Mary Gibby obituary

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.

Appointed director of science at the RBGE in 2000, Mary transformed science at the garden, developing new partnerships with the University of Edinburgh and Scottish Natural Heritage. As a direct result of these partnerships, a number of Scottish native plants, previously threatened with extinction, are now being restored to the wild. Her work at the garden brought science and horticulture much closer and led to her supporting biological field stations and gardens around the world, including in China, Bhutan, South Africa and Socotra in Yemen.

She was committed to education in its widest sense, acknowledging the need for scientists to engage with the general public. Her PhD students have gone on to key positions in Britain and abroad.

Born in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, to Sheila (nee Bickerton), a former secretary, and Edgar Ambrose, a teacher, Mary grew up in the village of Greysouthen, on the edge of the Lake District, where she acquired a lifelong love of mountains and nature. She earned a first-class degree in botany at Leeds University, followed by a PhD in genetics from Liverpool. Her professional career began in 1975 at the Natural History Museum, London, where she became assistant keeper of botany, and remained until taking up the Edinburgh post.

In addition, Mary was actively involved in Britain’s inland waterways as the owner of Swan, a historic, 72ft working narrowboat. She was a founding member in 1978 of the boat community at Battlebridge Basin in north London and a director of the London Narrow Boat Company. She plied thousands of miles of Britain’s canals and rivers, making many friendships and working to defend these historic transport arteries for their contribution to leisure, commerce and habitats for flora and fauna.

Her first marriage, to Mike Gibby, a fellow botany student at Liverpool, ended in divorce. She is survived by her husband, Janis Antonovics, whom she married in 2015; her daughter Jessica, from her marriage to John Barrett, who died in 2004; and two brothers, Ivor and me.