Roger Phillips
‘Mushroom man’ and photographer whose field guides made him a cult figure among foragers
ROGER PHILLIPS, who has died aged 88, was a self-taught plantsman and portrait photographer of plants, the author or co-author of numerous beautifully illustrated books, including guides to wild flowers and edible wild plants, roses and other garden flowers, fungi, and even fish.
His first book, Wild Flowers of Britain (1977), sold 400,000 copies in its first year. He went on to publish more than 30 photographic field guides (often written with Martyn Rix) which have sold more than 4.5 million copies worldwide.
He became a cult figure among foragers after the publication in 1983 of his Wild Food, a book featuring recipes alongside full-colour photographs of British plants and fungi. This introduced readers to the delights of the now ubiquitous rocket, as well as ceps and alexanders (a parsley-like vegetable brought to Britain by the Romans, said to be delicious cooked in butter and black pepper).
His aim, Phillips explained, was “to photograph in the way the old botanical masters used to draw”, and his delightfully arranged compositions showed tarte aux myrtilles on the banks of a woodland stream, and Carragheen soup precariously balanced on waveswept rocks.
Meanwhile, his Mushrooms and Other Fungi of Great Britain and Europe (1981), Mushrooms (2006, with a foreword by David Bellamy) and, for transatlantic foragers, Mushrooms and Other Fungi of North America (2005) earned him the soubriquet “the mushroom man”.
Featuring colour photographs and vivid descriptions of hundreds of varieties and stages of growth – with footnotes ranging from “edible”, “not edible” and “hallucinogenic”, to “deadly poisonous” and even “edibility unknown”, these were not only essential reference works, but were enlivened by anecdote.
Common Ink Caps, he noted, for example, have been used in rehab due to their emetic effect when consumed with alcohol, while Fly Agaric (the stereotypical red toadstools with white spots) are used as a hallucinogen and intoxicant by the Lapps, who may have picked up the habit by observing the effects of the fungus on reindeer.
His entry on the Death Cap, “the most deadly fungus known”, included the alarming information that, if ingested, an initial period of prolonged and violent vomiting and diarrhoea and severe abdominal pain is typically “followed by an apparent recovery, when the victim may … think his ordeal over. Within a few days death results from kidney and liver failure.”
Phillips warned against using his guide – or any other – as the sole authority on edible fungi, advising that novices should always have experts identify their finds.
Roger Howard Phillips was born in Uxbridge on December 16 1932 to Philip, borough treasurer for Hillingdon, and Elsie, née Williams. Educated at St Christopher School, Letchworth, a progressive vegetarian boarding school, Roger was introduced to the joys of foraging for blackberries by his father – “total bliss to him – and to me”, and for mushrooms when he was sent during the war to live with his grandparents at their dairy farm in Hertfordshire.
There he earned extra pocket money by picking mushrooms which his grandmother would then cook and send to market: “I remember one year when we picked 70 pounds in a single day.” But his grandmother would only allow the family to eat field mushrooms, instructing him in the dangers of eating other kinds – a typically British attitude which he speculated might be inherited from druidic times when mushrooms were thought to contain magic properties and could only be eaten by the druids themselves.
Called up to do National Service in the RAF, Phillips was sent to Canada but resigned his commission, declaring himself a pacifist, and worked in a hospital, at the same time enrolling in night classes in painting at the Chelsea School of Art, later completing the full-time course.
He subsequently worked in advertising, culminating in the position of art director at Ogilvy & Mather, and it was while working there that he became a photographer. Wanting to help his son “get mud on his boots”, he would take him on expeditions to photograph native plants, and in 1968 he set up as a freelance photographer, working from a studio in Shaftesbury Avenue.
Much of his early work was photographing food, but he also did record covers for Cream and Jack Bruce through his friendship with the psychedelic graphic designer and illustrator Alan Aldridge.
In 1970 he met the book designer David Larkin, for whom he did numerous book covers. It was Larkin who signed him up to publish his Wild Flowers of Britain (1977) with Pan/ Macmillan. This was followed by Trees in Britain (1978), and the success of both titles led Pan/macmillan to sign up him up to work on a series on garden plants – eventually numbering 12 major volumes and 17 pocket books – with Martyn Rix, a botanist and plantsman whom Phillips had met at Wisley.
“To keen gardeners and plantsmen, the names Phillips and Rix enjoy the same level of recognition as that of any other famous double-act you could mention,” observed Christopher Bailes in The Daily Telegraph, in 2002. “The combination of Roger Phillips’s accurate colour photography and design flair with the botanical expertise of Martyn Rix is a winning one.”
Meanwhile, years of voluntary work in the communal garden in Eccleston Square, Pimlico, where he lived, led in 1980 to Phillips being asked to take on its management. Under his stewardship the garden, now part of the National Gardens Scheme, was transformed into a plantsman’s paradise, containing the National Collection of Ceanothus, in addition to some 200 different climbing roses and 120 different Camellias.
He also served as chairman of the Society for the Protection of London Squares, helping to frustrate the incursions of developers, work for which he was appointed MBE in the 2010 New Year Honours.
Phillips presented or co-presented two television series based on his books on gardening, The Quest for the Rose (1994, BBC Two) and The 3,000 Mile Garden (1995, PBS), in which he and the US gardener Lesley Land compared and contrasted their gardening methods and preferences.
He also collaborated with his wife and plantswoman Nicky Foy on several books, notably Herbs (1990) and A Photographic Garden History (1997) .
In later years, Phillips returned to his early passion for painting, culminating in two major art projects. The Final Story of the Nez Perce Indians,
a 320 ft canvas recording one of the most tragic of the Indian wars of the 19th century, was exhibited in Eccleston Square in 2015; Dark Age Arthur, a series of paintings based on events recorded in the Historia Brittonum (attributed to Nennius), were exhibited, accompanying a performance piece, at the Cockpit Theatre, Marylebone, in 2017.
An ebullient figure often seen in distinctive red-rimmed glasses and matching jacket and beret, Phillips travelled all over the world in his quest for wild food and celebrated his odyssey in The Worldwide Forager
(2020). In later years he enjoyed joining the musician and D J Cerys Matthews at her Good Life Experience festival in North Wales, leading foragers into the woods and cooking up the results over a fire pit.
September this year saw the publication of a new edition of his Vegetables (with Martyn Rix), and at the time of his death he was working on new editions of his two earliest books, Wild Flowers of Britain and Trees in Britain.
In 1958 he married Pammy Wray, who predeceased him, and in 2003 he married Nicky Foy. She survives him with their two daughters and a son from his first marriage.