DICKWoollcombe, one of the last surviving Tamar Valley market gardeners of the postwar period and a founder member of the original Tavistock Art Group, has died peacefully at the age of 97.

Born in Florence, Italy, Mr Woollcombe spent most of his life at Rumleigh, where his father Major Frank Woollcombe had bought some fields in 1929 to set up a market garden.

He attended Mount House School (then in Plymouth), before becoming an aircraft designer at Bristol Aeroplane Company and at Miles Aircraft. His war years were spent as a pilot in RAF Coastal Command hunting U-boats.

On being demobilised in 1946, Mr Woollcombe took over the market garden from his ailing father, marrying in 1952.

His engineering skills in devising equipment and developing a system of movable glasshouses on a shoe string budget often put Rumleigh Fruit and Flower Farm at the forefront of horticultural innovation.

He was featured in an issue of The Grower, the trade journal for market gardeners, as well as in Sovereigns, Madams and Double Whites, a book about the history of market gardening in the Tamar Valley.

Over the next four decades the market garden evolved as demand changed: out went apples and hothouse crops, in came pick-your-own. When Mr Woollcombe retired in 1985, the land was converted to grazing.

Off duty, Mr?Woollcombe was a talented painter and keen member of the Tavistock Art Group and the Plymouth Art Club. Some of his comic scenes of country life, reminiscent of Beryl Cook’s work, he later had published in a book called The West Country Year.

He is survived by his wife Phoebe and two sons.