Percy W. D. Izzard OBE (September 1877 - 1968) was the well-known gardening correspondent on the Daily Mail

Daily Mail

The Daily Mail is a British daily middle-market tabloid newspaper owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust. First published in 1896 by Lord Northcliffe, it is the United Kingdom's second biggest-selling daily newspaper after The Sun. Its sister paper The Mail on Sunday was launched in 1982...

newspaper and author of several books on gardening.

Life and works

Percy Izzard was the first regular agricultural and horticultural correspondent in the popular press and wrote for the Daily Mail for a period of 50 years. He was noted for his book Homeland: A Year of Country Days, a collection of 365 of his "Country Diary" columns from the Daily Mail, with black-and-white illustrations by his wife Florence Louise Izzard and Will G. Mein

Will G. Mein

Will G. Mein was a British book illustrator who flourished in the late 19th to early 20th century. He lived in London from around the turn of the century.- Life and works :Mein was born in Kelso, Roxburgh, Scotland...

. He was claimed by his son, the writer Ralph Izzard

Ralph Izzard

Ralph William Burdick Izzard, OBE, was an English journalist, author, adventurer, and British Naval Intelligence officer ....

, to have been the inspiration for William Boot

William Boot

William Boot is a fictional journalist who is the protagonist in the 1938 Evelyn Waugh comic novel Scoop.-Character:Boot is the young author of a regular column on country life for a London newspaper named the Daily Beast; his affected style is typified in the notorious sentence "Feather-footed...

 in the Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh

Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh , known as Evelyn Waugh, was an English writer of novels, travel books and biographies. He was also a prolific journalist and reviewer...

 novel "Scoop

Scoop (novel)

Scoop is a 1938 novel by English writer Evelyn Waugh, a satire of sensationalist journalism and foreign correspondence.-Plot:William Boot, a young man who lives in genteel poverty far from the iniquities of London, is contributor of nature notes to Lord Copper's Beast, a national newspaper...

".
He was an authority on roses and the Percy Izzard rose was named for him.

Selected works

• Homeland: A Year of Country Days (1918)
• Daily Mail Garden Plans (1929)
• Breeds of British Poultry (1933)
• Grow it Yourself: Daily Mail Practical Instruction Book on Food from the Garden in War-Time (1940)