Alan Herbert Vauser Bloom
(1906-2005), PlantsmanSitter in 2 portraits
Alan Bloom was a horticulturist and steam engine enthusiast. During his life he created over 170 new varieties of hardy perennial plants. He wrote some thirty books and appeared frequently on radio and television. The son of a nurseryman, in 1926 Bloom started his own wholesale nursery at Oakington, Cambridgeshire. During the Second World War he switched to growing food crops and in 1946 he sold his nursery and moved to Bressingham where, by the mid-1950s, he had become the largest producer of hardy perennials in the UK. In the 1960s, when steam trains were being phased out on British railways, Bloom bought up several old engines and established a steam museum next to the nursery.
by Lucinda Douglas-Menzies
bromide fibre print, 1990
NPG x35121
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