Timothy Walker read Botany at University College Oxford. Following graduation, he worked as a trainee at Oxford Botanic Garden, the Savill Garden Windsor, and then at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. In 1985 he was awarded a Master of Horticulture by the Royal Horticultural Society of London. From 1988 to 2014 he was director (Horti Praefectus) at the Oxford Botanic Garden. Between 1992 & 2000, during his tenure, the OBGHA won 4 gold medals at the Chelsea Flower Show London. In 2009 the Botanic Garden was awarded a Queen’s Anniversary Prize for providing imaginative educational programmes for adults, students, children, and the general public, thereby breathing new life into education for people of all ages and enriching their lives. In 2010 he was elected as a Fellow of the Linnaean Society of London. In the same year, he presented a 3-part series of films on the history of botany on BBC4. Since 2014 he has been a tutor in Plant Biology at Somerville College, Oxford.