Sir Peter Smithers

Peter Henry Berry Otway Smithers, politician, diplomat, historian, wartime intelligence agent and gardener: born Moor Allerton, Yorkshire 9 December 1913; called to the Bar, Inner Temple 1936; MP (Conservative) for Winchester 1950-64; Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Foreign Office 1962-64; Secretary-General, Council of Europe 1964-69; Kt 1970; Senior Research Fellow, UN Institute for Training and Research 1969-72; General Rapporteur, European Conference of Parliamentarians and Scientists 1970-77; married 1943 Dojean Lane (née Sayman, died 2006; two daughters); died Vico Morcote, Switzerland 8 June 2006.

Had he been so inclined, Peter Smithers could have written several intriguing autobiographical volumes about his career as a politician, diplomat, scholar and wartime intelligence agent. Yet he produced only one, and by calling it Adventures of a Gardener he signalled that his distinguished and eventful public life had always, in his own assessment, taken second place to his lifelong passion for horticulture.

For instance, he described in the 1995 book how, during the Second World War, he was thrilled to be assigned to a sensitive post in Central America principally because it "would oblige me to pass through some of the world's richest flora". (In the event it proved stimulating in a way he had not anticipated, for it was in Mexico that he met and - after a three-week courtship - married Dojean Sayman, an American. The marriage lasted 62 years, until her death just a few months before his own.)

His fascination with gardening took root when, as a child, he would hang around the potting sheds of his family estates in Hampshire, where his parents lived, and Yorkshire, where he was sent to stay with his grandparents during the First World War. He watched and listened intently as the head gardeners demonstrated and explained the mysteries of their craft and was soon buying plants with his pocket money.

After his marriage, he and his wife settled in Winchester, where he served first as a district councillor and then from 1950 until 1964 as Conservative MP. In the shadow of the cathedral he created a magnificent garden and, in the glasshouse, raised more than 2,000 species of cactus.

The key moment of his gardening life came in 1970, when he bought an old terraced vineyard at Vico Morcote, on a hillside 380 metres above Lake Lugano in Switzerland. There he constructed an extraordinary house, based on Japanese principles, its two wings joined by a bridge across a stream tumbling over rocks. He decided from the start that the house should be integrated with the garden that he planned to develop on the hillside. Today some of the external walls are almost totally covered with foliage, while the full-length windows provide spectacular views of the now mature plantings.

The Eastern theme was continued in what he described as his "Japanese stroll-garden", where a winding path with spurs led visitors through its key features. It was reflected, too, in his choice of plants. The flowering shrubs and trees that fill the terraces include 150 varieties of magnolias, many of them newly introduced to Europe, interspersed with camellias, rhododendrons, azaleas and tree peonies. He was also fond of hostas, wistaria, irises, orchids and nerines, of which he bred a number of new varieties.

He created the garden on a set of strict principles that he set out at the beginning of his book. The first was that "it shall be a source of pleasure to the owner, and not a source of anxiety". Because he was approaching 60 when he began to lay it out, he tried to ensure that the amount of work involved in maintaining it would diminish as he grew less capable of carrying it out. He therefore eschewed annuals and biennials or plants that required special attention, such as lifting in winter.

What he aimed for was "a self- sustaining plant community, an ecosystem of exotics, within which, as in nature, the plants support and maintain one another without the intervention of man". And that was what he achieved, until towards the end of his life the garden needed scarcely any regular care.

The last of Smithers's guiding principles was:

No plant is ever sold or exchanged. All are available to serious gardeners, stock and labour permitting. The pleasure of owning a fine plant is not complete until it has been given to friends.

His intimate relationships with the plants he grew - or "love affairs", as he called them - were revealed in some of the book's most eloquent passages. He found orchids "disconcertingly human" - easy to grow if given what they want, "but make a mistake and then - they will not tell you: they will leave you to find out". As for lilies:

They win your love with their beauty and grace and a certain indefinable allure: and then they break your heart in the end. It is a very old story.

In 1993, at the age of 80, he was awarded the prestigious Veitch Memorial Medal of the Royal Horticultural Society. In 2001 the garden at Vico Morcote won the Schulthess Prize as the best garden in Switzerland. These were among a number of awards that Smithers won, principally from the RHS, not only for his skills at plant breeding but also for his superb flower photography.

He had been a keen photographer ever since buying his first camera, a Leica, when he was an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1932. He had not thought to show his pictures publicly until 1978, when a professional photographer happened to see some at a Florida processing laboratory and urged him to exhibit them. Three years later, he won the first of his seven RHS gold medals for photography, and since then more than 20 one-man shows in Europe and the United States have been devoted to his work. Some of his pictures were used in a high-profile advertising campaign for the Diesel fashion range in New York.

The Smithers' decision to move to Switzerland in 1970 was a result of an invitation from Willi Spuhler, the President of the Swiss Confederation. In 1964 Smithers, having achieved the rank of junior minister in the Foreign Office, stood down from the House of Commons to become Secretary- General of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, where he had served as a British delegate in the 1950s. When his term expired in 1969 he was asked to stay on for a further five years, but decided against it. Yet he did not seek to return to British politics. He and his wife had enjoyed living and gardening in Strasbourg, so they sold their large house in Winchester and moved full-time to the Continent.

His earlier experiences of Europe had been more hair-raising. Leaving Oxford in 1934 with a First in Modern History, he became a barrister at Lincoln's Inn. Soon after the start of the Second World War he was recruited into MI6, where he worked closely with Ian Fleming, the creator of the fictional spy hero James Bond. (He was one of Fleming's many acquaintances who had some claim to be a model for the dashing Bond.) Smithers was posted first to Paris and then to Bordeaux, organising the rapid evacuation of British refugees in the weeks before the German occupation.

Later he was sent to Washington before going out to Mexico to investigate where German submarines were being refuelled in the Central American region. After the war he returned to nurse his Winchester constituency in readiness for the 1950 election. He maintained his interest in history and used the waiting time to write a study of the 18th-century essayist Joseph Addison (The Life of Joseph Addison, 1953).

Despite his move to Switzerland he never regarded himself as an exile and took a lively interest in British politics, writing frequent letters to The Times and The Daily Telegraph offering his insights into current developments. Although much of his career was devoted to encouraging co-operation among European nations, he opposed what he saw as moves towards the creation of a federal state, and disapproved of the single currency. After the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 he lamented:

The old world of international politics is dead . . . The world is out of control, driven by a new sys-

tem which knows nothing of the rule of law or human rights.

In Adventures of a Gardener, Smithers noted that Joseph Addison had wanted to die in the summer, surrounded by a thriving garden, and achieved this by passing away in June 1719. Smithers had the same ambition, and died in the same month. And he discouraged any idea that the garden, springing as it did totally from his own imagination and perception, would survive as a memorial to him:

It is easy to describe but difficult to estimate something which is of one's own creation. The problem is one of philosophy. The garden has given me great pleasure at every stage of its development and I see it not as a snapshot taken today but in the perspective of the years past. The only reality for me is what I myself perceive. When I die the universe dies with me.

Michael Leapman