Graham Rose was educated at Dame Allen's school in Newcastle, which he always referred to as the Eton of the North. He was proud of his roots and very pleased that Arthur Bell, the director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew was an old school chum, and that the Queen's gardener, Ashley Stephenson, also came from Tyneside.
Rose was evacuated to Windermere during the war and later attended Newcastle and Cambridge universities. He travelled the world for fifteen years as an expert on crop protection before joining the Sunday Times as agricultural correspondent in 1968. The paper was then edited by Harold Evans, who had spent a successful period on the Northern Echo in Darlington. Rose created a garden in the Vale of the White Horse in Oxfordshire and the story of this project is told in his amusing book Landscape with Weeds (1980). He became gardening correspondent in 1978.
Rose designed a garden to cope with the 1976 drought and, always in search of unusual gardens and gardeners, also wrote the celebrated Good Gardens Guide. Rose was the first to introduce mirrors into garden design and took a special interest in gardening for the disabled. His northern landscapes garden at the Gateshead Garden Festival reclaimed a chunk of the Team Valley. He was a warm-hearted, impatient and plain-spoken man, with a great sense of humour, and a noted raconteur. He referred to his second wife, Doff, as 'our kid'.