David Austin – rose breeder extraordinaire, writer, poet and founder of the family business – died at his UK home in December last year.

He was 92. I had met David Austin in the early days when he was briefly attending a Heritage Rose Society conference in Christchurch. His roses were coming into New Zealand nurseries thick and fast at the time.

The sunshiny yellow climber 'Graham Thomas' was probably the most popular, but there was a host of  beautiful roses – 'Pretty Jessica', 'Gertrude Jekyll', 'Leander', 'Lucetta', 'Sweet Juliet', 'Queen Nefertiti', 'Belle Story', 'Abraham Darby' and so on.

Gardeners were beginning to remark on the steady stream of roses coming from England and asking if they needed special treatment; on the whole, they did not.

READ MORE:
* New Zealand rose lovers mourn death of British rose breeding great David Austin
* The colour of sunshine: the history behind one of the greatest yellow roses ever
* David Austin: the man behind those famous roses

It had been my job to organise a photograph of David leaning against a pillar decked with a rampant 'Graham Thomas'. It was then that he remarked how the rose, in England, was expected to only reach a few feet whereas here, it became a climber and reached for the sky.    

In 1988, he published a weighty book, The Heritage of the Rose, which I have, but he also loved poetry and in 2014 published a collection of poems, The Breathing Earth, which I would very much like to have. However, he will always be remembered as one of the greatest rosarians of all time. 

He died knowing what the future may hold for his roses, having planned and undertaken the next crosses which will be introduced in nine years. He wrote: "There is nothing more exciting than having 350,000 seedlings growing that no-one has ever seen before."    

Unlike most hybridists, David is not descended from a dynasty of rose breeders. His family had farmed in Shropshire for hundreds of years but during the war most of the land on his father's farm was requisitioned by the Royal Air Force to be used as an air base.   

When the war ended, there was not sufficient workable land left to make an economic farming unit and the young David's thoughts turned to horticulture which had always been his interest – and to roses in particular. 

To this end, he worked for a time at Sunningdale Nurseries and it was here that he met rosarian and author Graham Stuart Thomas, who became a lifelong friend and inspiration.

Though David returned to farming, the breeding of new roses became an all-consuming interest. He was dissatisfied with the stereotype bedding roses then on the market and had a great affection for the old shrub roses.   

His dream was to build "a new race of roses" by crossing these. Throughout the 1950s, he made many crosses but it was not until he hybridised the charming modern Floribunda 'Dainty Maid', bred in 1940, with the highly fragrant old pink Gallica rose, 'Belle Isis', bred almost a century earlier, that he produced a worthwhile offspring. 

The resulting rose was the superb 'Constance Spry', released in 1961. It was an instant sensation and is still popular today. In flower form, perfume and vigour, it was exactly what its breeder was looking for but it was a very large shrub climber and flowered only once in spring. 

Other selected crosses were needed to get the more compact, shrubby, long-flowering roses with Old World blooms that David was aiming for. So 'Constance Spry' was crossed with other recurrent flowering modern roses as well as 'Madame Caroline Testout', bred in 1890, a robust old Hybrid Tea with masses of pink many-petalled blooms. 

In this way, the pink colouring for the new roses was established.

At the same time David Austin crossed the first truly scented Floribunda, the velvety red 'Dusky Maiden', bred in 1947, with 'Tuscany', an ancient deep crimson Gallica. This union produced the wine-red 'Chianti' in 1967, a rose still popular today, but again only once-flowering, so many other crosses were made.

But the stage was now set for him to cross and re-cross, introducing other roses to improve the nature of the plants and produce a variety of old rose forms and colours.