Professor’s Wife Is Rhododendron Expert

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31780, 10 September 1968, Page 2

Professor’s Wife Is Rhododendron Expert

Mrs W. R. Philipson, wife of the professor of botany at the University of Canterbury, is a taxonomist in her own right in the botany division of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research at Lincoln and an expert on rhododendrons. In the last four months this specialty has taken her to all the notable collections in Britain, the United States, and Europe, and on an expedition with her husband into the highlands of New Guinea. Mrs Philipson was working in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, which has the largest herbarium and living collections of rhododendrons, when a colleague mentioned that Sir Bernard Fefrgusson had asked him to supervise the arrival of a plant collection from Christchurch. Rhododendrons and azaleas 'rom the University of Canterbury at Ham and other olants from the Christchurch City Council were flown to the Fergusson’s garden at Auchaime, Ballantrae, Ayrshire. Sir Bernard Fergusson told Mrs Philipson of his particu-

lar interest because the original Ham rhododendrons came from three gardens nearby and that in 1925, Mr Edgar Stead gave the 14-year-old Fergusson the job of watering more plants three times a day on the Ruahine by which they were both travelling to New Zealand. “Who knows but that these may not be remote progeny of some of those,” Sir Bernard Fergusson said. From all her travels, Mrs Philipson was able to gather dried herbarium specimens and living plants to build up the Lincoln rhododendrons to the best reference collections in the southern hemisphere. “Rhododendron species (pure strains) will be lost unless such collections are preserved,” Mrs Philipson said: This was so now because such rhododendron areas as China were virtually closed to botanists. Because of this, the American Rhododendron Species Foundation had built up fine collections and was arranging for speciments to be sent to the botany division in New Zealand.