Christopher Lloyd | |
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| Born | 2 March 1921 Northiam, East Sussex, United Kingdom |
| Died | 27 January 2006 (aged 84) Hastings, United Kingdom |
| Other names | Christo |
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Christopher "Christo" Hamilton Lloyd, OBE (2 March 1921 – 27 January 2006) was an English gardener and a gardening author of note, as the 20th-century chronicler for thickly planted, labour-intensive country gardening. [1]
Lloyd was born in Great Dixter, into an upper-middle-class family, the youngest of six children. In 1910, his father, Nathaniel Lloyd, an Arts and Crafts architect, author, printer and designer of posters and other images for confectionery firms, [2] ), bought Great Dixter, a manor house in Northiam, East Sussex near the south coast of England. Edwin Lutyens was hired to renovate and extend the house and advise on the structure of the garden. [3] Nathaniel Lloyd loved gardens, designed some of this one himself, and passed that love on to his son. Lloyd learned the skills required of a gardener from his mother Daisy, who did the actual gardening [4] and introduced him as a young boy to Gertrude Jekyll, [3] who was a considerable influence on Lloyd, in particular with respect to "mixed borders". [5] His mother Daisy, to whom he had remained close his entire life, died at Great Dixter on 9 June 1972, aged 91. [6] [7]
After Wellesley House (Broadstairs) and Rugby School, he attended King's College, Cambridge, where he read modern languages before entering the Army during World War II. [7] After the war he received his bachelors in Horticulture from Wye College, University of London, in 1950. He stayed on there as an assistant lecturer in horticulture [8] until 1954.
In 1954, Lloyd moved home to Great Dixter and set up a nursery specialising in unusual plants. He regularly opened the house and gardens to the public. [9] Lloyd did not do all of the gardening himself, but, like his parents, employed a staff of gardeners. In 1991, Fergus Garrett became his head gardener, and continued in that role after Lloyd's death.[ citation needed ]
In 1979 Lloyd received the Victoria Medal of Honour, the highest award of the Royal Horticultural Society, for his promotion of gardening and his extensive work on their Floral Committee. [10] In 1996, Lloyd was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Open University. In 2000, he was appointed as an officer of the Order of the British Empire. [8]
Today, the Garden is run by a trust under the direction of Fergus Garrett.
Lloyd was a great-grandson of Edwin Wilkins Field, a law-reforming solicitor, and the great uncle of Christopher Lloyd, the author of numerous non-fiction books, including the popular What on Earth? Happened from the Big Bang to the Present Day and a series of children's historical Wallbook titles. [11] [12]
Lloyd was firmly rooted in the Arts and Crafts style of garden. [3] In most ways he was, like his mother and Gertrude Jekyll, a practical gardener. He said "I couldn't design a garden. I just go along and carp." [1] Despite his extensive work with flowers, he had an appreciation for the garden as a whole. He also understood human nature. One professional gardener likes to quote Lloyd from his book Foliage Plants on how "it is an indisputable fact that appreciation of foliage comes at a later stage in our education, if it comes at all." [13]
Lloyd rapidly felt the need to share his gardening discoveries and published The Mixed Border in 1957, [14] which was followed by Clematis in 1965, [15] and The Well-Tempered Garden in 1970. [16] Lloyd had begun a book on the use of exotic plants in British gardens when he died. This his gardening friends and colleagues completed as Exotic Planting for Adventurous Gardeners in 2007. [17]
In Meadows at Great Dixter and Beyond, published in 2004, Lloyd explored the use of meadow land around his own house. [18]
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The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), founded in 1804 as the Horticultural Society of London, is the UK's leading gardening charity.
Topiary is the horticultural practice of training perennial plants by clipping the foliage and twigs of trees, shrubs and subshrubs to develop and maintain clearly defined shapes, whether geometric or fanciful. The term also refers to plants which have been shaped in this way. As an art form it is a type of living sculpture. The word derives from the Latin word for an ornamental landscape gardener, topiarius, a creator of topia or "places", a Greek word that Romans also applied to fictive indoor landscapes executed in fresco.
Gertrude Jekyll was a British horticulturist, garden designer, craftswoman, photographer, writer and artist. She created over 400 gardens in the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States, and wrote over 1000 articles for magazines such as Country Life and William Robinson's The Garden. Jekyll has been described as "a premier influence in garden design" by British and American gardening enthusiasts.
William Robinson: was an Irish practical gardener and journalist whose ideas about wild gardening spurred the movement that led to the popularising of the English cottage garden, a parallel to the search for honest simplicity and vernacular style of the British Arts and Crafts movement, and were important in promoting the woodland garden. Robinson is credited as an early practitioner of the mixed herbaceous border of hardy perennial plants, a champion too of the "wild garden", who vanquished the high Victorian pattern garden of planted-out bedding schemes. Robinson's new approach to gardening gained popularity through his magazines and several books—particularly The Wild Garden, illustrated by Alfred Parsons, and The English Flower Garden.
The cottage garden is a distinct style that uses informal design, traditional materials, dense plantings, and a mixture of ornamental and edible plants. English in origin, it depends on grace and charm rather than grandeur and formal structure. Homely and functional gardens connected to cottages go back centuries, but their stylized reinvention occurred in 1870s England, as a reaction to the more structured, rigorously maintained estate gardens with their formal designs and mass plantings of greenhouse annuals.
Great Dixter is a house in Northiam, East Sussex, England. It was built in 1910–12 by architect Edwin Lutyens, who combined an existing mid-15th century house on the site with a similar structure brought from Benenden, Kent, together with his own additions. It is a Grade I listed building. The garden, widely known for its continuous tradition of sophisticated plantsmanship, is Grade I listed in the National Register of Historic Parks and Gardens.
A plantsman is an enthusiastic and knowledgeable gardener, nurseryman or nurserywoman. "Plantsman" can refer to a male or female person, though the terms plantswoman, or even plantsperson, are sometimes used. The word is sometimes said to be synonymous with "botanist" or "horticulturist", but that would indicate a professional involvement, whereas "plantsman" reflects an attitude to plants. A horticulturist may be a plantsman, but a plantsman is not necessarily a horticulturist.
The Victoria Medal of Honour (VMH) is awarded to British horticulturists resident in the United Kingdom whom the Royal Horticultural Society Council considers deserving of special honour by the Society.
The hybrid elm cultivar Ulmus × hollandica 'Wredei', also known as Ulmus × hollandica 'Dampieri Aurea' and sometimes marketed as Golden Elm, originated as a sport of the cultivar 'Dampieri' at the Alt-Geltow Arboretum, near Potsdam, Germany, in 1875.
Thomas Moore was a British gardener and botanist. An expert on ferns and fern allies from the British Isles, he served as Curator of the Society of Apothecaries Garden from 1848 to 1887. In 1855 he authored The Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland.The standard author abbreviation T.Moore is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.
RHS Garden Rosemoor is a public display garden run by the Royal Horticultural Society in north Devon, England.
Edward Augustus Bowles was a British horticulturalist, plantsman and garden writer. He developed an important garden at Myddelton House, his lifelong home at Bulls Cross in Enfield, Middlesex and his name has been preserved in many varieties of plant. The standard author abbreviation Bowles is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.
Euphorbia griffithii, the Griffith's spurge, is a species of flowering plant in the spurge family Euphorbiaceae, native to Bhutan, Tibet and south west China. It is a spreading, rhizomatous herbaceous perennial growing to 90 cm (35 in), with many erect reddish stems and narrow dark green leaves with red central veins, turning red and yellow in autumn. In summer it produces flowerheads (cyathia) of brilliant red and yellow.
Ellen Ann Willmott was an English horticulturist. She was an influential member of the Royal Horticultural Society, and a recipient of the first Victoria Medal of Honour, awarded to British horticulturists living in the UK by the society, in 1897. Willmott was said to have cultivated more than 100,000 species and cultivars of plants and sponsored expeditions to discover new species. Inherited wealth allowed Willmott to buy large gardens in France and Italy to add to the garden at her home, Warley Place in Essex. More than 60 plants have been named after her or her home, Warley Place.
Anna Pavord is a British horticultural writer. She wrote for The Observer for over twenty years and for The independent for over thirty years - from its first to last print edition. Her book The Tulip (1999) was listed as a New York Times best seller.
The Field Elm cultivar Ulmus minor 'Dicksonii', commonly known as Dickson's Golden Elm, is a yellow-leaved tree raised in Chester in 1900 by Dickson's Nursery, which distributed it from the autumn of 1907 as 'Golden Cornish Elm'. 'Cornish Elm' was the name often given in error to Guernsey or Wheatley Elm by the local authorities who planted the latter extensively, an error which may have influenced the choice of name by Dickson's nursery. 'Dicksonii' is usually listed as a variety of Guernsey Elm rather than Cornish Elm, Bean giving 'Wheatleyi Aurea' as a synonym, and Hillier 'Sarniensis Aurea' and later U. × sarniensis 'Dicksonii'. Clibrans' nursery of Altrincham, however, described it (1922) as otherwise identical "in habit and constitution" to 'type' Cornish Elm. The Späth nursery of Berlin distributed it from c.1913 as U. campestris cornubiensis Dicksonii. The nursery Messieurs Otin père et fils of Saint-Étienne sold an Ulmus Wheatleyi aurea pyramidalis, with leaves marbled yellow, in 1882, earlier than Dickson's introduction.
Christopher Lloyd is a historian, educationalist and author on big history. He is the author of What on Earth Happened: The Complete Story of the Planet , which has sold 500,000 copies. Lloyd is a advocate of connected learning. In collaboration with Beckenham-based illustrator Andy Forshaw, Lloyd has established a format for telling giant narratives to young people by using illustrative timelines called Wallbooks, which present a broader view of world history and visualise connections between the past and the present day.
William Gregor MacKenzie ALS VMH (1904–1995) was a gardener and horticultural curator born in Scotland, where his father was head gardener at Ballimore, near Loch Fyne in Argyllshire.
Nathaniel Lloyd OBE FSA was a business man who, later in life, studied architecture as a pupil of Sir Edwin Lutyens and became an architectural historian and author. He owned the Grade 1 listed house Great Dixter in East Sussex, now a legacy left to the nation by his youngest child, Christopher Lloyd, the gardener and author.
Fergus Garrett VMH is an English plantsman, horticultural educationalist and Chief Executive of the Great Dixter Charitable Trust. He is described as one of the most influential living garden designers and horticultural educators in Britain today.
