John Garton and his two brothers, Robert and Thomas, were in business with their father, Peter, in Golborne and Newton-le-Willows in Lancashire, England, as corn and agricultural merchants.
As a young man, John Garton (1863–1922), was the first to understand that whilst some agricultural plants were self-pollinating, others were cross-pollinating. He began experimenting with the artificial cross pollination firstly of cereal plants, then herbage species and root crops. 
He attracted the friendship and encouragement of a young Scottish seedsman, George Peddie Miln (1861–1928) who had trained in Dundee and was seed manager of Dicksons Limited of Chester.
Knowing he had developed a far reaching new technique in plant breeding John Garton began to carry out many thousands of controlled crosses on fields at the family farm in Newton-le-Willows. He and his colleagues tried in 1889 to interest the UK Government’s new Board of Agriculture in the invention they called Scientific Farm Plant Breeding.  But this was to no avail.