac all in one day. I love the cleanliness of it. You only take the shot if you're absolutely sure you're going to kill it cleanly. You are simply harvesting.
Richard P: How much of what you shoot do you eat?
John Miller: There's nothing I shoot that I don't eat. It's 100%. I totally understand people who don't like shooting. But if I loved it and didn't eat any of it, what argument would I have?
Richard P: I met a guy poaching in a river once who told me he didn't eat fish because he hated the smell. He even wore gloves to handle them! I thought, You are so disconnected from this activity.
John Miller: Years ago, you'd catch a salmon and eat it—it was the most wonderful thing, perfectly timed with new potatoes. Eventually, we moved to catch-and-release. Nowadays, I don't even take them out of the water. I hook them and unhook them right there. The privilege is just seeing the salmon and putting it back. I want to be right there with it, not wearing gloves.
Richard P: How much does seasonality come into this interaction between you, nature, and food?
John Miller: That's exactly why I divided the book into 12 chapters for the 12 months. Connecting with seasonal events—whether it's the salmon smolt run in May or pheasant shooting in November—grounds you. Last night, I had new potatoes from the garden with garlic scapes (which are actually from elephant garlic) chopped up with fresh thyme and butter. That is June on a plate.
Richard P: It's a lot of work and planning to get this into your life, though.
John Miller: It's not the cheapest or most cost-effective way to live. But back when I was a kid, every house had a vegetable garden. It's a labor of love.
Richard P: Richard Mabey’s Food for Free suggests foraging is free, but it actually trades food for time. Was sharing your methods part of why you structured the book by month?
John Miller: Yes. Each month brings specific tasks. In March, I'm deciding whether to chit my potatoes before planting them. By breaking it down month by month, I'm trying to help people visualize what is actually happening around them at any given time.
Richard P: What can people expect from the book?
John Miller: When I sent it to the publishers, they asked, "What genre is it?" I said it’s a bit of cooking from the garden, wildlife, conservation, and field sports. They said, "We don't do multi-genre. It has to be a book about fly fishing, or a book about potatoes." I told them that misses the point! The whole point is bringing it all together. If you go down a single road, you miss the context of what life out there is actually about. A wild rabbit exists as part of a whole ecosystem.
Richard P: For an audience trying to integrate more wild food into their diet, understanding that interconnectedness is vital. You can't just learn foraging; you have to learn botany and habitat reading too. I'm looking forward to reading the book. When did it come out?
John Miller: It just came out on May 30th.
Richard P: Let's talk about a major topic right now: salmon farming. You're quite involved with this. Can you frame the problem for people who might just see it as cheap, healthy protein in the supermarket?
John Miller: A lot of people don't realize this: there is no such thing as wild UK salmon sold in our shops anymore. The only wild salmon you can buy here is Sockeye from Canada. All "Scottish salmon" in the supermarkets is farmed.
John Miller: Originally, farming was supposed to take the pressure off wild salmon. But it's intensive farming—thousands of fish in a small net in a Scottish loch. Just like packing pigs or cows into a shed, intensive farming brings disease. For salmon, that means sea lice. The farms create a buffet for them.
John Miller: When wild salmon eggs hatch and head out to sea as smolts, they have to swim past these tightly packed farms. The sea lice attach to these tiny, 200mm smolts. Just two or three lice can kill a smolt. So the farms are actively killing the wild population.
Richard P: And the farmed fish themselves suffer massively.
John Miller: Exactly. They legally have to report their mortality rates now, and thousands upon thousands of fish are dying in these pens. If a cattle farmer had 60% of his herd dying in a field, he'd be shut down immediately. Plus, they pump chemicals into the water to kill the lice. We worry about chlorinated chicken, but look at what we're doing to salmon!
John Miller: In Canada, open-net salmon farming wasn't banned until the parasites from the farms spread and decimated the local herring fleets. It makes you wonder what we are potentially eating.
Richard P: And there are added issues, like altering the color of the fish and adding Omega-3 to their feed.
John Miller: Right, because we feed them on fishmeal. We catch thousands of tonnes of small fish off the coast of West Africa just to feed farmed salmon. We are decimating the bottom of the food chain to feed our love for salmon.
Richard P: It's hidden from public view because these farms are remote. It requires effort to understand the nuance, but it’s a high priority.
John Miller: I understand there are jobs and money tied to the industry, but there is a solution: closed containment tanks on land. We could solve the environmental problem and transition the industry, but nothing happens. If we want change, we have to offer alternatives rather than just shouting at each other.
Richard P: We were talking about community and local landscapes earlier. You've been involved in the new GCSE for Natural History, hasn't that finally been approved?
John Miller: Yes, thank God it’s finally going through. It's completely non-political and absolutely vital. If we don't get kids involved in nature, we are always going to be chasing our tails. The wonderful thing about this GCSE is that while 80% of it is a national curriculum, 20% is reserved for local natural history.
Richard P: That’s great, because my worry was always that kids would end up studying the ecology of Kenya rather than what’s outside their window.
John Miller: Exactly. We've shown kids lions and elephants for too long, and we've forgotten the wonderful things we have here. We need them to connect with what they see every day—even if it's just a local bumblebee. If kids can walk outside and actually see the wagtails and the nests we pointed out earlier, their lives will be so much more enriched.
Richard P: I think that's a perfect place to wrap it up. John, where can people find your book and your writing?
John Miller: You can find the book at the Whitehorse Bookshop in Marlborough if you're local, but it's also available everywhere online—Amazon, Waterstones, you name it. I also have a website, johnmillernature.com, where I sell signed copies and keep a blog. I write frequently on Scribe Hound as well.
Richard P: It's a great time to be communicating about nature. Thanks, John. All the links will be in the show notes!
Richard P: This conversation reflects that. We went from talking about the book to talking more broadly about conservation, the issues with salmon farming, and the ecological effects of that. We talked about the Natural History GCSE, our connections to the wild, connections to food, and why all of those things are important. I think you're really going to enjoy this episode. You can find links to everything we talk about in the show notes on your podcast app. If you want to show support for the show, please go ahead and like and review it. Right, I'm going to shut up and leave you with two men talking in possibly the finest man-cave, escape corner, or garden room you could find. It's a beautiful place. Are we in Wiltshire here?
John Miller: We are in Wiltshire, but we're in a special little place in Wiltshire at this very moment.
Richard P: Yeah, this particular room we're in.
John Miller: This room has taken me 35 years to put together. There's a fishing lodge I know from Scotland. I've been there with the same mates for 30-plus years, and I always wanted to replicate that down here. This is it. I can't go fishing anymore—there are no more salmon up there—so I come here, and we can plan things.
Richard P: So this is a physical space that can take you somewhere else.
John Miller: We always talk about a "sense of place." This is my sense of place. I should mention, so people listening understand: it was originally a man-shed, but then my wife noted that her girls liked coming here, and my teenage son’s mates liked coming here. So now, it's just "the shed." I loved building it. If you want to replicate something old, it's about the smells—the smells of those old fishing huts. You can't get that with modern wood. By using reclaimed timber, every time I come in here, I catch the scent of it.
Richard P: If only this were a scratch-and-sniff podcast! It’s a great place, and it’s a reflection of your personality. This is only the second time I've met you. We originally met at a secret place somewhere in the North of England—we're not allowed to say exactly where. It was part of the Why Moorlands Matter event, and we were both invited up there to share our views and to learn.
John Miller: Yeah, to learn. To learn what is living there in the spring, because everyone always talks about August the 12th. But wow, the rare birds, the nests we found, the chicks... it's just an amazing place. We all just have to talk more. We have to get away from this "us and them" mentality.
Richard P: That's the thing we find in our work. The more you talk to people, you realize they might not be aligned with what you originally thought. If you keep drilling past that point and further into the conversation, you find common ground. You might even change your own views. But it has to be a long conversation; it can't just be a brief interaction on Twitter or X.
John Miller: You also have to build a relationship. So much of the debate these days is online, where there is no relationship between the people arguing. As you said, it's only the second time you've met me, but coming into this room helps you know me a bit better.
Richard P: Give us a quick rundown of your life. You were born somewhere, and then what?
John Miller: I was born in High Wycombe in 1960, 65 years ago. I had a lovely childhood. My father was an actor who always described himself as an "out of work actor." He had a few big films, but money came in sporadically. I had no pocket money, so I spent my time out shooting rabbits or poaching pheasants. The thought of going on a formal pheasant shoot or salmon fishing was out of reach. That's partly why I collected old books—I'd just read them and dream of catching a salmon in a named pool.
John Miller: I've always been rich in the countryside, but I spent my career in IT. I worked a lot in America, particularly in Texas for Dell Technologies. When that came to an end a couple of years ago, I finally thought, "How can I give something back to nature?" It has always grounded me. After a long, circuitous route, I'm back to my roots.
Richard P: Did you have an off-ramp in your head as you were leaving that career?
John Miller: Yeah, the off-ramp was a garden tool business I built called My Garden. I actually just sold it last week. It was based on old-fashioned D-handle tools, the way they made them in Victorian times, but I never had much time for it and eventually got a bit bored. After selling it, I just started writing. I became a trustee of the Atlantic Salmon Trust and Curlew Action, and started writing on Scribe Hound.
John Miller: I kept seeing extraordinary things around the country and felt I had to tell people. The "new normal" is so bad compared to the normal I grew up with. People talk about biodiversity and climate change, but they don't talk enough about bio-abundance. We have so few sparrows now. Why do we worry so much about naturally rare things when we are losing our everyday sparrows?
Richard P: So much focus goes onto one thing that everyday losses slip away unnoticed.
John Miller: Writing is a lovely thing because you get to empty your head. You don't do it as a rant; you go through it carefully, and it becomes a wonderful way to share.
Richard P: I get that itch in my brain while driving. I get an idea for an article, and it will eat away at me until I write it down. If I don't get the chance before the idea drifts away, I feel a sense of loss.
John Miller: Exactly. You just see something and want to share it. Just this afternoon, there was a massive row down in the garden. We have about 50 pairs of jackdaws nesting in the lime trees. A buzzard came in to take the young, and the entire flock went nuts. The buzzard was trailing this poor fledgling across the field, hardly able to fly with all these crows attacking it.
John Miller: Seeing those amazing things every day is a privilege, but the majority of people don't see it. I told BBC Wiltshire today: you drive along the road, and most people just see a green field and a brown wood. They miss so much. I'm trying to get people to see more of what's there.
Richard P: I've heard you use the phrase "sporting naturalist." Can you explain what that means to you?
John Miller: It sums me up well, and it highlights some of the things I dislike about shooting today. When I go shooting, I'm there to see everything; the shooting is just the cream on top. If you've been on a shoot where the only priority is killing a bird, and that person doesn't understand the bird, the nature, or the plants around them—they shouldn't be there.
John Miller: In Germany, you need a license that requires a deeper understanding. Here, you can just jump in. I think we need a system that ensures people appreciate everything around them. And, of course, that extends to eating what you shoot.
Richard P: That is a contentious issue. I've said before I'd be happy if there was a knowledge test—on safety, natural history, and context—in order to access firearms for hunting. If you're not interested in that, stick to target shooting.
John Miller: When a doctor signs off on your license and the police interview you, all they want to know is if you have a locked gun safe. There's nothing about whether you understand the life cycle of what you're shooting.
Richard P: You see it at a club level—wildfowling clubs won't let you out until you can identify a bird flying at 70 miles an hour in a gale. There's a big difference with wildfowling because you are harvesting a completely wild creature, rather than a farmed pheasant.
John Miller: You appreciate the wild birds more, especially as a naturalist. I only go pheasant shooting a couple of times a year now, and never on big days. I prefer stalking here in Wiltshire; you can see fallow, roe, and muntjac all in one day. I love the cleanliness of it. You only take the shot if you're absolutely sure you're going to kill it cleanly. You are simply harvesting.
Richard P: How much of what you shoot do you eat?
John Miller: There's nothing I shoot that I don't eat. It's 100%. I totally understand people who don't like shooting. But if I loved it and didn't eat any of it, what argument would I have?
Richard P: I met a guy poaching in a river once who told me he didn't eat fish because he hated the smell. He even wore gloves to handle them! I thought, You are so disconnected from this activity.
John Miller: Years ago, you'd catch a salmon and eat it—it was the most wonderful thing, perfectly timed with new potatoes. Eventually, we moved to catch-and-release. Nowadays, I don't even take them out of the water. I hook them and unhook them right there. The privilege is just seeing the salmon and putting it back. I want to be right there with it, not wearing gloves.
Richard P: How much does seasonality come into this interaction between you, nature, and food?
John Miller: That's exactly why I divided the book into 12 chapters for the 12 months. Connecting with seasonal events—whether it's the salmon smolt run in May or pheasant shooting in November—grounds you. Last night, I had new potatoes from the garden with garlic scapes (which are actually from elephant garlic) chopped up with fresh thyme and butter. That is June on a plate.
Richard P: It's a lot of work and planning to get this into your life, though.
John Miller: It's not the cheapest or most cost-effective way to live. But back when I was a kid, every house had a vegetable garden. It's a labor of love.
Richard P: Richard Mabey’s Food for Free suggests foraging is free, but it actually trades food for time. Was sharing your methods part of why you structured the book by month?
John Miller: Yes. Each month brings specific tasks. In March, I'm deciding whether to chit my potatoes before planting them. By breaking it down month by month, I'm trying to help people visualize what is actually happening around them at any given time.
Richard P: What can people expect from the book?
John Miller: When I sent it to the publishers, they asked, "What genre is it?" I said it’s a bit of cooking from the garden, wildlife, conservation, and field sports. They said, "We don't do multi-genre. It has to be a book about fly fishing, or a book about potatoes." I told them that misses the point! The whole point is bringing it all together. If you go down a single road, you miss the context of what life out there is actually about. A wild rabbit exists as part of a whole ecosystem.
Richard P: For an audience trying to integrate more wild food into their diet, understanding that interconnectedness is vital. You can't just learn foraging; you have to learn botany and habitat reading too. I'm looking forward to reading the book. When did it come out?
John Miller: It just came out on May 30th.
Richard P: Let's talk about a major topic right now: salmon farming. You're quite involved with this. Can you frame the problem for people who might just see it as cheap, healthy protein in the supermarket?
John Miller: A lot of people don't realize this: there is no such thing as wild UK salmon sold in our shops anymore. The only wild salmon you can buy here is Sockeye from Canada. All "Scottish salmon" in the supermarkets is farmed.
John Miller: Originally, farming was supposed to take the pressure off wild salmon. But it's intensive farming—thousands of fish in a small net in a Scottish loch. Just like packing pigs or cows into a shed, intensive farming brings disease. For salmon, that means sea lice. The farms create a buffet for them.
John Miller: When wild salmon eggs hatch and head out to sea as smolts, they have to swim past these tightly packed farms. The sea lice attach to these tiny, 200mm smolts. Just two or three lice can kill a smolt. So the farms are actively killing the wild population.
Richard P: And the farmed fish themselves suffer massively.
John Miller: Exactly. They legally have to report their mortality rates now, and thousands upon thousands of fish are dying in these pens. If a cattle farmer had 60% of his herd dying in a field, he'd be shut down immediately. Plus, they pump chemicals into the water to kill the lice. We worry about chlorinated chicken, but look at what we're doing to salmon!
John Miller: In Canada, open-net salmon farming wasn't banned until the parasites from the farms spread and decimated the local herring fleets. It makes you wonder what we are potentially eating.
Richard P: And there are added issues, like altering the color of the fish and adding Omega-3 to their feed.
John Miller: Right, because we feed them on fishmeal. We catch thousands of tonnes of small fish off the coast of West Africa just to feed farmed salmon. We are decimating the bottom of the food chain to feed our love for salmon.
Richard P: It's hidden from public view because these farms are remote. It requires effort to understand the nuance, but it’s a high priority.
John Miller: I understand there are jobs and money tied to the industry, but there is a solution: closed containment tanks on land. We could solve the environmental problem and transition the industry, but nothing happens. If we want change, we have to offer alternatives rather than just shouting at each other.
Richard P: We were talking about community and local landscapes earlier. You've been involved in the new GCSE for Natural History, hasn't that finally been approved?
John Miller: Yes, thank God it’s finally going through. It's completely non-political and absolutely vital. If we don't get kids involved in nature, we are always going to be chasing our tails. The wonderful thing about this GCSE is that while 80% of it is a national curriculum, 20% is reserved for local natural history.
Richard P: That’s great, because my worry was always that kids would end up studying the ecology of Kenya rather than what’s outside their window.
John Miller: Exactly. We've shown kids lions and elephants for too long, and we've forgotten the wonderful things we have here. We need them to connect with what they see every day—even if it's just a local bumblebee. If kids can walk outside and actually see the wagtails and the nests we pointed out earlier, their lives will be so much more enriched.
Richard P: I think that's a perfect place to wrap it up. John, where can people find your book and your writing?
John Miller: You can find the book at the Whitehorse Bookshop in Marlborough if you're local, but it's also available everywhere online—Amazon, Waterstones, you name it. I also have a website, johnmillernature.com, where I sell signed copies and keep a blog. I write frequently on Scribe Hound as well.
Richard P: It's a great time to be communicating about nature. Thanks, John. All the links will be in the show notes!