Bibliography - Lloyd, Christopher
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Christopher Lloyd: His Life at Great Dixter, by Stephen Anderton, published 2010 (xiii + 240 pp., Random House, ISBN-10: 0701181133 & ISBN-13: 9780701181130) accessible at: West Sussex Libraries & East Sussex Libraries

Christopher Lloyd (Christo) was one of the greatest English gardeners of the twentieth century, perhaps the finest plantsman of them all. His creation is the garden at Great Dixter in East Sussex, and it is a tribute to his vision and achievement that, after his death in 2006, the Heritage Lottery Fund made a grant of £4 million to help preserve it for the nation. This enjoyable and revealing book - the first biography of Christo - is also the story of Dixter from 1910 to 2006, a unique unbroken history of one English house and one English garden spanning a century. It was Christo's father, Nathaniel, who bought the medieval manor at Dixter and called in the fashionable Edwardian architect, Lutyens, to rebuild the house and lay out the garden. And it was his mother, Daisy, who made the first wild garden in the meadows there. Christo was born at Dixter in 1921. Apart from boarding school, war service and a period at horticultural college, he spent his whole life there, constantly re-planting and enriching the garden, while turning out landmark books and exhaustive journalism. Opinionated, argumentative and gloriously eccentric, he changed the face of English gardening through his passions for meadow gardening, dazzling colours and thorough husbandry. As the baby of a family of six - five boys and a girl - Christo was stifled by his adoring mother. Music-loving and sports-hating, he knew the Latin names of plants before he was eight. This fascinating book reveals what made Christo tick by examining his relationships with his generous but scheming mother, his like-minded friends (such as gardeners Anna Pavord and Beth Chatto) and his colleagues (including his head gardener, Fergus Garrett, a plantsman in Christo's own mould).

Dear Christo: Memories of Christopher Lloyd at Great Dixter, edited by Rosemary Alexander and Fergus Garrett, published 15 October 2010 (160 pp., London: Timber Press, ISBN-10: 1604692235 & ISBN-13: 9781604692235) accessible at: West Sussex Libraries & East Sussex Libraries

Great Dixter is a place of pilgrimage for gardeners all over the world. Its exuberant plantings have drawn legions of green-fingered visitors for decades. But Great Dixter's influence extends way beyond the gardening world and affects all who pass through it in a very particular way. Well-known garden writers and celebrities such as Alan Titchmarsh, Anna Pavord, Helen Dillon, Hugh Johnson, Simon Jenkins and Mary Keen remark upon their Dixter experiences. Photographers and designers such as Howard Sooley, Jonathan Buckley, Andrew Lawson, Jerry Harpur and Allen Pollok-Morris have also contributed a range of stunning photographs.