New Zealand forester and bryologist. Kenneth Allison was born at Wanganui, where his grandfather, a Scottish emigrant, had settled some half a century earlier. The Allison family farmed sheep and cattle at Wanganui and Kenneth Allison, the eldest of three boys, showed an interest in plants from an early age. He hoped when he joined up to serve in the First World War that he would be able to see more of the world and its plants, and indeed, as a lieutenant in the Rifle Brigade he had the opportunity to collect plants in Europe between 1914 and 1919.

After returning to New Zealand he married Olive May Lawrie and the couple made their home in the Whirinaki Valley, 30 miles from Rotorua. However, the cultivation of the wild lands they had been leased by the government proved expensive and Allison abandoned it in 1925 for a position in the Rotorua nursery of the New Zealand Forest Service. He went on to work for a private nursery and subsequently took charge of a plantation at Atiamuri for Timber Investment Plantations Ltd. The Depression of the 1930s forced him to look elsewhere for work once more and he then joined the company Perpetual Forests, planting trees near Taupo, which he described as the hardest work he had ever tackled: "...you had to be able to plant 2,000 trees per day, as there was always someone to replace you if you could not keep up," he explained in his reminiscences.

Good fortune saw him return to a position with the Forest Service after this, where he was in charge of the tree nursery at Wairapukao camp and later, the entire station, including a thousand-acre plantation. Following on from this he was transferred to the new Rotoehu Forest, and then Waipoua Forest in the 1940s. Following the Second World War he was given the chance to establish new forests in Otago and moved with his family to Dunedin in 1945. He remained District Ranger for the Dunedin District until his retirement in 1959.

All the while, Allison enthusiastically collected mosses and other plants, which he identified with the help of T.F. Cheeseman and H.B. Matthews. In the early 1920s he had mostly gathered orchids and ferns. His interest in mosses was sparked in 1927 when he found Buxbaumia aphylla while cutting firebreaks. The botanist Harry Carse advised him to send it to G.O.K. Sainsbury for more information; Sainsbury became an informative correspondent. When he found another leafless moss, Epemeropsis, Allison was hooked and assiduously began to amass bryophytes, which he continued to send to Sainsbury, and in time published his first paper on the subject in the Transactions of the Royal Society of New Zealand. Allison also struck up a fruitful correspondence with E.A. Hodgson, who identified hepatics for him.

By the time Allison moved to Dunedin in 1945 he was in possession of 800 packets of moss and 800 of hepatics, mostly from the central North Island and Waipoua Forest. Within five years of reaching Otago he had increased his collection to number 5,000 hepatics and 3,500 mosses, and published three more papers in the Royal Society’s Transactions before 1952, in which he described three new species. He was active in publishing again in the 1960s, when he described 10 new taxa. Around this time he succeeded Sainsbury as New Zealand’s foremost bryologist and as well as continuing to collect specimens, he organised and catalogued herbaria at Canterbury Museum and the University of Otago (the J. Buchanan and T. Kirk collections). His final works, both introductory texts on mosses and liverworts, were published in the 1970s following a collaboration with John Child.

Allison died at Dunedin in 1976 and his collection of 10,300 moss packets and 7,900 hepatics went to the Botany Division of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research at Lincoln (CHR) the preceding year. Some lichens and flowering plants were also given to Dr H.H. Allan of DSIRBotany Division. Allison was a member of the New Zealand Institute of Foresters, the Otago Branch of the Royal Society of New Zealand, the New Zealand Ecological Society and was associated with the Department of Botany at the University of Otago.

Sources: B.H. MacMillan, 1978, New Zealand Journal of Botany, 16: 169-172.