John Mattock

To say that John Mattock knew a thing or two about roses is like saying that Stephen Hawking could hold his own on the subject of black holes. He lived and — because he considered fragrance so important — breathed roses. This was just as well, because he grew half a million of them annually and, along with his brother Robert, introduced many new varieties, including the Chelsea Pensioner and Dreaming Spires.

In the 1970s Mattock was considered to be something of a star turn at the Chelsea Flower Show, winning the top prize with such consistency that he noticed his staff had taken to walking into the tent on the first day of staging with “an aura of invincibility”. The organisers eventually felt they had no option but to introduce a rule that competitors were not allowed to win the gold medal more than three times in a row. After that they made Mattock the chairman of the show, a role that he performed for 12 years.

An idiosyncratic man who was untroubled by inhibitions, Mattock found TV fame thanks to his 1974 exhibit at Chelsea, which he watered in front of the media with his best suit trousers rolled up above his knees. Afterwards he shared a taxi with Esther Rantzen, the TV presenter, and her children. When the youngest, who was tired and fretful, would not stop crying, Mattock came up with a novel solution to the problem: he passed his pipe to the child to use as a comforter. It worked.

John Stewart Mattock was born in Oxford in 1926. His parents, John William and Marita Mattock (née McFie), ran the family rose-growing company, Mattock’s Roses, which was established in 1875.

The eldest of four — three boys and a girl — Mattock grew up on Charity Farm in the village of Littlemore, where he nurtured an ambition to become the fifth generation of Mattock nurserymen. He witnessed the last traces of the firm’s original business — supplying Oxford colleges with flowers, fruit and vegetables — and could recall produce going by horse and cart to the city’s covered market.

Mattock was educated at Our Lady’s Convent in Cowley and Southfield Grammar School in Oxford. As a schoolboy he became a keen collector of cigarette cards — many of the staff at the nursery were smokers — and those that featured Royal Navy ships captured his imagination most. After leaving school he went to work on the family nursery and helped his father to safeguard a stock of cherished rose varieties while the nursery was turned over entirely to crop production for the duration of the Second World War.

This work meant that Mattock was classed as an agricultural worker, a reserved occupation, but avoiding war service was not on his mind. When he turned 17 he cycled into Oxford, produced his first travel warrant at the station and headed to the naval recruiting office at Reading. Six months later he was working as an electrician on a landing craft that was destined for Sword Beach on D-Day. As a “wireman” he was issued with a machete rather than a revolver. An enthusiastic curator of his own mythology, he liked to tell the story of a German deserter whom he deprived of his swastika-emblazoned belt after he attempted to surrender. When asked why, he said: “Have you ever attempted to run and keep your trousers up at the same time?”

Upon being demobbed, Mattock was issued with a civvy suit that he said “fitted him where it mattered” and he returned to the family business. The postwar years were tough times for ornamental horticulturalists. Sales of roses were sparse and the family grew crops of dahlias, vegetables and fruit in an attempt to boost the nursery’s finances.

After meeting Sheila Weatherly at an evening class in Oxford he married her in 1950. They settled in Headington, where their two children were born: Elizabeth, who is a nurse in Australia; and Helen, who works for Oxfordshire County Council.

Before the war, garden roses had largely been the preserve of grand country house owners, who favoured large shrub plants. As more people began to buy their own homes in the 1950s and 1960s, a new breed of gardener that wanted smaller bedding roses to fit the confines of their suburban gardens emerged. The Mattocks’ rose nurseries flourished as a result, with production rising from 100,000 to 850,000 in ten years.

When their father died in 1973, the brothers took over the firm. Mark did the accounts, Robert grew the roses and John did the marketing and selling, especially to suburban gardeners who craved novelty, better colour and disease resistance. The new breed of gardener lost interest in bedding roses and looked instead for roses that could be integrated into romantic settings.

Rarely less than ebullient, Mattock was happy to oblige, and his work was soon being heralded by the press, who recognised his instinctive flair for self-projection. As corporate institutions came to realise the power of the gardening media they also recognised the advertising potential of having a new rose named after them.

While Centurion and Shepherdess had a certain herbaceous appeal, selling a rose named Precious Platinum or, indeed, Benson and Hedges Gold caused no little gritting of the teeth. Again, John Mattock rose to the challenge.

He was staging ever grander exhibits with his brother Robert, and they obtained their first Chelsea gold medal on their first attempt. “Growing garden roses to flower for Chelsea requires an understanding of the demands of various types and a certain amount of luck,” Mattock reflected. The problem he found was that his roses had to be persuaded to come into bloom at the end of the third week in May, which was about four to six weeks before their normal seasonal appearance. In his words they had to be “jollied along”, but it was more scientific than that.

Mattock asked Robert to devise a growing technique that involved root pruning and a special compost that allowed him to grow roses under glass that would flower by late May. The “luck” element was disingenuous too, because the brothers would rehearse their production for two years before an exhibition, getting to know the foibles of each variety.

Their biggest Chelsea triumph came when they were offered the main site, known as “the monument”. They used it to demonstrate their natural style: massing flowers on long stems in huge bowls and tall pedestals staged on islands in a pool that surrounded the obelisk, which, as another innovation, they left bare rather than using camouflage.

The growth of the firm continued apace, resulting in the sale of the retail side of the company in 1985 to Notcutts. Robert Mattock continued to grow his large specimen plants on a smaller scale, but John retired to write and lecture. A lively and popular speaker, he toured Africa, Japan and the US. On one occasion, while lecturing to the inmate gardeners at the Avon Park Correctional Institution in Florida, he pulled out a knife to show how to bud, or propagate, a rose, an action that immediately brought everyone to attention, especially the guards.

Mattock was passionate about his orchard of apples, pears, greengages and plums, and his wife would often find a forgotten piece of fruit rotting quietly in his trouser pocket.

He enjoyed sailing a dinghy to Lyme or racing on the Thames with the sailing club in Abingdon. He was proud to hold the Order of the Blue Nose, an elite club founded by the rose growers Sam McGredy and Niels Poulsen. Membership was by invitation only and their anthem was Danny Boy. There was only one rule: “Never refuse a drink.” Mattock was an exemplary member.

As a committed bon viveur, he favoured claret, single malt whisky and Hook Norton beer in his village pub, in Oxford’s Frewen Club — where he became president — or at the bar that he ran in his retirement nursing home.

He served on the council of the Royal Horticultural Society for 15 years, held the Victoria Medal of Honour, the highest RHS award, and was the author of The Reader’s Digest Gardener’s Guide To Growing Roses.

In 1986 he split from his first wife and married his second, who was also called Sheila — he liked to keep things simple, he said. The second, Sheila Port, predeceased him in 2015. He was sometimes asked if he had named a rose after her. His often-used reply was: “No, as I would be unable to say whether it was better in a bed or up against the wall.”

John Mattock, gardener, was born on April 23, 1926. He died of heart failure on October 23, 2017, aged 91