v: In Focus
A fresh look at wildflowers Elaine MacGillivray I was an archivist. For almost twenty years I poured over the daily intimacies of the lives of some of Scotland’s greatest thinkers; documenting and describing their personal and business letters, financial records, notebooks, lectures, drawings, paintings, maps, plans, wildflower specimen books and anything else that may have been left behind, and making these valuable and insightful records accessible to the public for research. The great privilege of working so closely with archive collections is that we are repeatedly offered the opportunity to develop knowledge and interest in a person, subject or era that otherwise may never have occurred to us to explore. Through my work, I lived vicariously through the 18th century right up into the present day, meeting along the way diplomats, scientists, artists, poets, architects, geologists, educators, storytellers, tradition bearers and botanists, many of whom were leading intellects and innovators in their fields. These encounters with people from the past have the capacity to inspire actions in the present, which can transform our perspective and understanding of our current world and our place in it. I have been influenced by so many thinkers and ideas from the past that it’s difficult to cherry-pick a favourite. Some do stand out more than others, however; one of these is the female botanist, Joan Wendoline Clark (1908-1999). Clark grew up in Kincardineshire and Sussex, was fluent in French and German, and was skilled in shorthand. A trained typist, she worked for a time at the Foreign Office in London and at the British Embassy in Paris. In the 1930s, she returned to Scotland with her Scottish husband and together they settled in Lochaber, where she remained until her death. Shortly after this, her daughter, Anna MacLean, kindly gifted Joan’s manuscript collection to the School of Scottish Studies Archives. The collection includes her correspondence and botanical research notes dating from the 1970s right up until 1999, along with three specimen books containing almost 350 pressed wildflowers collected from Onich, Ballachulish, North Uist and Glencoe in around 1976.
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