My father, Charles Notcutt, who has died aged 81, was an inspirational and popular leader of the horticultural community, serving on a number of its trade bodies and helping to promote education and research in the field.
He was also instrumental in the rapid growth of our family firm, Notcutts, which was founded as a nursery business in 1897 by my great-grandfather and which is now the UK’s largest family-owned garden centre company.
Charles was a member of the council of the Royal Horticultural Society for 10 years, where his natural ebullience was infectious and where he could always be relied upon to provide supportive advice to his peers. On one notable occasion at the RHS, when there was a move to alert the public to the dangers of poisonous plants, he pointed out, with typical common sense, that placing a skull and crossbones on plant labels would hardly help to promote sales, and thus the idea was quietly dropped.
Charles was heavily involved with the Horticultural Trades Association, and when a separate body was created in 1966 for garden centres – the Garden Centre Association – he was its first chairman. He was also involved in the establishment of the Institute of Horticulture, subsequently becoming its president.
Born in Ipswich, he was the only child of Jean (nee Macpherson) and Roger Notcutt, and was educated at Edinburgh Academy. After national service and Pershore College in Worcestershire he joined Notcutts in 1958, the year the company opened one of the UK’s first garden centres – in Woodbridge, Suffolk. Under his leadership, Notcutts won a number of medals at the Chelsea Flower Show.
My father’s service to horticulture from the late 1950s onwards earned him an OBE, an honorary doctorate in civil law from the University of East Anglia, and the Royal Horticultural Society’s highest recognition, the Victoria Medal of Honour.
He is survived by his second wife, Gill Hutchinson, whom he married in 1977; by his three children, William, Caroline and me, from his first marriage to Angela Morris, which ended in divorce, and by eight grandchildren.
