 His father, Percy Lancaster, was a banker and a talented amateur gardener, who went on to become the Secretary of the Agri Horticultural Society of India in Calcutta, India.In 1902 Sydney Percy-Lancaster was apprenticed to the Agri-Horticultural Society and on his father's death in 1904, he was appointed an Assistant.He continued collecting and hybridising the Alipore Canna Collection, started by his father in 1892, they were the most popular garden plant in India at that time.