The nostalgic appeal of the BBC TV series The Victorian Kitchen Garden owed much to the presentation style and warm narration of the horticulturist Peter Thoday, who has died aged 88. The 1987 hit show made unlikely stars of the avuncular, bushy-moustached Thoday, then in his 50s, and the earthy head gardener Harry Dodson.
Each of the series’ 13 parts (an introductory episode, and then one for each month of the year) brought the pleasures of restoring a semi-derelict kitchen garden at the Chilton estate in Berkshire, where Dodson had worked since 1947, to the screen.
Thoday, who was also fundamental in setting up the Lost Gardens of Heligan and the Eden Project visitor attractions in Cornwall, offered historical commentary in his rich burr, explaining to an audience of millions the servant class skills and hard labour required to tend such a garden in a bygone age of duty.
The TV series came out of the blue when Jennifer Davies, an enthusiast for Victorian horticulture who became the show’s associate producer, discovered that Thoday had been using a derelict Glamorgan kitchen garden as a study tool for local young people’s charities.
They developed the TV series with the aim of working the garden as it would have been done in the Victorian era, using plants and practices from the 19th century. Rising costs had caused the walled garden to be made over by the estate’s owners to Dodson in 1981, who had begun running part of it as a commercial nursery.
Thoday revelled in educating the public in the history of the craft of gardening, dear to his childhood memories. Audiences loved watching Dodson growing fruit and vegetables as the sleeping garden returned to life, with the voiceover of Thoday perfectly matching the gentle tone of the programme.
He accepted that Dodson was the main character and admired him as a man a generation out of time, who appeared, for the show’s purposes, to be the last in the line of those who could do the laborious skilled jobs of the Victorian head gardener, such as forcing, hothousing, grafting and budding.
Viewing figures were two to three million, three times what had been expected, and from the original series grew The Victorian Kitchen (1989) and Wartime Kitchen and Garden (1993), providing more nostalgia, all produced by Davies and Keith Sheather and discovering another gem in the “below stairs” cook Ruth Mott.
In 1900, Thoday believed, there were 400-500 Dodsons running kitchen gardeners in the UK but there were only a handful left by the time the series was filmed. The programmes were produced at almost the last possible moment before the final head gardener to use the old-fashioned methods retired.
Dodson showed how Victorian gardeners nurtured pineapples and peaches, though Thoday later revealed that Dodson had bought the pineapples shown on the TV as the ones forced in the garden did not grow very well. Thoday said watching peaches being individually faced up to ripen was a lost art that he thought he would never see again.
He believed: “Victorian gardening had an excellence of technique and productivity but lost itself in the challenge of perfection.”
The original series even proved to be a lockdown hit, prompting a 2020 article in the New Yorker lauding the soothing calm of Thoday and Dodson.
Thoday grew up in Cambridge, the son of Mabel (nee Ellis) and Ralph Thoday, a head gardener who oversaw the grounds at St John’s College, which included a market garden producing everything from pigs to orchids.
Dyslexic, Thoday said he was a “failure” at school, and occupied himself by growing cacti and raising conifers from seed. After national service with the RAF, he studied at Cambridge University Botanic Garden in the early 1950s, then worked in East Africa in nursery stock production before becoming a demonstrator at the University of Bristol.
He spent five years as lecturer at Hertfordshire College of Agriculture and Horticulture. In 1966 he became lecturer in amenity land management at the University of Bath, later promoted to senior lecturer in landscape management and then director of studies.
Thoday’s expertise and knowledge of Victorian kitchen gardens prompted the businessman Tim Smit to approach him for help with restoring the neglected Victorian estate near Mevagissey in Cornwall that became the Lost Gardens of Heligan where, from 1987, Thoday was the horticultural consultant with Philip Macmillan-Browse.
For Smit’s subsequent garden, the Eden Project, Thoday was part of the inspiration, then consultant and later horticultural director.
In 1990 he set up his horticultural consultancy, Thoday Associates, staying on as a visiting lecturer at Bath until the course closed in 1993, championing the relationship between horticulture and landscape architecture.
He was president of the Institute of Horticulture 1994-96, an external examiner at Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and was created honorary fellow of the Kew Guild in 2014. Other roles included helping set up the Federation to Promote Horticulture for Disabled People in the 80s and pioneering hospital environment design. He was until recently trustee and chair of the Sensory Trust. In 2003 he was awarded the RHS Veitch Memorial Medal and in 2022 the Victoria Medal of Honour.
In his semi-retirement, he produced two books on the domestication of plants, Two Blades of Grass (2007) and Cultivar (2013), and another titled Plants and Planting on Landscape Sites: Selection and Supervision (2016).
He is survived by his wife, Anne (nee Thompson), whom he married in 1970, and their daughter, Helen. A son, David, predeceased him.