WHO WAS ALAN CHADWICK?

Alan Chadwick was born into British aristocracy in 1909. As a boy, his mother - a follower of the German philosopher Rudolf Steiner - arranged for Steiner to act as his private tutor. From this and other formative experiences Alan developed a love of theatre and the arts, but this brought him into conflict with his father. When Alan decided to pursue a career as a stage actor his father disowned him and Alan eventually left home and renounced his inheritance.

In London he trained with the Royal Albert company as a Shakespearean actor alongside such notable actors as Laurence Olivier and Richard Burton. He mixed in the same company as such famous literary figures as George Bernard Shaw and T.S. Eliot. By his own account he lived a self-indulgent life as an aesthete but also pursued an interest in horticulture, mainly in order to grow his own flowers and vegetables. He did courses in many fine horticultural schools both in England and on the continent.

This life ended with the outbreak of World War 2. A pacifist, he was granted a Conscientious Objection but subsequently volunteered for a position in the navy. His boat was attacked by the Japanese near Ceylon and he suffered lasting back injuries. He spent the remainder of the war in India.

After the war it became impossible for him to resume a viable career in live theatre in Britian. He travelled to South Africa to join a travelling theatre company but found life very hard there. It was there that he met a German countess, Freya Von Maltke, who encouraged him to pursue a career in gardening. His first major appointment was as head gardener at the Admiralty Gardens in Cape Town.

It was through Countess Von Maltke that he got a job in Santa Cruz in California as gardener at an experimental organic garden at the new campus of UCLA. He threw himself into the appointment and almost single-handedly made a large garden that came to national attention. Over the years he had constructed his own synthesis of organic techniques that he called the Biodynamic/French Intensive method. His method owed much to Rudolf Steiner and to his French teacher, the great gardener Louis Lorette.

Over the next decade or so he moved around the USA and made several other gardens of note including a garden for the rural retreat of the Zen Buddhist Centre in San Francisco. He taught many apprentices and had a significant and seminal impact upon the modern organic farming movement in America. He wrote nothing he left behind audio recordings of 250 lectures to his students. He died in 1980 and is buried at the Zen retreat in Green Gulch California.

He had a unique, eccentric and brilliant approach to gardening. Although only an ordinary actor, he was a gardener of genius. He regarded the garden as a theatre, a work of art.  E. F. Schumacher, author of Small is Beautiful, said that Chadwick was the greatest horticulturalist of the 20th C. He is still not well known outside of the United States. A streamlined variation on his methods has been repackaged by John Jeavons as "biointensive" gardening.

He had no direct relation to macrobiotics but his mode of organic gardening produces fruit and vegetables of unsurpassed quality and cosmic integrity consistent with macrobiotic ideals. Alan was a wizard, an alchemist of the soil.