CHRIS THOROGOOD

The deputy director and head of science at Oxford Botanic Garden on his early obsession with squirting cucumbers, his detailed botanic art and clambering over cliff edges

- ALYS FOWLER

Dr Chris Thorogood is a man who looks very closely at things. This is apparent in his extraordinary botanical art, of which the hyperreal detail is breath-taking. But spend a little time in his company and you realise that this intense looking runs like a philosophical seam through all that he does. “I’d like us to move away from just seeing plants as a green backdrop, and move towards a place where we appreciate them for their own sake, not something to use or wipe out, but to care deeply for,” he says.

As a child he was drawn to “all kinds of living things, particularly ugly ones”. All his life he has kept pet common toads in his garden. “They all have distinct personalities,” he says; an explanation you feel he’s had to utter many times. Pet toads led to squirting cucumbers, arum lilies and other strange and sometimes deadly plants. “I might have been a bit of a nightmare child,” he admits. By the time he was old enough for a weekend job, he was feeding sharks and falling for sea anemones at an aquarium in Southend. “I’m not really fond of fluffy things,” he says.

From his time at the aquarium, he knew he wanted to study the living world and, as plants were his main love, he went to the University of Bristol to study botany. He stayed on to do his PhD researching the evolutionary path of broomrapes,