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.
Chinese botanist, known as the father of Chinese pteridology. Wrote the first complete monograph of Chinese Ferns. He published over 160 articles and monographs, as well as 15 translations.
Developed the Ren-Chang Ching System for ferns. In 1940, Ren-Chang Ching published the Natural Classification System of Polypodiaceae, in which he divided plants of Polypodiaceae into 33 families and 249 genera, and proposed 5 evolutionary clues (Xing, 1994). His system ended the conservative classification system of Joseph Dalton Hooker and solved the biggest problem of fern botany at that time, which made great contributions to the worldwide fern taxonomy.
Became interested in botany when studying at the First Agricultural School in Jiangsu Province. After graduation, he attended the University of Nanking and got a bachelor degree in forestry.
Ren-Chang, went on to work as an assistant at Southeast University and later got a job with the Natural History Museum of Academia Sinica.
In 1929, he began researching ferns at the Botany Museum at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark). After returning to China, he worked as a researcher at the Institute of Hydrobiology in Peiping. In 1934, he was sent to Jiangxi to establish the Lushan Botanical Garden and became its director.
During the War of Resistance against Japan, he established a fern research center in Kunming. From 1945, he became an associate professor at the Department of Forestry and Biology of Yunnan University.
In 1949, he also became the Deputy Director of the Forestry Bureau of Yunnan Province.
In order to study ferns he learned English, French, Latin, and other languages.
He took over 18,300 photographs of fern patterns.
London's oldest botanic garden. Established in 1673, by the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries of London, Chelsea Physic Garden is home to over 4,500 medicinal, edible and useful plants.
Mission:
To demonstrate the medicinal, economic, cultural and environmental importance of plants to the survival and well-being of humankind.
Author of "The Ferns of India: Enumeration, Synonyms and Distribution" (2000)
(2026) Manging Director of National Botanical Research Institute, Pteridology Department (Lucknow, India)