Charles Jones began his career as a gardener working on many private estates, notably Ote Hall, in Sussex. Whilst his gardening flourish to which he received recognition for in the Garden Chronicle in 1905, however his career as a photographer remained unnoticed for another 75 years.
It was only when in a Bermondsey antique market in London in 1981, historian and photographic collector, Sean Sexton, plucked Charles Jones photographs from certain obscurity by buying a trunk that contained several hundred images of turn of the century photographs.
These photographs mainly consisted of vegetables whilst a third of them were images of fruits and flowers. Charles Jones was fastidious in his executions as he was meticulous in his printings, which were gold toned gelatine silver prints from glass plate negatives.
The power of his photographs are reflected in the subtlety of his arrangement of the vegetables as it is in his lighting and focus, to which has been compared to the work of Etienne Carjat, Charles Baudelaire and Felix Nadar. His style also anticipated the later modernist photographers such as, Edward Weston, August Kotzsch, Karl Blossfeldt and Josef Sudek.