Christopher Lloyd

Christopher Lloyd, an iconoclastic English gardener, died on January 27th 2006, aged 84

VISITORS to Great Dixter, an old, rambling, timber-framed house among the steep woods and pastures of the High Weald, on the borders of Kent and Sussex in the south of England, would find it haunted by several tutelary spirits. One, with pipe in mouth and owlish mien, was the shade of Sir Edwin Lutyens, who after 1910 laid out the gardens in what had been a cattle yard. Another, with pebble-spectacles, trug and boots, was the ghost of Gertrude Jekyll, whose principles of gardening first informed the place. And then – short, stout, moustachioed, and looking at first sight as though he might empty a blunderbuss on you as soon as invite you to tea – was Christopher Lloyd. If he was not there, his familiar spirits Yucca, Canna and Dahlia, short-tempered dachshunds, kept guard over the turf.

Save for short spells at Rugby School and Cambridge, Mr Lloyd lived at Great Dixter all his life. He learned gardening there, helping his mother prick out seedlings as a child, and found he never wanted to do anything else. In a country devoted to gardening, Mr Lloyd thus became its best plantsman. With his invaluable head gardener, Fergus Garrett, he stomped round his five-acre domain, ceaselessly experimenting with trees, shrubs and flowers. Each plant would be inspected twice daily, and each experiment recorded in a weatherproof notebook. The fruits of his observations became columns in Country Life, Gardens Illustrated and the Guardian, and were turned into more than 20 books.

“Christo”, as everyone called him, was a great believer in such discipline, which he said he had learnt from the Japanese. But it was only half his philosophy, and not even the more important half. His strongest belief was in freedom and fun. He advised gardeners to plant what they liked, throw out what they didn’t, discard all previous notions of colour, arrangement and taste, put up two fingers to horticultural rectitude and “Go for it”.

In the staid, quiet world of English gardening, this was dynamite. Not so far from Great Dixter, at Sissinghurst Castle, lay the epitome of English taste in Vita Sackville-West’s White Garden, surrounded by equally soothing beddings in blue, lilac and mauve. Mr Lloyd waved it aside. What about “Challenging Orange” or “Nothing to Fear Red”? What about a great big bush of mauve-pink Daphne mezereum underplanted with a carpet of Crocus x luteus, in bright orange-yellow? “The two colours may be shouting at each other,” he wrote, “but they are shouting for joy.”

Mr Lloyd believed in mixing up plants that had never been together before. His ambition was a closely-woven tapestry of colours and textures in which foliage – matt or shiny, grey or variegated, grass or coniferous – was as important as the flowers. In the borders at Great Dixter banana trees grew with verbena, and spiky agave with dahlias. Climbers, annuals, perennials and shrubs all clambered about, “helping each other”, as Mr Lloyd liked to say, with their sheer differences of habit. His borders were a paean to desegregation. When he showed slides of them at his lectures, audiences would sometimes gasp with horror.

His iconoclasm went beyond colour and arrangement. He believed that plants should go their own way in gardens. If a

yellow spike of mullein decided to grow in a clump of bright pink phlox, he welcomed it. (“Hurrah for vulgarity!”, as he wrote once.) He was delighted that lichens made patterns on his York stone paths, and that wild birds-foot trefoil colonised the Sunken Garden. These gave him ideas.

Two small lawns at the front of the house were always left unmown until the autumn. Mr Lloyd wanted orchids and fritillaries to grow there, but also hoped to enjoy the wind and light in the grass. Once he allowed a rambler rose to get so out of hand that it killed two holm oaks and made a gap in a hedge; but Mr Lloyd so liked what he saw through the gap, the twisted trunk of a crab-apple tree framed in ilex leaves, that he made a feature of it, underplanting the crab for good measure with bright yellow Epimedium pinnatum.

Certain flowers he loved especially. He would brake violently for poppies seen at the roadside, and gloried in lupins and clematis. Hydrangeas, on the other hand, were “anaemic” and most salvias “rubbish”. Roses and lavender he had little luck with; his clay soil was too heavy. He had a special fondness for the white Japanese anemones that backed, calmly and blankly,the psychedelic annuals he tried out in his beds.

His greatest appreciation, however, was for the hedges and trees that gave architectural structure to his garden, and held its history. The winding yew hedges at Great Dixter had been planted by his father, who had bought the house with his printing fortune. For Mr Lloyd they had “a presence”, seeming to inhabit his garden rather than grow there. He treasured the fig trees introduced by Lutyens – their huge leaves so useful in his plantings – and the few pear trees left from the original farm orchard. On the western boundary stood a line of ash trees that he wished, in dictatorial moods, to cut down, because they filled his garden with seeds. But then freedom and joy prevailed: there was nothing quite like a sunset seen through their faint feathered leaves.