Sir Peter Smithers, retired British spy and botanist, dies at 92

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This article was published 25/06/2006 (7282 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

GENEVA (AP) – Sir Peter Smithers, a leading botanist and international civil servant who was a British spy in France before it fell to Germany in the Second World War, has died. He was 92.

Smithers’ death on June 8 in Vico Morcote, the southern, Italian-speaking Swiss village he had adopted as home to pursue his gardening passion, was disclosed on his Web site and confirmed by the 46-nation Council of Europe, which he served as Secretary General from 1964 to 1969.

In an autobiography written for the International Bulb Society, Smithers recalled that a childhood nanny introduced him to gardening and that the fascination never left him.

He said he was a member of MI6, the British intelligence service, in the British Embassy in Paris in 1940.

“I got away two days before the collapse of that country,” Smithers said.

He then served as a naval intelligence liaison officer in the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., but said his garden in Georgetown was a failure because he had too little time.

Smithers reportedly was a friend and colleague of Ian Fleming, creator of the fictional James Bond, but he makes no mention of it in his account.

“Back in England after the war, and a member of Parliament, I took over the garden of my late father at Itchen Stoke, and then moved to that of my late mother in Winchester, Colebrook House, next to the Cathedral, where I made a garden based upon the three medieval streams which ran through it,” Smithers said.

He resigned from Parliament to become secretary general of the Council of Europe, which was set up in 1949 to defend human rights, parliamentary democracy and the rule of law.

He said he made a garden in the official residence in Strasbourg, France, and worked for the first time in a continental climate.

After retiring from Strasbourg, he and his American wife built a house and made a garden at Vico Morcote, above Lake Lugano, “in one of the best gardening climates in Europe, where an extremely wide range of plants can be grown successfully,” he said.

Smithers bred a number of varieties and hybrids, and won many prizes for gardening and photography. In 2001 he received the Schulthess Garden Prize from Swiss Heritage Protection.

Smithers said he conceived his Swiss garden as an ecosystem of exotic plants in which the plants themselves would do most of the work, with the workload diminishing as the owners grew old.

“This, in fact, worked out successfully and the garden is now easily maintained with the help of a part time gardener twice a week in season and once a week in winter,” he said in his autobiography.

Smithers’ wife died last year. He is survived by his two daughters.