Edmund Leopold de Rothschild, the owner of Exbury Gardens and steam railway near Southampton in Hampshire, has died aged ninety three.
Bloomberg reports that Edmund de Rothschild, who was a partner at the family bank in 1946, died on January 17th.
He was educated at Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge and lists fishing and gardening as his hobbies.
Edmund de Rothschild's father Lionel Nathan de Rothschild started the famous woodland gardens in 1919 after buying the isolated Exbury estate from William Mitford.
In the following years, armies of men began reclaiming the woodland and cutting back undergrowth. The soil was acidic and the temperate climate together with modest rainfall made Exbury an ideal place for growing Rhododendrons.
Work continued at Exbury right up until the Second World War with the building of over two acres of green-houses - with specially imported fine teak - the installation of twenty two miles of irrigations and a purpose built pump house and bore hole ensure, even today, that irrigation can take place at Exbury in even the driest of summers.
Lionel de Rothschild died in 1942 just before the Ministry of Defence requisitioned Exbury House for the war effort. All work on the gardens stopped during the war and the house was renamed HMS Mastodon by the Royal Navy who used the building as an HQ for planning amphibious assaults on the beaches of Europe.
In 1946 and with the war ended, Edmund began restoring the gardens to their former glory.
For a tour of the individual garden features - click on this link to the big garden map
Edmund's father Lionel famously once said that he was a banker by hobby, but a gardener by profession.
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