In a quiet corner of Shropshire, a family business built on the pursuit of the perfect bloom has lost, for the second time in eight years, the man at its centre

There is a particular kind of English institution that hides in plain sight: unassuming, provincial, easy to drive past without a second glance, and yet quietly responsible for something that has ended up in gardens, wedding bouquets and coronation arrangements the world over. David Austin Roses, tucked into the fields outside Albrighton in Shropshire, is one of these. This week, the family at its heart lost the second of the two men who built it.

David J.C. Austin, who has died at 67 at his home in Shropshire, spent more than three decades as chairman of the company his father founded — a tenure that took a niche nursery specialising in old-fashioned, richly scented roses and turned it into one of the most recognisable names in horticulture anywhere in the world. His family said he had been diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the rare and incurable brain condition, and that he died at home, surrounded by them.

It is, in its way, a very Shropshire death: private, undramatic, announced not with fanfare but with a short, dignified statement, the kind that seems designed to draw as little attention to itself as the man it describes.

Joining the family firm

Austin arrived at the business in 1990, walking into a company that was, by then, beginning to make a name for itself under his father, David C.H. Austin — a former farmer’s son who had spent decades trying to solve what he regarded as an unforgivable flaw in the modern rose: that in gaining the ability to flower all summer long, it had somewhere along the way lost its scent, its fullness, its romance. The elder Austin’s answer, the “English Rose”, crossed old garden varieties with modern ones and, against the odds, found a public hungry for it.

It fell to the son to take that idea and turn it into a global enterprise. Over the following thirty-odd years, under his stewardship, the company expanded far beyond the fields where it started, its roses now grown under licence and sold across continents, its blooms a familiar sight at flower shows, in florists’ shop windows, and — perhaps most visibly of all in recent years — in the sort of lavish, faintly nostalgic bridal bouquets that have become something of a house signature. Through all of it, those who worked alongside him say, he never lost sight of what the business was actually for: the roses themselves.

A private man, publicly mourned

If his father was, by most accounts, a reluctant public figure who preferred to let his flowers speak for him, the son appears to have inherited much the same instinct. Those who knew him describe someone more comfortable in a greenhouse than in the spotlight — modest, understated, happiest walking the trial beds.

His children, Richard, James and Olivia, put it simply in a family statement: that first and foremost, their father was a gardener. That, they said, was the heart of who he was. He had carried his own father’s vision forward, they added, with humility and an unwavering sense of responsibility, always placing the roses, the business and its people ahead of himself — kind, modest, with a playful streak and a real appetite for life, and one who met his illness with the same quiet courage he brought to everything else.

Tributes followed quickly from beyond the family. The Royal Horticultural Society said it was deeply saddened by the news. The broadcaster and gardening writer Monty Don, a familiar face to anyone who has spent a Friday night in front of gardening television, remarked that Austin had left behind millions of exquisite roses that would go on living long after him — a tribute that, whatever else it was, had the advantage of being literally true. Online, hundreds of gardeners and rose growers left their own messages beneath the company’s announcement, many recalling roses that had outlived house moves, marriages, and decades, all traceable back to the same small Shropshire nursery.

What comes next

The company itself has said it will carry on much as before, under its existing leadership team, working alongside the next generation of the Austin family. It is a formulation that manages to be both a corporate reassurance and, in its way, a small act of continuity — a suggestion that the roses, at least, are not going anywhere.

There is something fitting, if melancholy, in the timing. It is not yet eight years since David C.H. Austin died, in December 2018, having spent seventy-five years chasing the same idea: that a rose ought to be beautiful, of course, but that it ought to smell like something too. His son spent the rest of his life turning that conviction into a business capable of reaching gardens on every continent, without, by every account, ever losing his father’s sense of what actually mattered. With his death, the company enters a new chapter for the first time without either of the two men most responsible for making it what it is — though with a third generation of Austins already close to the business, it seems unlikely that the roses themselves will notice the difference.