British botanist who served as assistant director at the Singapore Botanic Gardens and as Professor of Tropical Botany at the University of Cambridge. Corner (known as John) was an authority on the genus Ficus and the palm family. He was also an expert on mycology and formulated the Durian Theory of the origin of flowering plants.

The son of a surgeon, Corner was born in London and educated at Rugby School. After distinguishing himself as a student at Cambridge, he was appointed Assistant Director of the Botanic Gardens in Singapore in 1929, where he was tasked with taxonomic research on tropical fungi. This included the identification of rubber pathogens and other microfungi. He remained in this position until 1941, continuing his work in the years of Japanese occupation during World War Two, when as a civil internee he was made to wear a red star on his clothing to distinguish himself as such. (Claims that he had been an informer for the Japanese were quashed in a 2000 article by D. Mabberley.) Corner developed an interesting method of making collections of plant material while in Singapore; he trained macaque monkeys to bring him fruits from trees, though he had to abandon this after one gave him a nasty bite. As well as his work on fungi, he studied the forests of the Malay Peninsula, making several forays into the swamp forests of Johor. He published many papers in the Gardens Bulletin, Straits Settlements during his time in Singapore, and the book Wayside Trees of Malaya (1940). In 1934 he married Sheila Bailey.

Leaving the Colonial Service in 1946, Corner moved to South America, where he was Principal Field Officer for Unesco at Manaus, Brazil, charged with establishing a research institute there (the venture failed, however). He returned to England in 1949 as a lecturer in taxonomy at Cambridge, later being made Professor of Tropical Botany in 1966. Soon after his return to his home country Corner published The Durian Theory, in which he brought together some of the striking characters of tropical trees (including the durian fruit) to argue he had identified the origin of flowering plants. His works The Life of Plants (1964) and The Natural History of Palms (1966) followed some years later. In retirement he published Seeds of Dicotyledons (1976), based on his studies of the microscopic structure of seeds.

Corner's interest in the botany of the Malay region and South Pacific islands continued and he led several expeditions to the area. In 1959 he visited Sarawak and in 1960-1961 collected in Papua New Guinea and North Borneo. He returned to North Borneo in 1964 with the second Royal Society Expedition to Mount Kinabalu, and in 1965 led the Royal Society Expedition to the Solomon Islands. He visited Singapore again in 1972 after spending three weeks in Bogor, Java. During these years his main interest was the classification of Asian figs, though his monograph on the subject was never published.

Corner retired in 1973 and was thereafter Professor Emeritus. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society (1955), Fellow, Sidney Sussex College (1959-1973) and was made CBE in 1971. He was awarded the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society in 1960 and the Gold Medal of the Linnean Society in 1970. Invited twice to Japan, he was given the Golden Key to the City of Yokohama and the first Japanese International Prize for Biology in 1985. A number of plant species names commemorate him, such as Bulbophyllum corneri and Thrixspermum corneri Holttum. He was married twice and had three children. One of his obituarists (T.C. Whitmore) described him as "the last of the titans (H.J. Lam, C.G.G.J. van Steenis, R.E. Holttum, P.W. Richards) who shaped tropical botany in the decades after the Second World War."

Sources:
D.J. Mabberley, 1999, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 45: 77-93
D.J. Mabberley, 2000, "A tropical botanist finally vindicated", Garden Bulletin Singapore, 52: 1-4
D.J. Mabberley, 2004, "Corner, (Edred) John Henry (1906–1996)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn:
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/63291, accessed 20 Sept 2010
T.C. Whitmore, 1996, "Obituary: Professor E.J.H. Corner", The Independent, 21 September 1996.