Brighton’s colourful wild flower displays in parks and on newly created chalk butterfly banks all over the city this summer captured people’s hearts and became something of a talking point.

Less well known is the man behind this initiative who has been quietly working in the background at Stanmer Park nursery, for more than 40 years, to fulfil a lifetime’s passion. John Gapper, now 72, started working for Brighton Corporation in 1958 as one of two qualified apprentices from agricultural college.

He grew up with a love of flowers and trees but it wasn’t until the 1960s that he began to understand that the prevailing culture practised by local authority parks departments everywhere was actually contributing to a decline of wild flowers and the butterflies and insects that depend on them.

“‘The policy in those days was – if it was green and grew, you sprayed it! Of course the butterfly population was in decline,” says John.

As a Brighton Council employee, John was responsible for mowing grasslands with one of the first manufactured powered pedestrian flail mowers.

He kept discovering rare wild flowers in their natural habitat that he had only ever seen in books and began to realise he was onto something special.

He started mowing round the patches of wildflowers in order to provide the conditions to allow them to seed and multiply.

“After a couple of years the patches of wild flowers were increasing and I had less and less to mow,” says John.

But as a young man in his early 20s he wasn’t confident enough to challenge the status quo which was that wild flowers were weeds to be destroyed.

He kept his head down and in a determined effort to enhance the natural environment he started harvesting wild flower seeds and planting them on the allotments attached to the cottages at Stanmer Park where he moved to live as a young married man in 1969 and still lives.

During the 1970s, he became a close friend of the retired former deputy director of Brighton Corporation, who showed John all the sites around Brighton where there had been a tradition of collecting butterflies before the Second World War but where butterflies were now rarity.

This allowed John to embark on a personal mission to replenish the different types of wild flowers needed for butterflies to breed and feed by planting pockets of wild flowers where once butterflies had roamed.

“They couldn’t’ stop me, it was a way of life,” says John with a twinkle.

John says his lucky break came in 1972 when the A27 bypass was being built and he was responsible for winning a major contract for Brighton Corporation to landscape the land excavated for the bypass.

He made a pact with the Department for Transport landscape architect that in return for giving him quantities of indigenous wild flower seeds to plant on the sides of the Southwick Tunnel embankment John would be allowed to plant wild flower seeds along the A27 stretch cutting south of Stanmer Park in Coldean. This stretch of the A27 has become known as Gapper’s Folly and John says it marked the beginning of some sort of official recognition that he may be a maverick but that his wild flower knowledge and understanding was invaluable.

In 2010 John was runner-up in a Guardian newspaper national Environmental Hero Award and more recently his hard work has been rewarded by an innovative two year pilot project supported by the South Downs National Park to plant out 90,000 wild flower plug plants across the north of the city.

He is perhaps proudest of the visits by scientists from Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank at Wakehurst Park who have come to see him to find out how some of the more endangered wild flowers such as bird’s foot trefoil and horse shoe vetch have managed to thrive and multiply in and around Brighton.

His lifetime’s work has been re-energised with the arrival of volunteers in the last couple of years who work with the City Park Rangers, under the supervision of his ranger son Mark, harvesting wild flower seeds at the end of summer to be returned to Stanmer Nursery for other groups of volunteers to plant on, under John’s watchful eye.

John’s green fingers with wildflowers have much to do with the unique blend of compost in which the seeds are planted. He explains that commercial compost does not contain chalk which the local flowers need to thrive. So he has developed his own which consists of loam collected from the active mole hills in fields around Stanmer Park, rotted leaf mould and manure from recycled green waste produced by Jock, his 26 year old Shetland Pony whose diet consists of wild grass from a little-known three- acre meadow close to Stanmer which John says hasn’t been ploughed since Saxon Times. John’s compost blend is appropriately called Gapper’s Gold and, like the man behind it, is helping to transform the natural landscape of our city by helping to restore local ecosystems, boost diversity and encourage the return of rare species of butterflies and other insects.