Me and my garden: ‘I get very emotional about plants’

As a boy, I’d go off into the moors just above my home in Bolton. I’d find interesting birds, and wander farther and farther afield each time. I was returning from a bird walk one day when I passed an allotment. I looked over the fence and this very different plant was growing in a patch of potatoes. I was moved to climb the fence and pick a bit – it was very sticky. I became known as the boy who found the Mexican tobacco, Nicotiana rustica: it was only the second recorded occurrence of this plant wild in the British Isles. I thought, if it’s that easy, what might I find if I really try?

When I was curator at the Sir Harold Hillier Gardens, I saw it as my big garden. Once I left the arboretum, I wanted my own collection; a garden under my nose. That way, if I was writing about plants I was growing and I needed to check – did it have a hairy leaf? Were the flowers really dark pink in bud? – I could just go outside and look.

I grew a rare Chinese magnolia, M. cylindrica, from seed sent to me from a friend I’d made in 1979 at the Shanghai Botanic Garden. He was a wonderful, shy, unpretentious gardener who was banished by the communists to some wilderness far from his home and had just been allowed back. The tree is in pride of place in my garden, where I can look down on it from my bedroom window. I had it for 15 years, and it still hadn’t flowered. I thought, if it doesn’t flower this spring, I’m going to give it away. It didn’t, so I rang a local arboretum to come and dig it up. The following spring it flowered for the first time. I thought, yes, I am going to keep you. At its peak in April, it produces several hundred blooms, and I still have it to remember my Chinese friend by.

I get very emotional about plants. Sometimes people ask where my energy comes from. Well, it should be obvious: my energy is green energy; it comes from plants, and plants get their energy from the sun. I am in my 80th year now. There’s no way I can pass away yet: there are too many plants that want to show me what they can do.