An amateur botanist from Pucketty Farm, Faringdon, England.
Born in South India in 1914. He left India at age 4 to attend school in England. Eventually attended Marlborough College and Oriel College, Oxford, with a degree in zoology.
After a brief period in the army, he took up farming, working as a pupil on a farm near Kelmscott. In 1938, Hugh bought Pucketty Farm in Faringdon. He became an organic farmer and eventually published a book on the subject. Many people would come to his farm to learn about organic farming.
During WWII, Hugh was told by the Gloucester Regiment that they did not need him, so he resigned his commission and continued farming. He joined the Home Guard.
In 1950, Hugh became interested in ferns when he happened upon a very rare fern by chance. For the next 50 years, he dedicated himself to the study of ferns. He joined the British Pteridological Society in 1962 and began to specialise in Dryopteris. He was the first to suggest formulae (e.g. AB, AAB) for the possible combinations of genomes in what later became the subspecies of Dryopteris affinis, work that is still being continued today. President of BPS, Stanley Walker, lent him an old microscope so he could check spores.
Hugh would carry out fieldwork in Southern England and Wales on the weekends when the farming calendar would allow. In 1982, while fern hunting in Kintyre, he made the first discovery of Dryopteris x sarvelae outside Finland.
Hugh built up a living fern collection at Pucketty. Care of his ferns was his top priority, and they were well taken care of. Many of his plants were later studied in depth by Stanley Walker and Mary Gibby at the BM. Under Walker's tutelage, Hugh quickly learned to detect the exact stage when developing spores could be stained to show their chromosomes.
Hugh was a kind and generous person who was always willing to help anyone who showed an interest in ferns. One such person was a young student from Radley College, Christopher Fraser-Jenkins. They developed a long-lasting friendship, and Christopher would go on to name a species of Dryopteris after Hugh: D. corleyi.
In his 70s, Hugh trained as a chiropractor, being one of the first students of John McTimoney, founder of the Oxford College of Chiropractic. Hugh built on McTimoney's work.
Roland Edgar Cooper was born in 1890 in Kingston-Upon-Thames, but lost both his parents by the age of four. He came to be cared for by his aunt Emma Wiedhofft who was married to William Wright Smith, eventual Regius Keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. It was this association that was to shape Cooper's career - he travelled to Calcutta with Smith in 1907 when he became in charge of the Herbarium there, travelling and collecting botanical specimens in Sikkim, Nepal, Tibet and Bhutan. In 1910, Cooper and Smith returned, and Cooper took the Horticultural course at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.
In 1913, Cooper returned to the Himalayas to collect plants for A.K. Bulley of Ness, near Liverpool. He travelled through Sikkim in 1913, Bhutan in 1914-15, and the Punjab in 1916.
In 1921, after the First World War, during which Cooper served in the Indian Army, he was appointed Superintendent of the Botanic Garden at Maymo in the Shan Hills of Burma, eventually returning to Scotland in the late 1920's for the education of his son. From 1930-1934 Cooper worked at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh as the Garden Curator's assistant, taking the role of Curator (Head Gardener) himself in 1934, a post he held until his retirement in 1950. Post retirement, he and his wife Emily Bartusek moved to Westcliff-on-Sea in Essex.
During his career, Cooper became a Fellow of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Royal Caledonian Horticultural Society, the Botanical Society of Edinburgh (now Scotland), the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Scottish Anthropological Society. He was also the vice-president of the Scottish Rock Garden Club, of which he was a founder member.
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.