C harles Roy Lancaster CBE, VMH, FIHort, FLS, born in Bolton in 1937, is one of British horticulture's most recognisable figures — a plantsman whose curiosity has carried him across most of the temperate world and into the living rooms of two generations of gardeners. He began work at fifteen in Bolton Parks Department, served two years of national service in Malaya recording the local flora, and apprenticed at Cambridge Botanic Garden before joining Hillier Nurseries, where he assembled the standard reference Hillier Manual of Trees and Shrubs and became the first Curator of what is now the Sir Harold Hillier Gardens.
From 1980 he worked freelance, leading plant-collecting expeditions to Nepal, Yunnan and elsewhere — eleven trips to China alone — chronicled in A Plantsman in Nepal and Travels in China: A Plantsman's Paradise. His television work on Gardeners' World, Channel 4's Garden Club and BBC Radio 4's Gardeners' Question Time turned a private vocation into a public one.
He is a Vice President of the Royal Horticultural Society, holds the Veitch Memorial Medal and the Victoria Medal of Honour, and was made CBE in 2014 for services to horticulture and charity. His memoir My Life with Plants traces a remarkable working life from a chance schoolboy find of a Mexican tobacco plant on a Bolton allotment to a career spent in the company of plants and the people who grow them.
