Mark Rumary was a celebrated garden designer, who worked for many decades as Landscape Director of Notcutts. He was born in 1929, the son of a Sussex butcher, and studied architecture at Brighton School of Art before segueing into garden design. He began his career as the assistant to the American landscape architect Lanning Roper, and also worked at Sissinghurst, the world- famous garden in Kent created by Vita Sackville-West.

It was the job at Notcutts that brought him to Suffolk. He moved to Yoxford with his partner, the composer and musician Derek Melville, in They lived at Magnolia House in the High Street, which he named
for its five magnolia trees. It also has an ancient mulberry and two fig trees.

He divided his NHS garden into separate rooms with a raised lily pond, an old sundial and seating areas as focal points. It is surrounded by high mellow brick walls providing privacy and seclusion. He created a
scented garden for all seasons, including narcissus and tulips, roses and honeysuckle.

During his thirty-one years as Landscape Director, he designed and restored dozens of gardens, mostly in East Anglia, though he also undertook a commission for the Jordanian royal family. He was a consummate plantsman, his style romantic and intimate despite the scale of his creations. His only published book, The Dry Garden (1994), was seriously ahead of its time in terms of suggesting planting for a drier and more unpredictable climate. He also wrote about the creation of his own garden in a lovely, characteristically enthusiastic and self- deprecating essay in The Englishman’s Garden, a collection edited by Alvilde Lees-Milne and Rosemary Verey in 1981.

Mark Rumary’s contribution to gardening was widely recognised in his lifetime. His displays for Notcutts at the Chelsea Flower Show were awarded the Lawrence Medal for best exhibit three times, a very rare
achievement. His contribution to horticulture was so great that in 1995 he was made an RHS Associate of Honour, an award for distinguished service, of which there are only a hundred recipients at any given time.

Rumary died in 2010, shortly after his eighty-first birthday. In his obituary, the garden writer Tony Venison paid tribute to a man of remarkable talents, yet “quiet, unassuming, with a twinkle in his eye.”

A number of gardens in Yoxford benefitted from his advice and from gifts of cuttings, bulbs and seedlings, many still in evidence – a kind of local immortality.