A great rosarian - Bertram Park

Photograph: Bertram Park, self-portrait with roses, c. 1950.

It sometimes comes as a surprise that great rosarians have a life behind the roses. Bertram Park, OBE, VMH (1883-1972) was one such man. In his 60s and 70s Park was a famous rosarian of stupendous authority, but as a young man in his 30s and 40s he was fêted as a photographer. He was considered avant garde and associated with the modern movement. Some of his numerous studies of the female nude rise to great art - although many are coyly romantic and trivial.

He turned to photography having studied art and music and in 1916 married Yvonne Gregory, a fellow photographer and miniature painter. In 1919 they opened a studio with Marcus Adams at 43 Dover Street, London (with the financial backing of the noted egyptologist Lord Carnarvon).

During the 1920s and 30s he was a sought-after society photographer. In 1926 he photographed the future King George VI when Duke of York, and in 1936 was commissioned to take the royal portraits for all the Royal Mail stamps.

However it is his photographs of the female nude for which he is best known. It may have come as a surprise to his royal sitters and nude models that while he was photographing them he was probably thinking of roses, which were the overweening passion of his life.

Between 1926 and 1936 he published several volumes of nude studies which seem to have been successful, as after the second world war he was able to devote himself increasingly to roses and rose growing.

He became a long-time council member (from 1931), and eventually president, of the Royal National Rose Society. He not only edited the Rose Society's "Rose Annual" for some time, but he also published prolifically on the cultivation of the rose between 1949 and 1962.

The following notes on his personal rose growing are from the jacket of the Collins Guide to Roses:

"His first rose garden was made at Hendon in 1917, but finding it was too small to accommodate all the roses he wished to grow, he moved to Wisborough Green in Sussex, where he grew about 5,000 and collected about 150 different rose species. Wartime difficulties caused him to leave his country home, and for over two years he lived in a London flat. His interest in roses, however, proved more than he could bear, and he moved to Pinner, where in 1942, he made his third garden, in which he grows about 3,000 roses. This time the soil is light sandy loam, which he finds much easier to work than the Sussex clay."

Any true gardener who has been forced by circumstance to spend time without a garden will sympathise with his wartime move to the London suburb of Pinner, borne out of desperation to surround himself with roses.

Books on Roses by Bertram Park

• Roses (1949)
• Roses: a select list and guide to pruning (1952)
• Roses: hints on planting and general cultivation (1954)
• Collins guide to roses (1956)
• Roses: a selected list of varieties [ed. B. Park] (1958)
• Roses: the cultivation of the rose (1958)
• The world of roses (1962)

Photographic Books

• Living sculpture: A record of expression in the human figure (Park, Bertram and Yvonne Gregory, 1926)
• Eve in the sunlight (Park, Bertram and Yvonne Gregory, n.d. [c. 1930])
• Sun bathers (Park, Bertram and Yvonne Gregory, 1935)
• The beauty of the female form (Park, Bertram and Yvonne Gregory, 1935)
• Curves and contrasts of the human figure (Gregory, Yvonne and Bertram Park, 1936)
• A Study of Sunlight and Shadow on the Female Form: For Artists and Art Students (Park, Bertram and Yvonne Gregory, 1939)