We were saddened by the death in May of Andrew Agnew at home in Eglwys Fach.
Andrew, with his late wife Shirley, was a driving force behind the North Ceredigion Local Group since his arrival to teach Botany at the university in Aberystwyth in 1969, and he played an important role in the merger of Trusts that created today’s Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales (WTSWW).
He was a popular and active figure among local botanists for many years; the photo below shows him at 92 with rare local orchids.
Andrew came from a noble Scottish family, being great-grandson to the 8th Baronet of the Agnew Clan of Lochnaw, Galloway. He was born in India in 1929, his father being an Army Colonel. He went to Edinburgh University, before a PhD on the ecology of Juncus effusus in 1957 at Bangor, where he met Shirley. They spent some years at a college in Baghdad, which included this diary entry: “May 2 1962. Got shot up at Mandali and temporarily locked up by Iranians on disputed border. Good botany.”
After the 1963 Iraq coup, Andrew moved to the new University of Nairobi soon after Kenyan independence, and was President of the East Africa Natural History Society (1967-1969). He worked with the East African Herbarium and Kew Herbarium on the ‘Upland Kenya Wild Flowers and Ferns’ (1974), which the East Africa Natural History Society says "researchers and naturalists have for decades taken with them to the mid and high altitude parts of Kenya".
In Nairobi, Andrew was alerted to the Aberystwyth post by a visiting staff member, the late Ellis Griffiths, and his wife Ruth, who is still an active member of the North Ceredigion committee. In Aberystwyth, Andrew’s eccentric enthusiasm endeared and inspired generations of field course students, while he authored papers on the ecology of diverse vegetation systems of Britain, Kenya and New Zealand.
After retirement in the late 1990s, he continued to make trips to Kenya to complete the Third Edition of his flora by 2013, and co-authored a book on ‘The Nature of Plant Communities’ in 2019. Andrew leaves a widow, Janie, and three sons.
Figure: Andrew Agnew with Spiranthes romanzoffiana (Irish lady’s-tresses orchids) at Dyfi NNR in July 2022 (Photo: Dave Purdon)
