Meikle, Robert Desmond   (1923 - 2021)

Born in Newtownards, Northern Ireland on 18 May, 1923; died 8 February 2021.

Primary education: home schooling.
Secondary education: Royal Belfast Academical Institution
Tertiary education: Trinity College, Dublin.

He worked at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, from 1947 to 1983.

He became most notable for his two-volume work Flora of Cyprus (1977 and 1985), the first comprehensive contribution about the almost 1,750 plant taxa from Cyprus. Other works including parts of the encyclopedia Flora Europaea, Willows and Poplars of Great Britain and Ireland from 1984 and Garden Plants from 1963. He has written articles for the Irish Naturalists' Journal since the 1940s and he was editor of the Draft index of author abbreviations compiled at the Herbarium, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew from 1980.

He undertook a medicinal plant survey of Nigeria (Africa) in 1949-50; and collected extensively in Cyprus 1962, 1974, 1981.

He is not known to have done any plant collecting in Australia (AVH, 2021)

This botanist is denoted by the author abbreviation Meikle when citing a botanical name.

Meikle died in February 2021 at the age of 97.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Desmond_Meikle
ABRS contributors survey mid-1980s
Portrait Photo: supplied to ABRS by Meikle.