page_title: Reginald Farrer
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Reginald Farrer / Life
caption_attribution_description: English: Rhododendrons planted by Reginald Farrer are still growing in Clapham, North Yorkshire.
context_page_description: Reginald John Farrer, was a traveller and plant collector. He published a number of books, although is best known for My Rock Garden. He travelled to Asia in search of a variety of plants, many of which he brought back to England and planted near his home village of Clapham, North Yorkshire.
context_section_description: Farrer was born in Marylebone, London into a well-to-do family who resided in Clapham, North Yorkshire. Due to a speech defect and numerous operations on a cleft palate, he was educated at home. He developed a passionate and lifelong enthusiasm for high places and the mountain plants that grow there. By 10 years of age he was a well-qualified field botanist with a "fair knowledge of plant anatomy." At 14 years he made his first rock garden in an abandoned quarry.
  He entered Balliol College, Oxford  at 17 years of age and graduated in 1902. During his time there he helped to make the rock garden at St John's. In 1902 Farrer embarked on the first of his expeditions to Eastern Asia, visiting China, Korea and, particularly Japan. He was there for eight months and influenced by Japanese gardening tastes and traditions, he developed his characteristically strong views on rock garden design, 'where naturalism superseded formal artificiality, and where alpine plants were to grow in surroundings which, though ordered by man, copied as far as possible their original habitats'. These travels resulted in The Garden of Asia (1904).
  Returning to England he attempted to become a novelist and poet. His first book was well received, but later publications less so. In 1907 he published My Rock Garden, which was a very popular and influential book and was kept continuously in print for more than 40 years. His next publications were Alpines and Bog Plants (1908), In a Yorkshire Garden (1909) and Among the Hills (1910). In 1913 he published The Dolomites: King Laurin's Garden, which deals with plant hunting in the Italian Dolomites. In 1913 he wrote The English Rock-Garden: Volumes 1 and 2 (1918), which was very popular with at least four impressions.
  At this time Farrer travelled widely in the mountains of Italy, France and Switzerland, walking and climbing with gardener friends, including fellow plantsman E.A. Bowles. He also visited Ceylon in 1908, becoming a Buddhist there. Later the same year appeared his book, In Old Ceylon.
  Farrer was attracted by the horticultural possibilities of the introduction of new hardy rock plants to the British gardening public. With this in mind, he founded the Craven Nursery in Clapham, which specialised in Asian alpines, an enterprise foundered in the economic crisis of the 1920s.
  In 1914 Farrer and the Kew-trained William Purdom, set out on an ambitious expedition to Qinghai Tibet and the Province of Kansu province of North-west China. He and Purdom found there numerous hardy specimens that today enrich British gardens. Many bear his name, though the list would have been longer if Farrer had not sometimes neglected to collect, as well as plants and seeds, the herbarium specimens necessary for classification and naming. These two years of exploring and plant collecting are described in Farrer's On the Eaves of the World (2 vols) (1917), and in the posthumous The Rainbow Bridge (1921).
  Farrer drew many illustrations, often painted in the most uncomfortable of circumstances, which record, not an exact botanical resemblance, but Farrer's emotional reaction to the plant and its habitat. Many of these, and his landscape water-colours of Kansu and Tibet, were exhibited by the Fine Art Society in 1918.
  Farrer's diary conveys the practical difficulties he faced, and provides a glimpse of his ebullient use of language: "June 2, 1919 ... I sat down to paint it (the most marvellous and impressive Rhododendron I've ever seen – a gigantic, excellent, with corrugated leaves and great white trumpets stained with yellow inside – a thing alone, by itself WELL worth all the journey up here and everything) and oddly enough I did not enjoy doing so at first... a first false start – a second, better, splashed and spoilt, then a mizzle, so that umbrella had to be screamed for and held up with one hand while I worked with the other. Then flies and torment and finally a wild dust storm with rain and thunder came raging over so that everything had feverishly to be hauled indoors and the Rhododendron fell over and all the lights a
caption: Rhododendrons planted by Reginald Farrer are still growing in woods above Clapham.
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