Family treasures

Tilly Ware meets Lucy Skellorn, great-great-grand-daughter of the pre-eminent iris breeder Sir Michael Foster, at her garden near Stowmarket, where her quest to find the original Foster hybrids has already created a National Collection

- Tilly Ware

LUCY SKELLORN never intended to own a National Collection. ‘I had this idea you’d have to be a nursery or a big outfit,’ she remembers, ‘whereas this is just me and my garden’. Plant history hovered in the wings at her first gardening job at Langham Walled Garden, Suffolk, holder of the National Collection of Campanulas, followed by a Heritage Gardener apprenticeship at the Museum of East Anglian Life. It wasn’t until she met Sarah Cook, collector of Cedric Morris iris, at her local gardening club that her fate was firmly sealed. She asked if Ms Cook had heard of her great-great-grandfather, Sir Michael Foster. ‘THE Michael Foster?’ came the reply. ‘The father of all iris breeding?’ Ms Cook immediately encouraged her to track down the original Foster hybrids, recommending experts and societies who would help. ‘I blame it all on Sarah,’ confesses Mrs Skellorn. ‘She was just so enthusiastic.’