British botanist and field naturalist. Gibbs was based at the British Museum (Natural History) in London but spent a great part of her career botanising in various parts of the world, encouraging others to identify and describe the collections she made. She was an authority on montane vegetation.
Gibbs was born in London and trained at Swanley Horticultural College (1899-1901) before enrolling at the Royal College of Science, South Kensington (now Imperial College, London) to study botany. She spent her holidays collecting plants in the European Alps and North Africa, and in 1905 visited Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) with the British Association. Continuing to undertake postgraduate research in London she investigated the seeds of the Alsinoidae (Caryophyllaceae), and in 1907 made an expedition to Fiji. Here she explored high altitude flora on the northern slopes of the Mount Victoria range.
Gibbs visited New Zealand on her way home from Fiji, concentrating on the country's bryophyte flora. Travelling from Auckland to Bluff she collected in the Waitakere Ranges, and discovered four new species of liverwort. She met Donald Petrie in Auckland, who recommended she collect at Mount Te Aroha. She also collected with F.G. Gibbs in the Maitai Valley and on Dun Mountain, and with guide Harry Birley at Mounts Bonpland and Earnslaw. Although enamoured by the flora she encountered there, Gibbs was not impressed by the destruction of forests in New Zealand, where stumps and grassland for grazing was taking over the landscape. She reported on this on her return to England (in the Gardener's Chronicle, 1908 and 1909): "The results of deforestation everywhere to be witnessed in the country between Auckland and the Bluff were such as to create an impression as painful as it was indelible," she wrote. "Past and present evidences of the destruction haunt me everywhere, from the barren plains and barren hills of the older 'settled' districts in the one case, to the miles of blackened tree-stumps, even on much-advertised tourist routes, in the other."
In 1910 Gibbs was awarded the Huxley Medal and Prize for research in natural science. In the same year she visited British North Borneo (Sabah), where she climbed Mt. Kinbalu, and in 1912 collected plants in Iceland. In 1913 she was in the Arfak Mountains, Dutch New Guinea, from whence she travelled to Queensland, gathering specimens in the Bellenden-Ker Range in 1914. She then went on to Tasmania, departing for home in 1915.
After falling ill in 1921, Gibbs had to abandon her next planned expedition, which was to have been to South America. She died at Santa Cruz on Tenerife in 1925 and was buried there. The genus Gibbsia Rendle (Urticaceae) and the moss species Calobryum gibbsiae Steph. and Lepidozia gibbsiana Steph. were named in her honour. Miss Gibb's Bamboo (Racemobambos gibbsiae (Stapf) Holttum) also commemorates her. Gibbs was one of the first women to be elected FLS (1905) and to join the Microscopial Society (1910). She became a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1919. A characterful woman, obituarists noted her hostessing skills and feminist ideals. While an inveterate traveller and serious scientist, her plant specimens are somewhat scrappy with difficult-to-read labels. She nevertheless made an important contribution to the knowledge of plants in the places she visited.
Sources:
L. Digby, 1925, Proceedings of the Linnean Society, 1924-1925: 72
E.J. Godley, 2004, "Biographical Notes (55): Lilian Suzette Gibbs (1870-1925) and Harry Birley (c.1863-1924)", New Zealand Botanical Society Newsletter, 77(September): 22-23
A.B. Rendle, 1925, "Obituary. Lilian Suzette Gibbs, Journal of Botany, 63: 116-117
R. Vickery, 1999, "Field Notes: Lilian Suzette Gibbs", Plant Cuttings, 3:
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/departments/botany/news-events/newsletter/archive/issue3/fieldnotes/index.html, accessed 20 July 2010.
