text: Horticultural interests While in the Far East, he became interested in Chinese and Japanese garden and landscape design and the flora of these countries. On his return, he created the arboretum at Batsford as a wild garden of naturalistic planting based on his Chinese and Japanese observations. His 1896 book, The Bamboo Garden, was the first book on the cultivation of bamboos in European temperate climates and remained the only text on the subject until the 1960s. He persuaded Edward VII to plant Japanese knotweed at Sandringham House and it later became difficult to eradicate, according to George VI.
  H.S. Chamberlain
  In his closing years, Lord Redesdale edited and wrote extensive and effusive introductions for two of Houston Stewart Chamberlain's books, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century and Immanuel Kant: A Study and Comparison with Goethe, Leonardo da Vinci, Bruno, Plato, and Descartes, both two volumes each, translated into English by John Lees, M.A., D.Litt., and published by John Lane at the Bodley Head, London, in 1910 and 1914 respectively.
  Marriage
  In 1874, Mitford married Lady Clementine Gertrude Helen Ogilvy (1854–1932), daughter of David Ogilvy, 10th Earl of Airlie, by his wife Hon. Blanche Stanley, daughter of Lord Stanley of Alderley. They had five sons and four daughters. David, who succeeded in the barony, married the daughter of Vanity Fair founder Thomas Gibson Bowles and was the father of the Mitford sisters.