Reginald Farrer Plant hunter Reginald

Reginald Farrer, the Victorian-Edwardian plant hunter who introduced many classic plants we enjoy today.

A tortured soul who struggled to fit into society, plant hunter Reginald Farrer, who died 100 years ago this month, had a yearning for travel that gave us a lasting legacy, says Francois Gordon

Right Viburnum farreri is just one of the plants familiar to us today that was introduced to the UK by Reginald Farrer. Below On an expedition, plant collecting in Asia.

In October 1920, shortly before he was due to begin his long journey home, Reginald Farrer, plant hunter and author, died of fever in his camp on a rain-sodden Burmese mountain. During his final days, Farrer was aware how his illness would end. Tragically, it’s likely he didn’t much care because he believed that he had little to live for. Yet he was one of the best and most successful gardening writers of his day and a plant hunter and travel writer of repute. He was sincerely mourned by the British gardening community, many of whose descendants to this day enjoy his writings, notably his two-volume work, The English Rock Garden (1919), which was continuously in print for four decades. How could there be such a contrast between public success – acclaim, even – and private despair?

Farrer was born in 1880 into a family of lawyers and clergymen, who were every bit as socially conservative as that might imply. As an infant he endured painful surgery on the hare lip and cleft palate with which he had been born, to allow him to eat normally, but the operation that enabled him to talk intelligibly had to wait until his late teens. Even then his voice was described by his cousin Osbert Sitwell as “[being] as startling as the discordant cry of a jay or woodpecker… like one of those early gramophones fitted with a tin trumpet”.

Farrer was schooled at home by tutors and from childhood he was a passionate botanist, a solitary boy who spent his time roaming the moors around the family home at Ingleborough, North Yorkshire, searching for rare plants. He was also a skilled watercolourist, specialising in botanical specimens.

At 18, Farrer went to Balliol College, Oxford, quitting a village of 67 houses, all but one of which (the vicarage) were owned by the Farrer estate and where his parents knew his every move, for a free-thinking community where his private life was private. He attached himself to and was, to a point, accepted by, a brilliant cohort of socially well-connected Balliol undergraduates. His eorts to be accepted as a member of that ‘set’ were, however, hampered by an allowance from his father that wouldn’t stretch to accompanying them on trips to Greece or Italy and also because, at a time when the link between height and social status was taken for granted, he stood a little under five foot three: this made him the butt of occasional cruel jokes and, far worse, covert sympathy. One of very few external manifestations of a streak of insecurity is that throughout his life Farrer avoided being photographed next to anything that might reveal his height – or lack of it.

At Oxford, Farrer discovered that he was exclusively attracted to men. In Britain 120 years ago, a few liberally minded intellectuals were privately tolerant of this orientation, but the overwhelming majority saw it as distasteful and aberrant. Farrer’s sexuality added another layer of complication to his eorts to integrate into upper-class British society, within which he was at all times forced to conceal this key element of his life.

After graduating, Farrer persuaded his parents to fund a trip to Japan with a Balliol friend. They broke the journey in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) where Farrer found himself drawn to Buddhism. In Tokyo he rented a house and spent eight months happily visiting temples and gardens, with brief sidetrips to China and Korea, all the while indulging his passion for collecting works of art. On his return to Ingleborough in 1903, his parents registered their horror both at their eldest son’s extravagance on his travels and his announcement that he had converted to Buddhism: despite trenchant conflict within the

Top The countryside near Ingleborough, where Farrer searched for rare plants as a child. Above right Farrer as a boy, taken around 1890. Above left Dressed in Chinese robes. family, his allowance was capped at a level that forced him to live at home. Partly in reaction to parental parsimony, Farrer took up his pen and for the rest of his life he published two or three books or plays a year. An account of his time in Japan was followed by My Rock Garden (1907), Alpines and Bog Plants (1908), and In a Yorkshire Garden (1909), all ground-breaking and influential works that remained in print for years and are still enjoyed today, not least for their lyrical descriptions. To his chagrin, however, the novels and verse-plays that he considered his real forté met with far less success than his gardening books or the book he wrote about plant-hunting in Italy, Among the Hills (1910).

In April 1913, Farrer attended the RHS Primula Conference, which included a display of plants collected in north-west China by William Purdom, commissioned by British nurseryman Sir Harry Veitch and the Arnold Arboretum in Boston. This crystallised Farrer’s dream of returning to Asia and he persuaded Purdom to join him on a similar mission for his expenses only. Farrer financed the expedition by selling shares in the future harvest of plants and seeds and hoped to turn a profit by selling plants though the nursery he ran from the Ingleborough greenhouses.

Farrer and Purdom collected successfully in western China in 1914, and in December sent their sponsors an impressive quantity of plant material, including Viburnum farreri, Buddleja alternifolia , and several primulas, poppies and rhododendrons. In normal times these would have made a very satisfactory impact on gardeners and horticulturists, but the August outbreak of the Great War had devastated gardening and the nursery trade. Farrer was able only to balance the books for 1915 by selling the coming year’s harvest at sacrifice prices to Liverpool nurseryman A K Bulley.

As a Buddhist, Farrer would not fight and would have failed the army medical in any case. On his return to Britain in 1916 he worked for John Buchan at the Foreign Oce, writing anti-German propaganda. In 1918 he fell seriously ill: after surgery, he was so anxious to leave Britain that he began organising an expedition to Burma from his hospital bed, sailing from Glasgow in January 1919.

Above Part of the Min Mountains in what is now China’s Jiuzhaigou National Park, where Purdom and Farrer went plant hunting in 1914. Right The lovely, long, lilac flower tassels of Farrer’s fine discovery, Buddleja alternifolia .

Francois Gordon’s book about Will Purdom will be published on 11 February 2021 by the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, £19.99.

The expedition was under-resourced and Farrer made the bitter discovery that there were few plants in northern Burma that might be hardy in Britain. His travelling companion, Ewan Cox, left after a year, leaving Farrer alone with his Gurkha sta. His letters to his friends were resigned, although in his final summer he seemed more optimistic, planning to return home and perhaps even marry, recording that despite his dislike for “the method of procuring them”, he would like children. It was not to be: in early October he fell ill and despite heroic eorts by his sta to obtain medical assistance he died on the morning of the 17th and was buried near the former fort at Nyitadi. His mother had the last word, ordering –in defiance of his wishes –a stone cross to be placed on his grave. Q GAP/JONATHAN BUCKLEY; ALAMY For further reading Nicola Shulman’s A IMAGES about Rage Reginald for Rock Farrer, try Gardening (Short Books) or Michael Charlesworth’s The Modern Culture of Reginald Farrer (Legenda).