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Born Derbyshire 1907; died Edinburgh 1978
Harold Fletcher graduated in botany from Manchester University in 1929, and obtained a doctorate from Aberdeen University in 1933 where he lectured in botany. In 1934 he moved to the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, continuing work on the taxonomy of Asiatic floras and gaining a DSc from Edinburgh University in 1939. Jointly with William Wright Smith he authored a key monograph on the genus primula, his other specialism being rhododendrons. Turning his attention to horticulture, he was appointed Director of the RHS Garden at Wisley in 1951 before returning to Edinburgh in 1954 as assistant Keeper at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and then Regius Keeper in 1956 (the point at which the posts of Regius Keeper and Regius Professor of the University were no longer held by one person). He energetically set about rejuvenating botany and horticulture in the Garden and oversaw a number of major developments including the refurbishment of Inverleith House as an art gallery, a purpose build Herbarium and Library which opened 1964, a new range of glasshouses, and the acquisition of the Logan Estate in Wigtownshire as a subtropical garden. He stimulated the post war revival of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh and was President of the International Association of Botanical Gardens 1964-69, having brought the Tenth International Botanical Congress to Edinburgh in 1964. Fletcher was appointed Queen’s Botanist in Scotland in 1967 and Honorary Professor of Botany at Edinburgh University in 1968. With W.H. Brown, he wrote the ‘History of the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh 1670-1970’ and also authored books on the history of the RHS and plant explorers. Fletcher had a deep love of the arts and after his retirement in 1970 served on the board of the Edinburgh College of Art.
Sources: R. Desmond ‘Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists and Horticulturalists; HR Fletcher and WH Brown ‘The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh 1670-1970’; Deni Bown, ‘4 Gardens in One’.
D.W.

Born Cheshire 1861; died Cheshire 1942
Arthur Bulley was the thirteenth of fourteen children of a wealthy Liverpool cotton broker and on leaving school joined the family business. As a young man he had a love of wild plants and in 1897 bought 24 hectares of farmland at Ness near Neston on the Wirral to build a new family home and create a garden. In 1896 he had started a correspondence with Professor Isaac Bayley Balfour, Regius Keeper at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) who was to become his mentor and lifelong friend. In 1904 Bulley started a commercial nursery at Ness which, a few years later, became Bee’s Ltd., and the search for new seeds and plants was on. In that year Bayley Balfour recommended George Forrest as a collector to send to North West Yunnan, a joint enterprise with the RBGE, with Bulley providing the finance. This was the beginning of a series of sponsorships of professional plant collectors including Frank Kingdon Ward and Roland Edgar Cooper, again recommended by Bayley Balfour, who made several trips to China and the Himalayas to provide stocks for Bee’s Nursery. The Nursery, which moved to Sealands near Chester in 1911, was a thriving business which sold not only rare shrubs and alpine plants including primula and meconopsis but supplied ‘penny packets’ of seeds to Woolworths for over 50 years. Bulley retired from the family cotton firm in 1922 but continued sponsoring plant collecting expeditions all over the world, usually as part of a syndicate, and also subscribed to the first Everest expedition. Arthur Bulley was a keen Socialist, shrewd businessman, eccentric and visionary. Primula bulleyana was named after him and after his death his daughter bequeathed Ness Gardens to the University of Liverpool.
Sources: R. Desmond ‘Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists and Horticulturalists’; Brenda McLean ‘A Pioneering Plantsman’
D.W.

Born Kincardineshire 1892; died Edinburgh 1960
Educated at Gordons College Aberdeen and Edinburgh University graduating MA with honours botany, John Macqueen Cowan completed his training in forestry at Oxford before being appointed to the Indian Forest Service in 1914. During ten years with the Indian Service he studied and classified vegetation and made considerable plant collections in Sikkim, Bengal and Burma, travelling with his wife, also a botanist. He was attached to the Indian Army during the First World War and served in Egypt and Palestine. On his return to India he officiated as Director of the Botanical Survey then as Superintendent of Royal Botanic Garden Calcutta from 1926, retiring in 1928. In that year he gained a temporary appointment as a botanist in the herbarium at Kew and in 1929 undertook botanical expeditions to Iraq and Persia principally to collect tulip bulbs but returning with 2,500 plant and herbarium specimens. In 1930 Cowan became assistant to the Regius Keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, a post he was to hold for 24 years. Using the Garden’s extensive collections he became an authority on Rhododendron, publishing widely on this and other genera. During the Second World War he was seconded to the Ministry of Supply build up timber production in west of Scotland. Cowan was President Botanical Society of Edinburgh from 1951 to 1953. On retirement in 1954 he took charge of the National Trust for Scotland (NTS) Garden at Inverewe in Wester Ross developing it into a major visitor attraction, and also inaugurated the prestigious NTS garden cruises.
Sources: R. Desmond ‘Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists and Horticulturalists); HR Fletcher and WH Brown ‘The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh 1670-1970’; obituary folder.
D.W.