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The Committe for the Study of the Scottish Flora was set up in 1953 to co-ordinate the activities of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh (now the Botanical Society of Scotland) and the B.S.B.I. in Scotland, with each society appointing an equal number of members to the committee. In 1953, B.L. Burtt was appointed its Chairman, and Basil Ribbons its secretary. By 1976 the partnership was under-strain with the Scottish members of the B.S.B.I. eventually voting to replace the C.S.S.F. with the BSBI Committee for Scotland with a BSBI Scottish Newsletter establish to tackle communication problems. (BSBI News 138, April 2018, pp.70-1)

Born Sussex 1897; died Oregon, U.S.A. 1969
Harold Comber’s father was head gardener at Nymans in Sussex and on leaving school he worked there for two years, before moving, aged 17, to Colesbourne Park, Gloucestershire where he managed the glasshouses and botanical collections. He studied horticulture at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh from 1920 to 1923, obtaining exceptionally high marks in all his subjects. This made him an ideal candidate for two plant-hunting expeditions in the Andes sponsored by the a group of wealthy gardening enthusiasts in 1925-26 and 1926-27, from which he sent back seeds and herbarium specimens of over 1200 species, including the Chilean Fire Bush and several species of Berberis and Eucryphia. In 1930 he made a further plant hunting trip to Tasmania and on his return took up the post of manager of the Burnham Lily Nursery in Buckinghamshire. In 1952 he emigrated to America to take up a position as lily hybridizer at the Jan de Graff Oregon bulb farms, retiring in 1962. In retirement he remained active, writing prodigiously and listing the native plants of specific areas for the Native Plant Society of Oregon and at the time of his death was revising his monograph on lilies of the world. In his lifetime Harold Comber collected many species new to science, a new genus Combera was named after him.
D.W.

Economic Botanist: Particular interests in India Rubber and Gutta Percha
Curator Royal Pharmaceutical Society Library and Museum, London 1868-1872
Curator Raffles Library and Museum, Singapore 1874-1877
Fellow of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh