Sir Peter Smithers, who saw his work as a lawyer, politician, diplomat, scholar, photographer and spy as distractions from his passion for growing glorious gardens, died June 8 in Vico Morcote, Switzerland. He was 92.
His death was announced by the Council of Europe, for which he once served as secretary-general, and the American Clivia Society, which noted that he had developed two new varieties of lilies.
As a spy in World War II, he worked for Ian Fleming, who went on to create the fictional spy James Bond, and British obituaries did not ignore the possible connection.
Fleming never confirmed any of the many rumored Bond originals, and Smithers was never prominent among them. A Smithers, however, did appear as one of Q’s assistants in “For Your Eyes Only” and “Octopussy,” and another Smithers was a villain in “Goldfinger.”
Arguably, though, Smithers was to gardening what Bond was to martinis. The Royal Horticulture Society gave him one of its highest awards, the gold Veitch Memorial Medal. His garden in Switzerland – with 10,000 plants, none a duplicate – won a prize for being the best in that country in 2001. The Financial Times said it was named one of the 500 greatest gardens since Roman times.
His lush photographic images of flowers won eight gold medals from the horticultural society. They have been called “floral pornography.”
“This is Playboy in flowers,” he told The New York Times in 1987. “What are flowers but sex in action? The bee performs the wedding. I take the pictures on the wedding day. Two days later, the flowers are exhausted.”
