Clark, Joan Wendoline

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.

Botanist