The Christmas just passed was for many of us markedly less merry than usual owing to the sudden death not long before of our friend John Thompson – usually JT, sometimes Jates or Jaters – at the age of 74.

Oxford’s friend, one might say, surveying so much that he did for the city to its permanent good, including the planting of a vast number of trees, first as an officer with Oxford City Council and later in his 14 years of retirement.

Si monumentum requiris, circumspice ... If you require a monument, look around you. Those words commemorating Sir Christopher Wren, carved beneath the dome of St Paul’s, were appropriately borrowed by one of the speakers at John’s wake.

Alan Allport continued: “All around Oxford and further afield, there are woodlands, copses, hedgerows, and street plantings – tens of thousands of trees that John has caused to be planted, or indeed planted with his own hands, many of them by now forming mature woods.

“These trees and woodland, for me, are John’s incomparable monument.”

I have only to look out of the front window of my house to see an example of John’s work, planted long before I arrived, in the shape of a handsome crab apple tree.

I am from the social rather than practical side of John’s life, though I was once prevailed upon to assist in the planting of hundreds of daffodil bulbs on the embankment of the main road through Barton.

From our first meeting in the mid 1970s, at The Gardener’s Arms in Plantation Road, pubs and restaurants were a focal point of our friendship.

His wake was at Nether Winchendon House, near Aylesbury, offered for the purpose by its owners Robert and Georgianna Spencer Barnard.

The event was enlivened by a number of eulogies, including one from Professor John Stein, of Magdalen College, an especially close friend with whom JT had hosted joint celebrations for many landmark birthdays.

Present to hear him was Professor Stein’s restaurateur and TV presenter brother Rick, whose friendship with JT had a strange beginning. John Stein explained: “My sister Henrietta was at one of Rick’s famous parties at my mother’s coach house in Cornwall in the 1970s and she asked him to ‘stop that toe rag with a beard’ stealing her cigarettes.

“Rick said he’d throw him out. He went up to JT and said: ‘Stop taking my sister’s cigs or I’ll throw you out.’.

“John said very meekly: ‘Well, they are very nice. Black Sobranies, I think. Where did you go to school? Try one.’ Rick did so. They got chatting and have been friends ever since.”

Those celebrating JT’s life were glad that its rakish side was not ignored.

John Stein spoke of John’s integrity, and then continued: “How could I say such a scandalous old reprobate had integrity – with his snobbishness, crudity, irreverence and subversiveness?

“How could one who loved so much old-fashioned – English pubs, English cricket, English cricket pitches and village greens, and English public schools, together with his passion for sustainability and indigenous English species – how could he also have been such a passionate supporter of Bauhaus, Corbusier, Brutalism, Didcot Power Station, modernism and post-modernism in all its guises?

“But this paradox emanated from his underlying deep aesthetic, his intuitive understanding of what was right for landscape, place and time. Village cricket pitches led naturally in his mind to sustainable vegetation and indigenous species, hence to perfectly constructed concrete in beautiful urban design – using exactly what was right for each environment in each age.”

What good fun JT’s presence provoked was spelled out in the closing sentences of John’s speech.

“He could always lighten our gloom, revelling in black humour, crudity and bad taste. Rooms lit up when he entered, not with a thundering ego, but with modest, self-deprecating presence and gloriously obscene stories.

“JT was like an ideal institution – authoritative, consistent, supportive, comforting, enduring.”