D.G. Hessayon is widely recognized as the world’s best-selling gardening writer, although many people outside Britain may not recognize his name. At home, however, he was the Agatha Christie of the genre.
Like Christie’s whodunits, Dr. Hessayon’s books followed a strict formula; and, like Christie, he shunned the limelight.
“I’m far too round, far too short and far too fat, for a start,” he told the British newspaper The Guardian in 1999. “I didn’t want people coming up to me asking for an autograph or a photograph or a donation.”
Yet he was, in his own unvarnished way, a star, the guru of suburban gardeners. Margaret Thatcher was a fan.
Beginning with “Be Your Own Gardening Expert” (1959), Dr. Hessayon (pronounced HESS-a-yon) published about 60 books, not including revised editions. They marched determinedly through single topics: roses, orchids, potatoes, bulbs, vegetables, flowers, fruit, houseplants, lawns, trees and shrubs, greenhouses and container gardens. There were books on pests and weeds, and one devoted to cereal diseases.
His work was descriptive, prescriptive, comprehensive, encyclopedic and exhaustive, written in a no-nonsense tone that some called bossy. The Guardian once said that the look of his books, which he designed himself, “could be best characterized as ‘1980 East German tourist brochure,’ but without the exuberance.”
But for beginning gardeners and completists, his hortatory manner, detailed illustrations and crisp style — best summed up as “do this, not that” — were a godsend. A sampling of advice, from a section in “The New Flower Expert” (1999) on how to dig, includes: “Wear stout shoes”; “Drive in the spade vertically. Press (do not kick) down on the blade”; and “For most people 30 minutes digging is quite enough for the first day.”
“The real secret of my work is that people feel at ease” with his books, he said. “I’m writing for the man in the semidetached.”
Dr. Hessayon died on Jan. 16 at a hospital in southeast England, near his home in Essex, a Georgian house on 20 acres landscaped with most of the thousands of plant varieties he had written about.
His daughter Angelina Gibbs confirmed the death, which was not reported until late February at the request of his family.
By 2008, it was estimated that half of the households in Britain had at least one of Dr. Hessayon’s books. At his death, his sales had topped 50 million copies. But for most of his career, he had a day job as an executive at Pan Britannica Industries, a manufacturer of garden and agricultural chemicals.
Dr. Hessayon started as a chemist there — he was the inventor of the company’s best-selling plant food, Baby Bio — and rose to become the chairman. He was, by his own admission, a bit of an autocrat.
When he had an idea for a gardening manual in the late 1950s, he asked his company to publish it, promising that if it didn’t sell he would pay the costs. A first printing of 100,000 copies of “Be Your Own Gardening Expert,” the cover quaintly illustrated with a stolid example of ’50s manhood, hoe in hand and pipe clenched in his lantern jaw, quickly sold out. The book would go on to sell nearly six million copies.
“Be Your Own House Plant Expert” (1960), his second book, was said to be the best-selling reference book of all time, after the Bible — a claim, much reported, that would nonetheless seem to be apocryphal.
David Gerald Hessayon was born on Feb. 13, 1928, in Salford, Manchester, in northwest England, the youngest of seven children of Leah (Fisherman) Hessayon and Jack Hessayon, a watchmaker who had immigrated from Cyprus. The family was poor, and after David’s mother died when he was young, his father raised the children alone.
“The love of his life was this little plot with four square beds, eight lilies and some hydrangeas,” Dr. Hessayon said of his father in a 2012 interview with the British newspaper The Standard. “From a very early age, it was my job, with him, because his health wasn’t good, to look after this small plot.”
He studied botany and chemistry at the University of Leeds in West Yorkshire, graduating in 1950, and earned a Ph.D. in soil ecology at the University of Manchester in 1954. He joined Pan Britannica the next year, and he remained with the company until he retired in 1993.
In 2007, Dr. Hessayon was named an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, a high honor. (J.K. Rowling was awarded hers in 2000.)
In addition to Ms. Gibbs, Dr. Hessayon is survived by another daughter, Jackie Hessayon; four grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. His wife, Joan (Parker Gray) Hessayon, a romance novelist whose plots often involved horticulture, died in 2001.
Dr. Hessayon could be prickly and dogmatic, but his gruff demeanor hid a generous nature. He was a trustee of Capel Manor, a horticultural college in London. It was his idea, which Mrs. Thatcher strongly supported, that the school create 34 demonstration gardens for what he called “practical gardeners,” Steve Dowbiggin, a former principal of the college, said in an interview.
“They wanted to empower the majority of gardeners, not the people with a Gertrude Jekyll garden and a million pounds to spend,” he continued, referring to the turn-of-the-20th-century designer of English estate gardens. (Mrs. Thatcher presided over the opening of the gardens in 1991, on a day of pouring rain. When the sun came out, one newspaper reported, she declared, “Ah, you see the sun shines on the righteous.”)
When the college needed money for new buildings, Dr. Dowbiggin said, Dr. Hessayon quietly stepped in, providing a no-interest loan of 60,000 pounds. He also quietly paid the entire staff for two months in 1993, when the college became independent.
“You must really love Capel,” Dr. Dowbiggin recalled saying.
“Joan loves Capel,” Dr. Hessayon corrected him. “And I love Joan.”
In 2013, when Dr. Hessayon was 85, he announced that he would produce no more gardening guides. “You should give up,” he said, “while you still remember what your name is.”
