At home in Oxfordshire with the art dealer and broadcaster Philip Mould

Ever since he was a boy, the art dealer Philip Mould has had an abiding interest in the wild flowers, plants and grasses of this island. This lifelong passion came in useful in his profession some years ago when he noticed that the background flowers in the portrait of a girl were identical in species to those in a painting by Gainsborough of a young boy. His theory proved correct: the painting turned out to be the young boy's missing sister, and the pair, now happily reu­nited, hangs in Gainsborough's House in Suffolk.

Philip is a leading expert in British portraiture - his gallery in Dover Street specialises in British art and Old Masters - and has an impressive record in rediscovering and attributing the works of artists as varied as Lawrence, Constable and Van Dyck. A writer with two books under his belt, he is also a successful broadcaster - his television programme, Fake or Fortune?, establishing the authenticity of Old Masters, has just been recommissioned by the BBC for its third series. He also advises the Heritage Lottery Fund, and for 20 years he advised the Houses of Parlia­ment, for which he received an OBE.

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Ten years ago he and his wife, Catherine, bought Duck End, a small seventeenth-century manor house in Oxfordshire which, with the same forensic eye to detail and research, they have painstakingly brought back to a basic authentic beauty, taking care not to over-restore.

But it is his passion for wild flowers and the British landscape that gives Philip as much solace and satisfaction - and in some cases excitement - as discovering a new work of art, or restoring his house. It is perhaps surprising to find someone so steeped in the sophisticated world of connoisseurship with such a profound appreciation of the natural world, but of course both require a person to see with the detailed intensity of an artist. It is this com­bination of eye, heart and mind that makes Philip a formidable force as a dealer and, as he now is, the president of the wild-plant charity Plantlife.

'It was some years ago that I decided to turn what had been a genuine hobby into something that could benefit the thing that I love, when I saw an article in the Telegraph that first mentioned Plantlife,' he explains.

The charity was founded 24 years ago by, among others, the naturalist Miriam Rothschild and began life as 'a group of enthusiasts in a cup­board at the Natural History Museum'. Since then it has grown into an organisation with 11,000 supporters, a staff of just under 50 - including several of Britain's leading botanists - a head office in Salisbury, and national offices in Scotland and Wales. 'We pioneer wild-flower conser­vation on a landscape scale, working with others to influence government and private landowners to do the same,' explains Philip. 'We own and manage nature reserves - from 1.5 acres to thousands of acres - and work alongside our tenant farmers to ensure these flower-rich landscapes continue to prosper.

'Intensive farming, eutrophication and climate change are our ene­mies,' he continues. 'If you want a statistic, we are losing, on average, a flower per county every couple of years, so, for example, meadow saffron has gone from Northamptonshire, mountain pansy from Mon­mouthshire and bell heather from Middlesex. However, there are signs that we can stop this hideous decline.'

It was his father who engendered in Philip a love of plants, giving him at the age of 11 the somewhat unusual gift of a day's instruction by a botanist. Even then, the early 'sleuth for the rare' showed itself in the young Philip. 'The day did not go well,' he recalls. 'I was only interested in trying to find rare plants but the botanist insisted on giving me a good grounding. I only stopped whining when we found these little ferns grow­ing on huge rocks and he pointed out the rare ones, which was a thrill.' As Philip explains, we lost many of our wild ferns in the nineteenth century when, because of their beauty, they were dug up for ferneries.

Although, over the years, art took precedence, Philip's early love of plants grew into an obsession. 'It is just so exciting to come across the beauty of a flower that is there, unlike art, of its own accord,' he says.

Philip and Catherine met in 1987, while she was working in film pro­duction. Today, she organises the busy events side of Philip's gallery and advises owners on the hanging of a work in an interior. They live, together with their son, Oliver, in a Kensington house, which, under the perfectionist eye of architect Thomas Croft, is undergoing a 'refresh'. The kitchen is to be redesigned and the formal dining room, not used over the last eight years, is being reconstructed to include a wonderful series of the Muses painted by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell.

But it is to Duck End that they retreat - to the 18 acres, which Philip is successfully turning into a small nature reserve and a haven for grasses and ferns, whose seeds he assiduously collects in the autumn to be re­sown, allowing them to proliferate the following year.