Roger Phillips

Roger Phillips (1932 – 2021) was a British botanist and writer, who published major works on mushrooms and fungi. Two of his titles, Mushrooms of Northern Europe and Mushrooms of North America, sold over two million copies between them. Wild Food, his book on foraging, also includes a large section on finding and cooking mushrooms. He worked on replanting Eccleston Square garden in London continued over nearly 40 years, and he described the result as "a plantsman’s garden with interesting plants from all over the world", many of which he collected himself. He received an MBE in 2010 for "services to London Garden Squares". Phillips was one of the most prolific plant illustrators of all time, and published more than 30,000 plant identification photographs of roses, trees, shrubs, mushrooms, perennials, annuals and wild flowers, in more than 40 books, using his advanced photographic techniques, in the manner of botanical drawings. Culminating in a two volume ground-breaking work on the botany of all garden plants, The Botanical Garden volume one deals with Trees and Shrubs. His TV work includes a six part history of the rose, Quest for the Rose, and a series on his own garden at Eccleston Square, written and filmed in conjunction with the garden of an American cookery writer Leslie Land and her work in Maine, The 3,000 Mile Garden.