'All gardens have some special quality'

摘要

Godparents everywhere, take heart: you can be of great use. This was spectacularly the case with Graham Stuart Thomas, one of the most important figures of 20th-century horticulture, who as a young boy was given a fuchsia by his godfather.'I think that set me off,' he says. 'At the age of six I decided to make horticulture my work. I was obstinate.' He remembers his father saying something like 'You'll never earn a living at that, my boy,' but the decisive six-year-old stuck to his career plan and10 years later left school. He never looked back. Overcoming recurrent health problems that plagued him from the age of 10 - 'I was a delicate child' - Graham successfully pursued a career as nurseryman, author, artist, photographer, saviour of old-fashioned shrub roses and, perhaps most influentially, as Gardens Adviser to the National Trust from the mid-1950s until the late 1970s. His name is known to most gardeners through his books and as a result of the habit of horticulturalists honouring their heroes in plant names. Thus 'Graham Thomas' has today become interwoven with thousands of British gardens as a shrub rose and a yellow-flowered honeysuckle - the best known of several plants named after him.