Ruth Scurr

Snobbery in the garden: U and non-U borders

When Richard Sudell began promoting pyracantha, hanging baskets and crazy paving in the 1920s, the backlash from the gardening elite was vicious and immediate

The yellow-and-orange-striped rose Rainbow Niagara – the sort of hybrid tea anathema to the gardening elite. [Getty Images] 
issue 20 July 2024

  • Behind the Privet Hedge: Richard Sudell, the Suburban Garden and the Beautification of Britain

    Michael Gilson

    Reaktion, pp. 328, £16

  • The Accidental Garden: Gardens, Wilderness and the Space in Between

    Richard Mabey

    Profile, pp. 160, £12

Richard Sudell is the forgotten hero of the gardening revolution in Britain between the first and second world wars. A Quaker, born in Lancashire in 1892, the son of a straw and hay dealer, he left school at 14 and became a gardener, worked at Kew, then went to prison as a conscientious objector in 1916.

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