Charles Quest-Ritson
English horticulturalist and garden writer
Charles Quest-Ritson (born 1947) is an English horticulturalist and garden writer. He is one of Britain's foremost rosarians and is the author of the RHS Encyclopedia of Roses and American Rose Society Encyclopedia of Roses. He was a director of the Royal National Rose Society and founder of the Historic Roses Group. Some of his books are co-authored with his wife, Brigid Quest-Ritson.
Life and work
Quest-Ritson was born on 20 June 1947 in Portsmouth, the eldest son of Gerald Ritson, a lieutenant in the Royal Marines, and Margaret Quest Thomson. He is the grandson of the mining engineer Professor John Ritson and the great-great-grandson of Thomas Alexander Dickson, the Liberal and Irish Nationalist MP.
He attended Stoke House preparatory school in Seaford, Sussex and won gardening prizes there from the age of nine. He developed his skills in his grandparents' ten-acre garden; and his father's garden, designed by Gertrude Jekyll. He was privately educated at Winchester College, where his housemaster was Dr Peter Partner, the historian of late-mediaeval Italy. He graduated in 1969 with a degree in history from the University of Warwick, where his tutor was Professor Sir John Rigby Hale. He began his professional life as a tax lawyer.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Charles Quest-Ritson” as english horticulturalist and garden writer. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as english horticulturalist and garden writer. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q110822904. VIAF identifies the subject as 39592752. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1947 and 1969.
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This entry incorporates text from “Charles Quest-Ritson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.