Roger Phillips

Roger Phillips was an award-winning photographer with a reputation spanning nearly fifty years. In 1975, he began his life's major work of cateloguing the world's garden plants, setting out to develop an encyclopedic collection of books to show the difference between plants as diverse as mosses, roses and annuals.

Roger consistently pioneered the use of colour photography for the reliable identification of natural history subjects, and wrote more than forty works dedicated to this purpose, including Vegetables; Mushrooms; Wild Food; Trees; and the seminal Wild Flowers: of Britain and Ireland, which sold almost half a million copies in its first year alone, and has gone on to become the bible for anthophiles across the Isles.

Roger wrote and presented two major six-part TV series on gardening for the BBC and Channel 4. Famed for his ebullient personality and trademark red glasses, he was a well-recognised figure in the world of gardening, and he received an MBE for his work on London’s garden squares. He died in November 2021.