Christopher Lloyd, 84; Writer Saw Gardens as Mode of Self-Expression
Christopher Lloyd, a popular horticulturalist whose chatty but authoritative writing filled about 20 books and made his long-running gardening column for the British publication Country Life a must-read for gardening fans around the world, has died. He was 84.
Lloyd died Jan. 27 at a hospital in Hastings, England, near his home of complications from a stroke, said Tom Cooper, a longtime friend and former editor of Horticulture magazine.
A showman with a sense of humor and a penchant for dressing as colorfully as his five acres at Great Dixter House and Gardens in East Sussex, England, Lloyd is considered the last of an era.
“Christopher Lloyd comes from a long and glorious line of gardeners,” Cooper told the Los Angeles Times this week. “He held to the highest standards of traditional training and knowledge, but he had a forward-looking view about gardens.”
Lloyd’s traditional side was apparent when he referred to every plant by its Latin name, even in casual conversations. Less conventional was his riotous sense of color. “I’m indulging my streak of vulgarity,” he said when visitors to Great Dixter asked about the purple, pink and red combinations in his garden beds.
Two books in particular -- “In My Garden,” (1993) an anthology of his magazine columns, and “The Adventurous Gardener” (1985), a journal of his planting experiments -- point to his specialty.
Colleagues came away from Lloyd’s public lectures bubbling over with exclamation points. “He showed slides of bright yellow partinia with lavender verbena! ... Hyacinths the color of Bazooka bubble gum!” one reported after a presentation at Wave Hill gardens in the Bronx, N.Y., in 1995.
“Somehow, in spring you want something to cheer you up,” Lloyd told his audience at Wave Hill. In the uneasy silence that followed, he reconsidered. “Plant blue hyacinth,” he suggested. “You’ll feel better.”
He was a social gadfly who enjoyed meeting the busloads of tourists who came to see his gardens, which were often the subject of his writing. Each year about 40,000 visitors toured the grounds at Great Dixter House, which he kept open to the public from April through October.
Most often the visitors asked about the garden’s two main features: the topiaries -- shrubs in the shape of chocolate pots, squirrels and peacocks -- and the “long border,” a 15-by-330-foot garden bed where pink, orange and royal blue plants mixed.
Lloyd’s gregarious nature spilled from his garden into his kitchen. In his 80s, “Christo” as friends called him, still played host to weekend guests and served them memorable dinners. Patrick Anderson, a retired businessman and avid gardener living in Fallbrook, Calif., met Lloyd at Great Dixter House in 1992 and was invited to stay for lunch when Lloyd discovered they had a mutual friend.
Anderson’s first impressions of Great Dixter were vivid. “This is not a low-maintenance garden,” he told the Los Angeles Times in an interview in 2003. Five full-time assistants helped Lloyd keep up the grounds. Hundreds of plants had to be dug up and kept in storage each winter. Borders and garden beds were replanted on a regular basis.
“The high-maintenance garden is the most interesting,” Lloyd explained to the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1995. “It gives the most chance to develop different ideas.”
On several visits to Southern California in the 1980s and 1990s, Lloyd was eager to visit private gardens, not the local public sites. “Show me a garden that reflects the gardener,” he urged Anderson before one tour. “Something personal.”
For him, individuality was a key to success. He wrote about his own experiments with plants to encourage others to try new things. He hoped to “stir people up, to make the blood flow,” he told the Times of London in 2003.
In one gleeful essay, he described ripping out a bed of roses that his mother had planted decades earlier. He replaced them with tropical camphor bean, yucca, and dahlias for extra color. Some of his colleagues were stunned.
He was against preserving any garden for sentimental reasons. “Don’t just keep it because its been there,” he told his audiences. But he did save one shrub from his rose garden purge, a hybrid tea rose that was a gift to his family from the Victorian author and avid gardener Vita Sackville-West.
In part, his tropical garden came of concerns about a warming trend in summer temperatures across England. He discussed the matter in one of his frequent letters to his friend Beth Chatto, a celebrated gardener and plants woman in her own right.
Chatto favored plants that required minimal watering for conservation’s sake. Lloyd was not so sure.
“I confess to being un-attracted to the concept of gardening with a moral implication,” he wrote Chatto in January 1997. “It puts a dampener on going all out, to garden full bloodedly in whatever way appeals to you most.”
His ever-thirsty plants did comply with part of her plan, he assured Chatto. “If we’re to have hotter summers, I am assembling the right sort of plants to take advantage of it!”
He inherited his love of flowers from his parents. His father, Nathaniel, was a landscape architect who bought the family estate in 1910. His mother, Daisy, was a plants woman who taught him to sow seeds, plant bulbs and grow healthy flowers, he once explained. He was the youngest of six children, and the only one who showed a serious interest in gardening from childhood.
Lloyd spent all but about 10 years of his life at Great Dixter House. He studied modern languages at Cambridge University, and was drafted during World War II.
After he completed military service in 1946, he studied horticulture at the now-defunct Wye College, the University of London’s agricultural college, where he stayed on as a lecturer for four years. From 1954 on, the family homestead was his permanent address. He never married and had no children.
Lloyd was officially recognized for his contributions to horticulture when the Royal Horticultural Society presented him with the Victoria Medal of Honor, it’s highest award, in 1979. He was also awarded the Order of the British Empire, in 1998.
In 1994, at 73, he hired Fergus Garrett, a young horticulturist of Irish and Turkish descent, as his head gardener. “Fergus was the son Christo never had,” Anderson said. As Lloyd advanced in age Fergus traveled with him as his assistant, adding occasional comments during slide lectures with Lloyd’s encouragement.
Days before Lloyd’s 80th birthday in March 2001, intruders hacked apart several of his garden’s famous peacock topiaries. The vandalism made news in the London Express Mail. By then the house and grounds were considered a national treasure, although Great Dixter remained a family-owned estate. It will now be managed by the Great Dixter Charitable Trust, with Garrett as overseer.
At 82, Lloyd made a five-city tour of the West that included Los Angeles. At several stops, tickets sold out in just over an hour.
Lloyd refused to sit on the stage during his presentations, preferring a wing chair placed in the front row. Audiences gave him a standing ovation.
“I think it made him feel that he still had it,” said Barbara Asmervig of the North West Horticultural Society, who organized the tour.
When he got home to England he wrote a note to Chatto. “You need the stimulation of travel,” he urged his friend.
