New Zealand pteridologist and authority on the ferns of New Caledonia and Fiji. Born at Westport, Garth Brownlie grew up in the coal-mining settlement of Denniston and trained as a teacher in Christchurch at the end of the 1930s. After beginning his teaching career he was called up and served from 1941-1945 in the Pacific. His World War Two service took him to Fiji, New Caledonia and Green Island in the Solomons, and also saw him contract malaria.
Having begun a part-time arts course at Canterbury University College during his teacher training, Brownlie took the opportunity to return after the war, switching to a full-time science course. He achieved his BSc in 1948 and his master's degree in 1950 with a thesis on the embryogeny of four species of Podocarpus. Following this he was appointed assistant lecturer in botany at Canterbury in 1951 (promoted to lecturer in 1955 and senior lecturer in 1961). About this time he embarked on an ambitious research theme, a cyto-taxonomic investigation of the New Zealand ferns, hoping to cover nearly every native species. In this work he collaborated with Professor Irene Manton of Leeds University and by 1965 he had examined about three-quarters of the country's fern flora, publishing chromosome counts in several papers. Among his discoveries were hexaploidy in Asplenium trichomanes and eccentric numbers in Hymenophyllum or Lindsea.
Brownlie married Jean Stevenson in 1956 and they spent eight months in Europe in 1957-1958, where Brownlie spent time at Kew Herbarium as well as visiting Manton in Leeds and the Natural History Museum in Stockholm. At Kew one of the subjects he gave his attention to was the small filmy ferns of New Caledonia, Samoa, Fiji and Lord Howe Island, and back in Christchurch he began to examine the ferns of Pitcairn Island. The 1960s saw Brownlie's research look mainly at the ferns of New Caledonia, but he also published work on the biogeographical relations of ferns in New Zealand.
Brownlie travelled to New Caledonia in 1961, 1962 and 1963 in preparation for writing the fern volume of a French-published flora of New Caledonia. He also visited Paris in 1966 on an Erskine Fellowship in relation to the work, which was published in 1969 and described 301 species. He went on to complete a pteridophyte flora of Fiji (1977), entailing extensive fieldwork on the islands in 1968, 1969, 1970 and 1971. In 1971 he took his family with him, sending the three Brownlie children to school in Suva. An authority on Pacific ferns by this time, in 1970 he was awarded a DSc. After his death at the early age of 66 his herbarium was incorporated into the Botany Division of New Zealand's Department for Scientific and Industrial Research (CHR).
Sources:
E.J. Godley, 2000, "Biographical Notes (39): Garth Brownlie (1920-1986)", New Zealand Botanical Society Newsletter, 61(September): 26-28.
