My sister, Mary Gibby, who has died aged 75, while on a field trip in the Italian alps, held the distinction of being the highest serving woman in the 350-year history of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE).
As the leading British cryptogamic botanist of her generation, she championed the study of non-flowering plants (ferns, mosses and liverworts, lichens and fungi), achieving international recognition for innovative research on the evolution of ferns using a combination of chromosome studies with molecular evidence. She also did extensive work on the evolutionary systematics of Pelargoniums. She was a former president of the British Pteridological Society and, until her death, editor of its journal, the Fern Gazette.
