Laurence D. Hills

Lawrence D Hills was the founder and was for many years the Director of the Henry Doubleday Research Association. This organisation, which started life in Bocking, Essex was named after the Victorian Quaker Henry Doubleday, a smallholder who was intrigued by the uses for comfrey. Hills took up the crusade to research comfrey. He also wrote books, edited journals, and wrote a weekly gardening column for The Observer for many years..

Lawrence Hills was born in 1911 and at the age of 16 he started a practical career in horticulture, interrupted by WWII. Whilst in and out of RAF hospitals during the war he wrote his first book. He was invalided out of the RAF on D-Day. In 1948 he first grew comfrey and became aware of its possibilities, writing his first book about comfrey in 1953 and founding the Henry Doubleday Research Association in 1954. He retired in 1986, the year after HDRA moved from Bocking to its present site at Ryton near Coventry.

It was at the Bocking trial grounds that he worked on cultivars of comfrey and perhaps his greatest success and the variety which is popular today is a sterile version, named Bocking 14. Comfrey can be an invasive plant so a plant that was exclusively propagated from root cuttings was a very useful variety. He was active in all aspects of organic gardening and oversaw the transformation of what had been The Comfrey Research Station into the internationally recognised organic research organisation that it is today.

His many publications included Fertility Without Fertilisers, Down to Earth Gardening, and Organic Gardening. He was best known for Grow Your Own Fruit and Vegetables published in 1971. This rapidly became a bible for gardeners, self-sufficiency enthusiasts and commercial organic growers. His autobiography was Fighting Like the Flowers (1989).

In 1973, his concerns about European Union legislation outlawing historic varieties of vegetables led to the setting up of HDRA’s vegetable seed library. Persistent lobbying of government eventually resulted in the world’s first vegetable gene bank where seed was deep frozen and stored forever. He was concerne that there would be a loss of genetic diversity if old and trustest varieties where allowed to die out.

Lawrence’s wife Hilda Cherry an author and nutrionist helped him overcome his severe problems with coeliac disease which had left him wheelchair bound, she introduced him to a wheat-free diet. Hilda died in 1989. Lawrence Hills died in 1991, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Coventry University that year.

For more information on his work visit www.gardenorganic.org.uk