On the edge of Auckland, New Zealand, where hardware megastores give way to cattle yards and pines, flower breeder Keith Hammett is making the world a little brighter. Over a 60- year career, Keith’s sense of himself has evolved from that of an engineer to “a practitioner of the visual arts,” he says.
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Indeed, his leafy property – where 100,000 clivias shelter under towering sycamores and liquidambars, and where, depending on the season, a rainbow of sweet peas and dahlias reach for the sun – is closer to an artist’s studio than a scientist’s experimental plot. Here, Keith envisions radical new colours, shapes and forms, and patiently creates them. “The essence of breeding is to imagine something that doesn’t exist and bring it into being,” he says.
Keith was born in London, “slap bang in the middle of the war.” He can remember the neighbour’s air-raid shelter, plane-spotting searchlights and cutlery caught in the telephone wires when a nearby house was bombed.
Both his grandfathers were professional gardeners, and as a teenager, he joined the local horticultural society. He soon fell in love with dahlias and sweet peas – twin lifelong passions – and began exhibiting flowers, collected a swag of prizes and got himself on to the committee of the Sweet Pea Society. Then, he started breeding. “When you’ve won the same cup God knows how many times, you start to want to do something different.”
He continued the habit when he moved to New Zealand, aged 25, for a plant pathology job. Back then, he was focused on perfecting sweet peas and dahlias for the show bench – flowers that would adhere to a predetermined standard – and he produced dozens of sought-after cultivars.
The essence of breeding is to imagine something that doesn’t exist, and bring it into being
But in 1987, keen to see dahlias in the wild, Keith visited Mexico. “That was a turning point,” he says. The sheer kaleidoscopic variety he saw there fired his imagination and changed his view about what was possible. For the first time, he noticed the beauty of a dahlia’s leaves. “Exhibitors cut all the ruddy leaves off and stuff the heads in a vase,” he laments. He conceived of a dark-leaf dahlia, eventually creating ten Mystic cultivars – tens of thousands of which are now sold worldwide.
Once concerned with conformity, he now began to read plant catalogues to see what wasn’t there. He observed that sweet pea exhibitors had for decades scorned bi-coloured flowers, preferring same-coloured ones, or selfs. Worried the original, bi-coloured sweet peas were in danger of being lost, he successfully crossbred ancestral cultivars with the best show-quality ones. “But while I had achieved my goal, the balance didn’t feel right.”
The flowers all had a darker standard – the back, vertical petal – and paler wings. Keith had an intuition the reverse would look more pleasing. “The idea was, could I create one? Within a collection of sweet peas, I looked for the slightest propensity of that reverse bi-colouring, and then I worked progressively
to accentuate that.” It took two decades, but he did it.
Then a wild card exploded on to the sweet pea scene. In 1987, botanists discovered a rare, related species in Turkey they called Lathyrus belinensis. It had a red-veined standard and bright-yellow wings. “Yellow is the holy grail of sweet-pea breeding,” says Keith – a missing slice of the colour spectrum.
With great difficulty, and the help of a University of Auckland collaborator with a high-tech lab, he managed to hybridise the new species with Lathyrus odoratus to create L. x hammettii, named in his honour. The influx of genetics has enabled him to produce more contrasting reverse bi-colours such as Lathyrus odoratus ‘Erewhon’, blooms that morph their colour as they mature like L. odoratus ‘Blue Shift’, vibrant turquoise and blue hues that “simply didn’t exist before in the sweet pea”, and a creamy-yellow cultivar he called L. x hammettii ‘Primrose’.
True yellow remains elusive, but Keith says an English breeder, crossing two of Keith’s own hybrid cultivars, is on the cusp of achieving this dream. Keith is delighted, and doesn’t mind that someone else got there first.
Moving to the other side of the world allowed his creativity to blossom, he believes. “I was kind of freed of the straitjacket of being in the British culture. Had I not come to New Zealand, I would probably have got sucked into breeding exhibition dahlias ad nauseam.” But he’s deeply flattered by the recognition he’s received from the old country: the RHS’s Reginald Cory Cup for his work on dahlias, the Veitch Memorial Medal, and his L. odoratus ‘Chelsea Centenary’, named to celebrate the 100th RHS Chelsea Flower Show in 2013.
Now in his eighties, he’s still making crosses, including of clivias, which take up to ten years to flower. And though he has entirely lost his sense of smell, he’s working on ever more perfumed sweet peas, recruiting an ex-sommelier dahlia breeder to serve as his ‘sniffer’. “I’m as passionate as I’ve ever been,” he says.
Useful information Find out more about Keith Hammett’s work at drkeithhammett.co.nz