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Born Cyprus 1907; died 2003
Hagop "David" Davidian graduated in botany from Edinburgh University in 1946 and in 1947 was offered a post at Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh by Sir William Wright Smith, Regius Keeper, to work on the taxonomy of rhododendrons. Rhododendrons became his life long specialism and enthusiasm. He contributed regularly to the RHS Rhododendron and Camellia Yearbook and at one stage identified 2,000 rhododendrons from the Arnold Arboretum in the USA. Honoured twice by the RHS and in Sweden, after his retirement in 1972 he set to work writing, in four volumes, books on the genus based on the Balfourian system.
Source; cuttings and obituary files
D.W.

Born Surrey 1882; died Westmoreland 1966
Cicely Nichols, the daughter of a Surrey printer, married William Crewdson a barrister and later High Sherriff in 1907. In 1911 they moved to Westmoreland eventually having three daughters. In 1914 William Crewdson went to war, serving in Burma where Cicely joined him in 1915. She returned home in 1916, William in 1919. After the war Cicely’s interests turned more and more to flowering plants, particularly alpines, which she grew in her garden at Helme Lodge, Kendal. In 1931 she had an article published in <i>‘Popular Gardening’</i> and thereafter produced a series of articles in various Alpine Garden Society magazines, including the <i>Journal of The Scottish Rock Garden Club</i>. Her expertise developed through a lifetime correspondence with alpine specialists and she brought back seeds from her travels in Europe. Primulas were a particular speciality but she is best known for her hybrid blue poppy <i>Meconopsis crewdson</i>.
Source: 'Recollections of Cicely Maud Crewdson', unpublished family memoir in RBGE Library.
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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

Born 1863; died 1943
Alex Cowan was the grandson of Alexander Cowan, a papermaker and local benefactor of Valleyfield House, Penicuik, Midlothian. Educated at Loretto School and Cambridge University he developed a love of the flowers and ferns which grew in the gardens of Valleyfield House and his home, Dalhousie Castle as well as the family’s country seat at Logan. He acquired plants while travelling in Europe and established an important fern collection. Cowan was made a fellow of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh in 1900 and was later its President from 1937 to 1939. He was secretary of the Alpine Botanical Club between 1903 and 1924 and, reflecting his knowledge of and interest in ferns, was President of the British Pteridological Society from 1909 to 1920. In his later years he developed an interest in breeding sheep in his farms in the Pentland Hills. Following the family tradition of public service he was Provost of Penicuik Town Council for nine years and served on Midlothian County Council for forty.
Sources: R. Desmond ‘Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists and Horticulturalists’; Transactions of Botanical Society of Edinburgh obituary 1943
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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’
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