When famous gardeners were asked 10 years ago which books were indispensable, his The Well-Tempered Garden topped the list.
One of Lloyd’s last acts was to launch a £3m fundraising campaign to preserve his manor house and garden, Great Dixter, near Northiam in East Sussex.
It dates from 1460 and was restored and enlarged by the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens for Lloyd’s father Nathaniel almost a century ago. Nathaniel Lloyd bought it in 1910 after making his fortune in colour printing and textile bleaching.
Its six-acre estate has been planted, cultivated and painstakingly tended into one of the finest private gardens in the world. It attracts almost 50,000 visitors a year.
Lloyd, who was born there in 1921, died from a stroke while in hospital recovering from a broken leg.
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He said recently: “My hope is that future generations will share the dynamic and exciting spirit that is Great Dixter today. I don’t want the place to become a museum. The garden is sure to change. It has changed a lot in my time and so has the house. That’s fine, so long as it is appreciated as it deserves.”
He was the youngest and last survivor of six children, five of them boys, and said that he learnt his love for gardening from his mother Daisy. “My mother was a passionate, hands-on gardener and I was the only member of the family who followed her in that respect,” he wrote in a column earlier this month.
“I would ‘help’ her when she was sowing seeds, pricking out and the like. She had a great capacity for concentration and was always counting, as I do, to help the job along. After pricking a box out, she would tap it on the side, which was the signal for me to remove it.”
After an education at Rugby and King’s College, Cambridge, he studied horticulture at Wye College, part of Imperial College, near Ashford, Kent. He set up a nursery for clematis and unusual plants at Great Dixter before becoming a writer and developing the garden originally laid out by Lutyens.
He claimed he learnt his discipline from the Japanese: “Keep plants in tip-top condition. Look at them twice a day. Pick off dying leaves. The Japanese aren’t sloppy like we are. Freedom and discipline are essential.”
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Lloyd never married.