New Zealand mycologist and head of the botany department at Otago University, New Zealand (1945-1978). Geoff Baylis was born in Palmerston North, New Zealand. His father had been an agricultural scientist, but moved into a career on the land in 1920, and Geoff Baylis thus grew up in the rural surroundings of Campbell's Bay on Auckland's North Shore. He studied botany at Auckland University College. Having been an active member of the university's Field Club, he joined an Auckland Museum expedition to the Three Kings Islands in 1934, which he revisted several times during his life. Completing his MSc thesis on the ecology of the mangrove Avicennia resinifera, in 1936 Baylis began doctoral studies at Imperial College in London with the help of a scholarship. It was during his PhD that he began to focus on mycology, looking at fungal damage in germinating peas.
Returning to Auckland in 1938 Baylis joined the Plant Diseases Division of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR). Initially he was based at the Division's Lincoln substation working on diseases of linen flax, but after war broke out joined the navy in 1940. Having trained in Britain he then served on ships escorting convoys off the coast of West Africa and across the Atlantic, and was promoted to lieutenant. Moving back to New Zealand in 1946 he took up the post of Lecturer-in-Charge in botany at the University Otago, Dunedin, where he would spend the rest of his career.
Otago then had few academics working in botany following the departure of two key staff specialising in the subject. Under Baylis the department grew, however, and established a Chair in Botany in 1952, with Baylis as its incumbent (he remained Professor until his retirement in 1978, and was thereafter Emeritus Professor). He continued his research in mycology, specialising in mycorrhizae, in particular showing the importance of the symbiotic relationship between plant roots and soil fungi in the uptake of phosphorous.
Baylis also continued to collect plants on excursions, finding in the Three Kings Islands two extremely rare species new to the flora of New Zealand: the small tree Pennantia baylisiana (Oliver) G.T.S.Baylis and the showy liane Tecomanthe speciosa W.R.B.Oliv. & J.A.Hunter, both of which had been reduced to a single surviving plant. In his younger days he was a keen mountaineer and climbed in the Southern Alps several times, and in the 1960s made expeditions to Secretary Island in the Fiordland National Park (he had been appointed to its Board in 1952).
Among his other committee and board activities, Baylis was chair of the Hellaby Indigenous Grassland Research Trust from its inception in 1959. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1961 and received its Hutton Medal in 1994. Baylis was also a founder member of the New Zealand Ecological Society, and in 1997 was elected an Associate of Honour of the Royal Horticultural Institute of New Zealand. Never married, he maintained close ties with his sister Genevieve and her family, and in 1969 bought his father's former lands as a present for his nephew. Baylis was a keen gardener, restoring and extending the woodland garden at his Edwardian home, Threave.
Sources:
P. Wardle and D. Galloway, 2004, "Geoffrey Thomas Sandford Baylis (1913-2003): obituary", New Zealand Journal of Botany, 42:.709-714.
