page_title: Lionel de Rothschild (born 1882)
section_title: Engagement in plants
hierarchical_section_title: Lionel de Rothschild (born 1882) / Engagement in plants
caption_attribution_description: English: Exbury House, Hampshire, England. November 2007
context_page_description: Lionel Nathan de Rothschild, OBE, also Major Lionel de Rothschild, was a British banker and Conservative politician best remembered as the creator of Exbury Gardens by the New Forest in Hampshire. He was the eldest son of Leopold de Rothschild and a part of the prominent Rothschild banking family of England. In 1910, he was elected to the House of Commons. In 1917, he co-founded the anti-Zionist League of British Jews.
context_section_description: His father, Leopold, died in early 1917 and Lionel and brother Anthony became the managing partners of N M Rothschild & Sons bank. However, Lionel de Rothschild had developed an interest in horticulture at a very young age and is said to have planted his first garden at the age of five. In 1919, he purchased the Mitford estate at Exbury in Hampshire, where he devoted a great deal of time and money to transform it into one of the finest gardens in all of England, with more than one million plants. In the 1920s, he built Exbury House around an existing structure in a neo-Georgian style. He constructed a private railway to transport rocks to build the largest rock garden in the country.
  Lionel de Rothschild also co-sponsored plant-hunting expeditions to places as isolated as the Himalayas to collect seed for plant growth and experimentation. In all, he developed 1,204 new hybrids of rhododendron and azalea that were recognized and sold around the world.
  Although he continued to work at the family bank, he is quoted as describing himself as "a banker by hobby — a gardener by profession".
caption: Exbury House
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