Alec Gray (horticulturalist)

Gray was born in London.[2] After the First World War he qualified in fruit growing and worked in North Devon before managing the Gulval Ministry Experimental Station near Penzance.[3] 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.

Narcissus "Tête-à-Tête", one of the many cultivars introduced by Gray.

Gray specialised in miniature daffodils, many bred from plants collected on trips to Southern Europe.[1] 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.[4] "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.[1]

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.[5]

Gray's own collection of bulbs now forms the basis of a National Collection at the Broadleigh nurseries near Taunton.[6]