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Personal biography I was born in Surbiton, a suburb in the southwest of London not far from Hampton Court Palace, and trained in horticulture and botany at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. My first garden was a small bed under an ash tree in the garden at home and, with the encouragement of my parents, I sowed some radishes. They grew well enough, but tasting them put me off gardening for years - I still can't face a radish. Fortunately, after leaving school I discovered plants and went to work at Kew. After progressing from weeding the rock garden to propagating perennials, I took the three year Diploma course at Kew, passed with flying colours, and joined the staff of the late and much lamented Practical Gardening magazine where I was eventually in charge of ensuring the horticultural accuracy of the whole magazine. Over the years my gardens have been unexpectedly varied, from two window boxes outside a first floor flat... to an 8 ft x 6 ft terrace... to a strip 200 ft long and just 14 ft wide to an acre of and half of meadow and garden. I now split my time between Northamptonshire and New Jersey. For the last thirteen years I've been writing on plants and gardens in newspapers, general interest magazines and in specialist gardening magazines; for two years I was gardening columnist for The Observer newspaper, I'm now gardening correspondent of the London Evening Standard. I've also written fifteen books, published both in Britain and the United States. I judge at the Chelsea Flower Show and at other Royal Horticultural Society shows and I also judge the RHS flower trials. I've appeared on BBC TV's Gardener's World and ITV's Grass Roots. I've won a number of awards. My book Hardy Perennials, published by Viking (UK) and Timber Press (USA), won the 1995 Garden Writers Guild award for the best book on a single subject. The following year I won another Garden Writers Guild award, this time for an article on new developments in bedding plants. My photography has been published in many magazines and books, and is represented by the stock photography house, New Leaf Images. My most recent books are The Planting Planner (MacMillan) and The Gardener's Guide to Perennials (Mitchell Beazley), published as The Complete Guide to Perennials (Readers Digest) in the USA. My next book, Discovering Annuals, will be published in March 1999 by the UK Publishers Frances Lincoln and, in a separate edition in April 1999, by US publishers Timber Press.
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