Early life Edward Hyams was born in Stamford Hill, London, on 30 September 1910, to Arthur (Isaac) Hyams and Annie Dollie Leitson Hyams. Arthur Hyams (b. 19 June 1881) was a "well-known London advertising agent", "of the Borough Billposting Company, London" Annie was born April 1884. Hyams attend the
University College School in London as a child, then went to the
Lycée Jaccard boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland and
Lausanne University. among other jobs, including in newspapers. Hyams joined the
Royal Air Force (1939-1941) but was disqualified from being a pilot because of his poor eyesight. Hyams and Hilda were demobilized in 1947, and settled in
Molash, in Kent, England.
Gardening and viticulture In Molash, the couple took up gardening, restoring a three-acre cottage garen property. He wrote about this time in his memoir,
From the Waste Land, describing the transformation of his home, "Nut Tree Cottages", into a prosperous market garden. Hyams stayed in Molash until 1960, while becoming an increasingly avid horticulturalist. During this time, Hyams also developed a serious interest in
viticulture, and in 1960 moved to south Devon, to re-establish grape vineyards in England. He published
The Grape Vine in England in 1949, and edited a volume on English viticulture in 1953,
Vineyards in England. In 1965 Hyams published
Dionysus: A Social History of the Wine Vine, combining his passions for social history and viticulture, and arguing for hybrid viticulture. Hyams' most famous work was
Soil and Civilisation (1952), a history of farming which advocated
organic farming and came out against mechanised agriculture.
Soil and Civilisation has been described as an early example of "
environmental literature". It also included a favourable depiction of the
Incas. From 1959 to 1974 he penned the gardening column for the
Illustrated London News. He was consulted by the government of
Iran when the National Botanic Garden in
Tehran was being built. One of Hyams' last works, published posthumously in 1979, was ''The Story of England's Flora''.
Fiction, literary, and translation work Hyams' fiction included science fiction, ghost stories, often satirical, and often with a clear political bent. His novels included
The Astrologer (1950) a satirical
science fiction novel about an
ecological disaster, Hyams maintained active relations with the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
Later personal life and death In 1967, Edward and Hilda's marriage ended. Hyams moved to Brampton in Suffolk in 1970, establishing a third garden on the property of an old Victorian school (described in ''An Englishman's Garden
(1967)) In 1973, Hyams married Mary Patricia Bacon, divorced from Edward Bacon, an editor at the Illustrated London News''. He died only two years later, 25 November 1975, at the age of 65, in
Besançon, Doubs, France. In his life he had written more than ninety books, broadly ranging across history, ecology, gardening, politics, and fiction, but interconnected by his radical politics and passions. == Works ==