Rose Breeder, Author and Discoverer  

Listing last updated on Sat Apr 2025

United Kingdom

Graham Stuart Thomas (April 3, 1909 Cambridge - April 17, 2003 Woking)

[From Three Gardens for Pleasant Flowers, by Graham s. Thomas, 1983:] p. 31: By considerable good luck, on advertising my few abilities in Gardeners' Chronicle in 1932, I received a letter from T. Hilling and Co., Chobham, Woking, Surrey. ....p. 38: after 25 years at T. Hilling and Co., the latter part as manager, I began what proved to be 15 years of managership at Sunningdale.

[From A Heritage of Roses, by Hazel le Rougetel, p. 135:] Graham Thomas is also Gardens Consultant for The National Trust and he laid out their Rose Garden in the old walled kitchen garden of Mottisfont Abbey, near Romsey in Hampshire in the early 1970s to display one of the most comprehensive collections in England today and containing many rare older varieties.

[From wikipedia:]  It was while working at Hillings that Thomas met the formidable garden designer Gertrude Jekyll, then aged 88, when he wrote her a letter and she invited him for a cup of tea and a chat about gardening. She became a mentor to the young gardener, passing on her theories of garden design as an art. It was around this time that Thomas began to collect old shrub and climbing rose varieties, many of which had fallen out of favour because they only flowered once during the season