Ida M. Hayward Collection

1 box containing a folder of correspondence and a scrap book.

Ida Margaret Hayward was born in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, in 1872 to a family very much connected to the cloth industry. After her father died, she and her mother went to live near her mother's family in Galashiels in the Scottish Borders where her uncles owned the woollen mills of Messrs. Sanderson.

It was noticed by one of her uncles, William Sanderson, that many of the seeds brought in with the wool imported from Australia, New Zealand and South America survived the treatment process and went on to germinate on the banks of the Tweed. Encouraged by him, Hayward set about conducting a thorough study of this alien flora. She was greatly assisted in this by George Claridge Druce (1850-1932) who helped to identify the plants Hayward collected and became the editor of what was to become their joint publication "The Adventive Flora of Tweedside" , published in 1919.

Following publication, Hayward toured the country displaying exhibits and giving presentations to such societies as the Botanical Society of Edinburgh, the Linnean Society of London, the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and the Botany Section of the British Association at Dundee in 1948. She was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society in 1910 and the Botanical Society of Edinburgh in 1913. She died in Galashiels in 1949 after a brief illness. Before her death, she donated her herbarium of adventive (alien) plants to the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, along with her scrapbook and letters relating to the Flora.

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The Ida M. Hayward Collection was arranged and catalogued in June 2011 by RBGE Archivist Leonie Paterson. The letters were in random order in a folder, so they were repackaged and arranged by correspondent, ordered chronologically where possible. There were some loose letters within the scrapbook, but it was decided to leave them where they were. Biographical information was compiled using Hayward's obituary written by William Wright Smith for the Proceedings of the Linnean Society, 1949-50, pp.105-6.