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Created sculptures for the RBGE Arid House between 1998 and 2000.
(right click, open link in new tab:) https://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/16949031.obituary---mo-farquharson-sculptor-known-scottish-memorial-miners/

Probationer Gardener at RBGE, went on to post in Kingston, Jamaica.

James Robert Anderson, 1841-1930, the son of A.C. Anderson, left Fort Nisqually in 1850 to attend school in Victoria for two years. He returned in 1858 and remained until his death. He was an accountant and businessman, and from 1894 until 1908, the Deputy Minister of Agriculture. He had a keen interest in natural history. His father, Alexander C. Anderson, was an early B.C. land surveyor. (right click, open link in new tab) https://search-bcarchives.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca/anderson-james-robert-1841-1930

Born Nicola Hilland Stewart in Belfast on December 23rd 1949, Nicky was schooled in England and Northern Ireland. She achieved a first class degree in psychology at Edinburgh University in 1972, going on to complete her doctorate in 1975. She married James Ferguson in 1970. As well as teaching, in her 30's Nicky became a self-taught gardening expert, conducting much pf her research in the library of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, and producing 3 books, the last published posthumously with the help of Charles Quest-Ritson: 'Right Plant, Right Place' (1986), 'Take Two Plants' (1998) and 'Double Flowers' (2018).
From her obituary: 'She somehow combined profound intellectual self-confidence with total modesty about herself and her achievements... Friends in distress found that she was the first to offer help and the last to claim credit. When her last years were afflicted, though never marred, by illness, very few people were allowed to discover the fact.' She died on 25 August 2007, leaving her husband James, two sons and a daughter.

Joan Wendoline Clark grew up in Kincardineshire and Sussex. Fluent in French and German, skilled in shorthand and a trained typist, she worked for a time at the Foreign Office in London and at the British Embassy in Paris. In the 1930s she returned with her husband to Scotland and together they settled in Lochaber, where she remained until her death on 6 July 1999. Shortly after her death, her daughter gifted Joan’s manuscript collection to the University of Edinburgh's School of Scottish Studies Archives. That collection includes her correspondence and botanical research notes dating from the 1970s right up until 1999, along with three specimen books containing almost 350 pressed wildflowers collected around Onich, Ballachulish, North Uist and Glencoe in around 1976. (from Elaine MacGillivray's blog SSSA in 70 objects: Filling the Creative Well: A Tribute to Joan W. Clark - (right click, open link in new tab: https://libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/sssa/object19/ )) Three foolscap hortus siccus scrapbooks comprising Clark's Taraxacum collection has come to RBGE. D McKean has removed some of these specimens to add to the herbarium collection, but the remainder, still in the scrapbooks, was transferred to the Library's Hortus Siccus collection in April 2023.

George Paxton, born 1 July 1850, was the eldest son of George Paxton senior of Richardland House, Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, who was a partner in the Richardland Brewery. Around 1887, by then in sole charge of the brewery in succession to his father and uncle, Paxton took up photography, a pastime to which he devoted increasing amounts of energy. A founder member of Kilmarnock Amateur Photographic Society, by 1890 he had joined Talbot Circulating Album Club, ‘founded for the monthly circulation and criticism of members’ work’, which connected a network of dedicated enthusiasts across Britain.

In his lifetime Paxton was best known for his the quality of his photographs of trees and other botanical subjects, mainly taken in Ayrshire, which he used for lecture slides and illustrations for his journal and magazine articles. In 1894 he was commissioned by RBGE Regius Keeper, Professor Isaac Bayley Balfour, to produce an album named 'Remarkable Trees in Ayrshire Photographed and Measured by G. Paxton, Kilmarnock'. This album, which remains in the collection of RBGE Library, contains 34 photographs of trees, each annotated by hand with the identity, history and measurements of the tree and the date of photography. Paxton went on to be elected to membership of the Royal Scottish Arboricultural Society, and was appointed Photographic Artist to the Society in January 1897. He provided formal images of members during their annual summer excursions, including to the Upper Forth Valley and Loch Lomond District (1896), southern Ireland (1897), Ulster (1900), Ayrshire and Glasgow (1901) and an extended visit to Sweden in 1902. Thereafter, already suffering from the effects of the neurological disease which soon proved fatal, he was replaced by A.D. Richardson.

Paxton died in Bournemouth on 16 May 1904, leaving his entire estate to his only child, Edith.
H.B.