A great lover of music and an accomplished player of piano and oboe, Lloyd's lifelong home and garden at Great Dixter and his classic book The Well-Tempered Garden (1970) . . . it's title a play on JS Bach's 'The Well-Tempered Clavier' . . . were hugely influential and enthused generations of gardeners and garden writers around the world, including me. In all, he wrote 20 books and his last, The Exotic Garden, will be published this year by BBC Books.

A confirmed bachelor with no children of his own, Christo, as he signed himself to friends in the many riveting letters he wrote during his busy life, surrounded himself at Dixter with people of all ages but particularly young people who flocked to help with the garden at high season. He was quite happy to see them all sleeping communally in front of the fire in the Great Hall at Dixter, a building dating from about 1460 but added to over the centuries, not least by the architect Edmund Lutyens, who designed new bits of the house and garden for Lloyd's parents after they bought the half-timber dwelling in East Sussex in 1910.

Waspish and witty (one personage he rather rudely ignored called him 'The BadTempered Gardener') he didn't suffer fools gladly, though if you were really keen and serious, with pencil and paper ready to jot down what he said, he could be a wonderful teacher; indeed, he was assistant lecturer in decorative horticulture at Wye College in London for four years, after graduating there with a BSc in 1950 at the relatively late age of 29, after finishing his National Service.

Like many good gardeners, Christo was an excellent cook and some of his best writing includes recipes and descriptions of food. Like his adored mother, with whom he gardened until she died, he was, according to a mutual friend, also a dab hand with the needle and produced the most wonderful pieces of tapestry, which you can see in various places around the big, atmospheric house.

Because he knew them inside out, he was not afraid to break the rules of gardening, which he did with impunity and shocked the then rather staid horticultural establishment by announcing . . . rather gleefully . . . that he'd ripped out the entire sunken rose garden planted by his parents in the 1920s, and that he was replacing it with a hotbed of tender exotics. (This is not low-maintenance gardening.

You have to dig things up or cart vast pots inside somewhere as soon as frost threatens, so obviously it helped that he had willing staff. ) Almost immediately after this rose garden episode, after the wailing of the outraged waned, such was his influence that his acolytes slavishly followed his lead with loud condemnation of all roses, no matter how intoxicating their scent or pleasing their beauty. "Roses, roses, out, out, out, " they chanted, but of course, they had missed Lloyd's point about roses completely.

Besides his impish and rather innocent desire to shock, what Christopher Lloyd was objecting to was the idea of a dedicated and overcrowded rose garden, which looked leggy and ugly for much of the year and where, because nothing else was ever planted, became a place that was the antithesis of healthy bio-diversity and a hotbed of ineradicable and disfiguring diseases.

He never said he disliked roses per se and, being a plantsman to the core, he never could or would. It was all a bit of a misunderstanding and since then, perhaps in an attempt at damage limitation, he has written in praise of roses, albeit of specific roses grown in the most sensible and effective way: as just another element . . . though one of a very high order . . . in a mixed planting scheme.

Until the last he was blazing a trail, leading the fashion pack who hung on his every utterance, afraid to call a dahlia a darling without his say so. That said, he was, and will continue to be through his erudite writing and hopefully his garden, an inspiration to us all.

Until his stroke a fortnight ago, he daily churned out impeccable prose and advice on his laptop computer, which he actually did keep on his lap, sitting wrapped in a rug by the big log fire with his 'girls', his dachsund bitches Canna and Dahlia, who will be bereft without their giant of a master.

Christopher Lloyd was of the generation of great gardeners who grew up and were trained in the best traditional practices. Known for his willingness and eagerness to experiment, he used say that "gardeners should live on the frontier of their experience".

He always extolled the benefits of a classical education and it shone through in his writing.

"I enjoy writing in our wonderfully expressive, albeit ambiguous, English language, " Lloyd wrote in his Country Life column. "I am passionate about my subject matter, but not (heaven forefend) solemn. I find it impossible to take myself or anyone else too seriously. I can never see the point of modesty, which makes everything uniformly low-key and drab. If you're bad at a thing . . . mending the electric light or, more seriously, in my case, any sort of draughtsmanship . . . admit it like a man, but if you've done something rather well, like producing a blaze of floral colour in May, why pretend otherwise?"

Great Dixter and its maker were recognised officially in 1979, when the RHS gave him its highest award, the Victoria Medal of Honour. In 1998 he was awarded the OBE for his service to horticulture. The gardens at Dixter have been open to the public for 50 years, with 44,000 people visiting in 2005, and they have continued to evolve and grow in popularity. Personally, I'm not mad about his colour sense, but I absolutely adore his meadows.

For some time before his death, Christo had been putting arrangements in place about the future of the garden at Dixter. "I don't want the place to become a museum, ' he wrote recently in theDaily Telegraph. "The garden is sure to change. It has changed a lot in my time. We have formed a trust, the Great Dixter Charitable Trust, which will take over. Dixter will change but it will go on. As long as Fergus (Garrett) is at the helm, I have no fears for Dixter."

Fundraising efforts have already begun, with information available at www. greatdixter. co. uk.

While Christo Lloyd leaves no immediate family, he was close to a niece, Olivia Eller; to his great-nephews and nieces; and to Fergus Garrett, his wife Amanda and their daughter, Ayse. He forbade any memorial service but instead asked for a party in honour of what would have been his 85th birthday, on 2 March. To that effect, his many friends are planning a celebration.

"Gardening, like living, should be fun, " he wrote. "It can't be much of the time, but we can do our best to make it so."

DIARY Co Carlow, 13-19 Feb : 'Snowdrop Week' at Altamont Gardens, Ballon, Tullow (tel. 059-915 9444).

Daily guided tours at 2pm, 2.75. Gardens open free of charge. Snowdrops, hellebores and other spring subjects for sale.