Mary Gibson Henry

Mary Gibson Henry ( * 1884, † 1967) was an American botanist and president of the American Horticultural Society. Your official botanical author abbreviation is " MGHenry ".

Life

Mary Gibson Henry was born in 1884 near Jenkinstown (Pennsylvania). Her mother was Susan Worrell Pepper and her father John Howard Gibson. The family were Quakers. Nursery was very common in the family and even Mary Gibson grandfather was a gardener, but she spent her childhood until 1894 in an apartment in the city center of Philadelphia without a garden.

She attended for six years from 1896-1902, the Agnes Irwin School in Philadelphia. After school, they tour the Garnd Canyon, the Colorado Rockies and eventually Europe, where they ascended the Mont Blanc. In 1909 she married the physicist John Henry Norman. Mary Gibson begins to draw orchids and the room is her soon too small, so she buys a farm in 1926 near Philadelphia.

It starts several expeditions through the western United States and Canada, and began to collect plants they also described themselves later. Your farm is rapidly becoming a botanical garden with many rare species, after her death, the garden was taken over by the Henry Foundation for Botanical Research.

Your herbarium is now kept in the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. The collected seeds from it and live plants were sent in part to the Arnold Arboretum and the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.

Mary Gibson Henry were awarded a number of awards and prizes, she was the Mungo Park Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, which awarded the Herbert Medal and Schaeffer Gold Medal. In addition, the Mount Mary Henry was named after her.

Ehrentaxone

The plant Hymenocallis henryae, a species in the genus of Spider Lily ( Hymenocallis ), was Mary Gibson Henry honor, named after her.