Bob Corbin
Veteran gardener who restored lawns at Buckingham Palace
BOB CORBIN, who has died aged 101, was a gardener and groundsman responsible for landscaping the heavily blitzed housing estates of war-torn London and for the refurbishment of the Royal Parks, including the ceremonial lawns at Buckingham Palace.
The son of a dairyman, Robert Corbin was born on September 23 1915 at Micheldever, Hampshire, and found his first gardening job in 1929, aged 14. It was “with two elderly spinster ladies,” as he remembered in his autobiography, Travels of a Bothy Boy, “who took me on to hand dig about half an acre of vegetable patch and maintain another half acre of lawns and shrubberies”.
The following year he was offered the job of “bothy boy” at an estate in Hampshire, where he became the most junior of 16 gardeners. “Peaches, nectarines and plums,” Corbin later recalled, “had to be pollinated with a rabbit’s tail on the end of a short cane.”
He spent the next eight years as a gardener in private service, during which time he lived in five bothies attached to various estates. “I was once called upon by the lady of the house at 4.30 one summer morning,” he wrote, “to pick and bring fresh strawberries growing in the greenhouse for the breakfast table.”
At Danesfield Park, Buckinghamshire, he learnt how to trim yew with a tiny hook as sharp as a razor. On another job he saw fuchsias being buried in a 2 ft trench and covered with straw for the winter. At Mereworth Castle, Kent, he grew mushrooms, learning the correct temperature in which to cultivate hyphae. In 1938, realising that his lack of qualifications meant that he would never be able to become a head gardener, he found a job with the Beckenham Parks Department. He also signed up for a diploma at the Royal Horticultural Society at Wisley.
Corbin’s studies were interrupted by the outbreak of war, and he joined the Navy, serving in North Africa and the Seychelles.
In 1946 he returned to Wisley and after gaining his diploma in Horticulture he joined the London County Council, working on the landscaping of housing estates which were being rebuilt after bomb damage in the Blitz. “It was my ambition,” Corbin wrote, “that where possible, houses and dwellings would be standing in woodlands and open gardens.” By the time he retired in 1980 it was thought that some two million trees had been planted in London estates under his direction.
In addition, Corbin had to organise a twice-yearly trim of 300 miles of garden hedges, the mowing of 1,500 acres of lawn and the raising and planting of a quarter of a million bedding plants each season. Such was the success of his programme that visitors from all over the world would come to see how London managed its housing estates.
In retirement Corbin continued to remain active, and throughout the 1990s he acted as a consultant to the Royal Parks Agency with a brief to assess the quality and presentation of the landscaping in the Royal Parks of London. He also worked on the restoration of the ceremonial lawns at Buckingham Palace. This task involved preserving, by royal request, the camomile on the lawn, and corralling the Canada geese and transferring them to Windsor Great Park.
Corbin held numerous positions on gardening committees, and was president of the Wisley Garden Club and chairman of the Royal Gardeners’ Orphan Fund. He was an associate of honour for the RHS, a fellow of the Linnaeus Society, and in 2004 he was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Institute of Groundsmanship, of which he had been president.
He married Alda Dixon in 1955. She died in 1979. He is survived by their daughter.
Bob Corbin, born September 23 1915, died October 3 2016