Inside Sun gardening guru Peter Seabrook’s incredible life from royal fans to tending to Barbara Windsor’s window boxes
PETER SEABROOK, The Sun’s legendary gardening expert, never forgot the moment he discovered the sheer joy of growing a plant.
Aged just six, he dug a handful of seeds into his grandfather’s wartime allotment and watched them grow into beautiful multi-coloured sweet peas.
And 80 years later, through his Saturday column in The Sun — which he began writing in Silver Jubilee year, 1977 — he was still sharing that passion for plants and vegetables.
Thanks to Peter, generations of people, including more than three million schoolchildren, learned to love gardens and gardening.
When he started writing for Britain’s biggest daily newspaper Peter was already a worldwide media star, with gardening shows on the BBC and American TV.
In 45 years he wrote more than 2,300 columns for The Sun, and never missed a single week.
When he died of a heart attack on Friday, aged 86, he had been making plans to build The Sun’s biggest-ever exhibit at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show to mark the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee.
Her Majesty, who he presented with a posy every year at Chelsea, was one of his biggest fans, along with Beatle George Harrison and acting legend Barbara Windsor — whose garden he looked after.
Marquee full of flowers
And yesterday tributes poured in from the greats of gardening to the man they called “Britain’s favourite gardener”.
Peter John Seabrook, the son of a tool-grinder in a ball bearing factory, was brought up on his grandfather’s farm at Galleywood, near Chelmsford, Essex.
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As a boy he discovered there was money to be made by growing his beloved sweet peas and selling them to the local flower shop.
By the time he was 15, and still at school, he could afford to pay £60 — a fortune in 1951 — to fly from Southend Airport to Holland to visit the world’s biggest flower market, Aalsmeer, near Amsterdam. He was still making the trip at 86 to check out new plant varieties to tell his readers about.
In 1952 he skipped off school in Chelmsford for his first-ever visit to the Chelsea Flower Show.
Peter said: “When I went into the marquee full of flowers it just blew me away. I can still remember it as if it was yesterday.”
He left school with few qualifications but that did not stop him landing his first full-time gardening job, working for a 200-year-old local firm which owned 40 pet and garden shops.
Peter put his amazing constitution down to those early years when he was digging from 7.30am to 5pm for six days a week — and cycling ten miles a day to and from work.
He quit to take a two-year diploma at the Essex Institute of Agriculture, where he also built up his encyclopaedic knowledge of plants — and also met his wife Margaret, who was on the same course.
While he was there, Peter bought his first push lawnmower, a Ran- somes Ajax with a 12in cylinder and weighing in at half a hundredweight.
Remarkably, nearly 80 years later, he still used that same mower to keep the two 40ft lawns at his home in Chelmsford immaculate.
Peter was so fastidious about his lawn looking good that he mowed each 12in strip three times to make sure the cut was perfect.
As a young man he had to do National Service, and joined the Royal Army Service Corps, who taught him two skills that would prove useful.
Peter said: “They taught me to type and paid for me to go to lessons in floristry.
“Little did I realise that, decades later, I would use those florists’ skills to make posies of flowers I’d grown in my garden to give to the Queen at the Chelsea Flower Show.”
National service
After National Service he returned to horticulture, just as Britain’s new garden centres began to boom.
Peter had hoped to run his own nursery business but his planning application to turn a 12-acre site into a garden centre was turned down.
Yet fate had other plans for him. He often spotted mistakes in a weekly trade magazine and wrote to the editor saying he could do a better job — and was hired.
He used the same ploy to get his first break in radio, which in turn led to TV. Peter appeared on a Saturday afternoon gardening show, Dig This!.
But when it was suddenly axed, Peter was left with 60,000 copies of a booklet he had paid for to accompany a TV show that no longer existed.
Luckily, he was soon hired as the regular gardening expert on 1970s BBC lunchtime show Pebble Mill At One — and Peter craftily called his weekly slot Dig This! which helped him get rid of the unsold booklets.
Peter’s biggest TV break came when Percy Thrower, legendary presenter of Gardeners’ World, was sacked for promoting commercial products.
Peter said: “Percy was a gardening god. He’d been presenting the programme for 25 years and they replaced him with a nobody — me. It was like Gary Lineker being taken off Match Of The Day.”
Peter soon had a weekly audience totalling eight million, and in 1977, when The Sun was looking for a new Gardening Editor, he was the perfect candidate.
And his first Sun column was titled ‘Dig This!’ Peter said: “By the time I joined The Sun, I had quite a following on TV and radio.
“I couldn’t go anywhere without being asked questions, even on holiday on the beach. It was terrible for my family but it was my job.”
At The Sun he once got 50,000 entries for a competition to win a mower — far more than for a Sun contest to win a Jag.
Peter had a wicked sense of humour, and once replied to a reader who asked if Viagra could help wilting plants: “There have been reports that it could help, but the cost would be too stiff for general use.”
He also loved telling how he ended up in Barbara Windsor’s bedroom after she had wolf-whistled at him in the street — only to be asked to trim the wild-growing geraniums in her window box.
As well as having fun, Peter took his job seriously and was only person in Britain to hold the three top awards for services to horticulture — the Victoria Medal of Honour, the RHS Associate of Honour and the Harlow Carr Medal. He was also awarded the MBE for services to horticulture in 2005.
Peter’s friend and colleague for 45 years, Sun royal photographer Arthur Edwards, said: “Peter was in his element at Chelsea Flower Show. He took such pride in his exhibitions and they became a firm favourite of the Royal Family. The Queen absolutely adored him and always had a big smile whenever she saw him.”
At Chelsea Peter created our brilliant award-winning Sunflower Street garden displays.
In 2005 a pair of nesting blackbirds moved into the display, and just as the Queen arrived the birds began slugging it out, making a gaping hole in the top of the display — which amused Her Majesty.
In 2020 Peter designed a stunning 10ft-high floral pyramid with 10,000 plants for Chelsea.
When Covid forced the show to be cancelled, he rebuilt it at the Royal Horticultural Society’s gardens at Hyde Hall in Essex, where he sought solace after his wife Margaret’s death from Alzheimer’s the same year.
Since then, Peter has turned the Hyde Hall plot into The Sun’s Floral Fantasia garden, and just before his death he and his assistant Molli Christman planted thousands of bulbs for this summer’s colourful display.
As well as encouraging people to grow plants and veg, Peter was a passionate campaigner who hated green bins instead of garden waste going to compost. In his last column, which you can read on Saturday, he campaigns against plans to outlaw peat in gardening.
'Adored by all'
The Sun’s Editor-in-Chief, Victoria Newton, said: “Just before his death, Peter was helping children at a school in Essex to grow oak saplings from acorns to plant for the Queen’s Jubilee Canopy.
“He was adored by all, from the Royal Family and celebrities to ordinary people who wanted his help to grow plants, even if they had the smallest plot or no garden at all. To them Peter was their gardener. He will be so missed in The Sun office, where he brightened up our days by bringing in presents of flowers or apples to taste and sample.
“Peter was devoted to Margaret, his wife of 60 years who died during lockdown in 2020 after suffering Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia for nine years.
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“He created a verbena plant in her memory and raised £7,000 for the Alzheimer’s Society. Our thoughts are with his daughter Alison, son Roger and grandchildren Tom and Rachel.”
His friend Arthur Edwards said: “Peter was a wonderful colleague. A man with the greenest of fingers, he was a thoroughly decent, witty and warm person. He will be much missed.”