Alec Gray (horticulturalist)


Alec Gray was an English nurseryman and horticulturalist. He was notable as an authority on and breeder of daffodils, having developed 110 new cultivars over a career spanning 60 years.

Life and career

Gray was born in London. After the First World War he qualified in fruit growing and worked in North Devon before managing the Gulval Ministry Experimental Station near Penzance. In the 1920s he worked as a farm manager at the Duchy Farm on the Scilly Isles, and became interested in the daffodils grown in the islands' bulb fields for the cut flower trade. He established a small collection of daffodil varieties, and by the 1930s started to register new varieties himself.
Gray specialised in miniature daffodils, many bred from plants collected on trips to Southern Europe. Whilst some miniatures had been bred previously, Gray effectively created the modern form of miniature daffodil, originally as an inadvertent byproduct of his attempts to breed early-flowering varieties. Amongst the cultivars he subsequently developed was Narcissus "Tête-à-Tête", first grown in the 1940s, and which became the most widely grown miniature variety despite Gray initially being unimpressed with the first plant. "Tête-à-Tête" remains an extremely commercially significant variety: by 2006 it made up some 34% of the total Dutch daffodil bulb trade, with 17 million pots sold at auction.
A number of his other varieties won the Royal Horticultural Society Award of Garden Merit, including "Elka", "Jumblie", "Minnow" and "Sun Disc".
In his later life Gray established a nursery at Treswithian near Camborne. In addition to his professional work he was an enthusiastic amateur archaeologist, who carried out a number of investigations on early habitation sites in the Scillies. He retired in 1984 and died in 1986.
Gray's own collection of bulbs now forms the basis of a National Collection at the Broadleigh nurseries near Taunton.