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Meeting Alan Street for the first time, you might think he was French, because he has a particular kind of style you don\u2019t often see in an Englishman. He\u2019s a sharp dresser. His boots are terrific. So is his haircut. The suits, in which he appears alongside the Avon Bulbs displays at the Royal Horticultural Society\u2019s shows in London, are immaculate dark pinstripes. If he wears a muffler, he does so in just the right insouciant way. But you need that good eye, that attention to detail if you are to win the number of Gold Medals that Avon Bulbs<\/a> has gathered in over the years.<\/p>\n Nobody who saw it will ever forget the stupendous display of snowdrops<\/a> Alan brought to the RHS February show three years ago, when more than 5,000 flowers were displayed among moss and leaves with such grace, such elegance, such sympathy, you thought they must have been growing there for ever.<\/p>\n He\u2019s 56 years old and Avon Bulbs is effectively the only job he\u2019s ever had. \u201cEvery day for the past 34 years I\u2019ve got up and come to the nursery and lifted and divided and propagated. And nurtured.\u201d Nurturing is a word Alan uses a lot. And it\u2019s this acute, visceral attachment to his plants that makes him such a great nurseryman. They still enchant him, all the flowers he brings into being with his twin-scaling<\/a>, his seed<\/a> sowing, his careful garnering of offsets.<\/p>\n There was a moment when he thought he might have been something else \u2013 a specialist perhaps in French carved capitals of the 12th century. Back in the seventies, he had a place to study Fine Art at Norwich University of the Arts, but he never took it up. Then he decided he would do his bit for society and become a psychiatric nurse. \u201cAre you really ready for that?\u201d asked a friend. He realised he wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n But he did love the garden at his parents\u2019 home in Oxfordshire. Nothing special, he says \u2013 sweet williams, marigolds, plenty of veg \u2013 but whenever they came back from a family holiday, he would rush round checking what had happened in his absence. \u201cThere was a love of plants there that just couldn\u2019t be taken away. And it\u2019s never left me.\u201d<\/p>\n So he signed on for a three-year course in nursery practice at Merrist Wood College<\/a> in Surrey. There, he discovered the first of the plants that he\u2019s been responsible for introducing to the gardening world \u2013 x Halimiocistus wintonensis<\/em> \u2018Merrist Wood Cream\u2019, a cross between Halimium<\/em> and Cistus<\/em> with creamy rose flowers blotched at the base with dark maroon. It\u2019s still in cultivation and the proud possessor of an RHS Award of Garden Merit.<\/p>\n But the flower he\u2019s most associated with is the snowdrop and earlier this year, the Avon Bulbs catalogue offered an extraordinary selection of 89 different kinds, cosseted, nurtured and slowly built up into saleable quantities by Alan. It included \u2018Blewbury Tart\u2019 the strange, angular, very green double snowdrop he discovered in the churchyard of St Michael\u2019s church at Blewbury in Oxfordshire. \u201cDug up with the permission of the vicar,\u201d he stresses.<\/p>\n That was in 1974, before he\u2019d started at Merrist Wood and certainly before the current, widespread galanthomania<\/a> had begun. But Walter Stagg, who \u2018bought\u2019 Alan as part and parcel of the nursery that became Avon Bulbs, was already collecting snowdrops in the early eighties. Many came from the gardens of the late Priscilla Bacon at Raveningham in Norfolk.<\/p>\n Alan\u2019s other great love is what he calls his \u201cold ladies\u201d \u2013 the ancient, papery-petalled narcissi<\/a> he\u2019s gradually been collecting from neglected orchards<\/a>, churchyards and overgrown gardens. \u201cSuch charm, such grace,\u201d he says as we gaze at a bunch he\u2019s picked of \u2018Bath\u2019s Flame\u2019, with a delicate frilled cup of orange set against primrose yellow petals, raised more than 100 years ago by the great connoisseur