Showing 255 results

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbm.1947.0009

Born Perthshire 1927, died Ross-shire 2007
Douglas Henderson graduated BSc in botany from Edinburgh University in 1948, joining the civil service as a scientific officer in the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries that year. He moved to the Royal Botanic Garden as a senior scientific officer in 1951 and was head of the non-flowering plant collections until 1970. He was library supervisor from 1961 to 1970 and also lectured in botany and plant physiology. A mycologist by training, he was involved in the start of the British Fungus Flora project and co-authored a book on British Rust Fungi. He became an authority on British flora, especially the plants of the Highlands. Douglas Henderson was appointed Regius Keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden in 1970. His time in office saw extensive developments in the Garden including completion of new glasshouses, a new alpine area and an expanded range of exhibition houses. The wider estate also grew with the acquisition of Dawyck Botanic Garden in Peeblesshire. During his period of office herbarium specimens increased by 250,000 to 1.8 million, including collections from an expanding programme of worldwide botanical explorations. And there was a rapid expansion of the library with a doubling of stock to 75,000 volumes and a developing international reputation; he personally led the introduction of the first electron microscope. Inverleith House in the centre of the gardens was re-opened as an exhibition space and Henderson was active in encouraging public engagement and growing educational links. Towards the end of Henderson’s term of office in 1986 the Royal Botanic Garden gained new status as a non-departmental public body accountable to a Board of Trustees. Douglas Henderson was awarded the CBE in 1985 and retired in 1987, moving to Wester Ross where initially he took on the role of administrator of the National Trust gardens at Inverewe.
Sources: Deni Bown, ‘4 Gardens in One’; obituary folder
D.W. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/douglas-henderson-twelfth-regius-keeper-of-the-royal-botanic-garden-edinburgh-760076.html

Hemsley began working at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in1860 as an Improver before becoming their Herbarium's Assistant for India and then the Keeper of Kew's Herbarium and Library.

Ida Margaret Hayward was born in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, in 1872 to a family very much connected to the cloth industry. After her father died, she and her mother went to live near her mother's family in Galashiels in the Scottish Borders where her uncles owned the woollen mills of Messrs. Sanderson.
It was noticed by one of her uncles, William Sanderson, that many of the seeds brought in with the wool imported from Australia, New Zealand and South America survived the treatment process and went on to germinate on the banks of the Tweed. Encouraged by him, Hayward set about conducting a thorough study of this alien flora. She was greatly assisted in this by George Claridge Druce (1850-1932) who helped to identify the plants Hayward collected and became the editor of what was to become their joint publication "The Adventive Flora of Tweedside", published in 1919.
Following publication, Hayward toured the country displaying exhibits and giving presentations to such societies as the Botanical Society of Edinburgh, the Linnean Society of London, the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and the Botany Section of the British Association at Dundee in 1948. She was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society in 1910 and the Botanical Society of Edinburgh in 1913. She died in Galashiels in 1949 after a brief illness. Before her death, she donated her herbarium of adventive (alien) plants to the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, along with her scrapbook and letters relating to the Flora.