FIELD NOTES

LILIAN SUZETTE GIBBS

by Roy Vickery

Worshipper of sunshine, flowers and all the beauties of nature, Lilian Gibbs was a lady of independent means who devoted much energy to the investigation of floras of high altitudes in different parts of the world. She presented the Museum with a complete set of her collections made between 1905 and 1914. These collections contained many new species which were described by staff at the Museum, and at least one new genus, named in her honour as Gibbsia by Alfred Barton Rendle, the then Keeper of Botany.

Miss Gibbs was born in London in 1870, and undertook two years training at the Swanley Horticultural College, before becoming a student in the Department of Botany of the Royal College of Science (now Imperial College, London) in 1901. Later she continued there as a research student, being awarded the Huxley Medal and Prize for research in Natural Science in 1910.

Her first major botanical excursion beyond the European Alps was to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1905. This was followed in 1907 by three months in Fiji, from which she returned via New Zealand, where she appears to have concentrated on the bryophyte flora, collecting four species of liverworts which were new to science. In 1910 she collected on Mt Kinabalu in Sabah (then British North Borneo), reaching the mountain's summit in February, and collecting many plants new to science. A trip to Iceland followed in 1912. By 1913 she was back again in what was then known as the East Indies, collecting plants on the Arfak Mountains of Dutch New Guinea. She is said to have been the first white person to explore some areas of the Mountains, and it was here that she collected the new genus Gibbsia, a member of the Urticaceae (Nettle family). She travelled home via Queensland and Tasmania, studying their mountain floras and collecting plants on the way.

In between her travels Miss Gibbs made her base at the Natural History Museum, a short walk from her home in Thurloe Square. She encouraged other people to work on and identify her collections, and used these contributions towards the accounts of her expeditions which she published in various botanical journals. These were praised as being 'not merely lists of species, but accounts of the vegetation and discussions on plant geography.'

In the autumn of 1921 a long-planned expedition to South America had to be abandoned, as Miss Gibbs' health suddenly deteriorated, and she seems to have spent the remainder of her life as an invalid. She died in Santa Cruz, Tenerife, in January 1925. She bequeathed her personal collections and related notes and books to the Natural History Museum, and left a sum of money to the University of London to establish a studentship for the advancement of medical research.

Various obituary-writers praised Miss Gibbs' considerable personality, her ability to organise journeys of exploration, her ability to play the role of a delightful hostess, her dogged determination and good physique, and her role as 'a keen upholder of the rights of her sex.' She was a serious and dedicated scientist, but one suspects that a major attraction of her chosen field was that it enabled her to escape from the confines within which respectable Englishwomen were expected to live.

Gibbs' specimens, some of which can also be found in the Leiden Herbarium, tend to be almost scrappy, and the information given on their labels is usually rather sparse (and difficult to read), but her intrepid travels contributed valuable material to the Museum's collections, and greatly enchanced our knowledge of the plants growing in the areas she explored.

Contact: Roy Vickery