He will be best remembered as an ardent and successful conservationist, a collector of superb specimens for his editorial work, but perhaps above all for firing the enthusiasm of many amateur botanists particularly in Africa to emulate his own magnificent results. He had at first sight an austere military air, caught to perfection by his Belgian colleague Prof. J. Leonard (a co-founder of Association poor l'Étude Taxonomique de 1a Flore d'Afrique Tropicale ) - to translate his comments would spoil them -"comme c'était ma première visite à Kew il eut la délicate attention de venir me chercher à la gare de Victoria à Londres. Je vis un homme sérieux très droit que me fit immédiatement penser à un officier anglais de l'armée britannique des Indes. Mais sous cet aspect un peu sévère je découvris rapidement un caractère particulièrement aimable."

Edgar was born near Frome in Somerset on 24 May 1906, His father George Bertram Milne-Redhead Redhead was a keen gardener and his grandfather Richard a great traveler seed collector and Fellow of the Linnean Society, had established a fine garden at Holden Clough near Clitheroe. His mother Agnes was interested in classical music and croquet and, after the death of Edgar's elder sister Rosamund at only 16, developed a strongly protective manner towards him. Edgar's early schooling was at the o1d Ryde preparatory school in Bournemouth. In 1920 the family moved to Cheltenham enabling him to attend the college as a dayboy and to enjoy the fine countryside

He went up to Gonville and Caius College Cambridge in 1925 and read Natural Sciences, taking a particular interest in botany after meeting the legendary Humphrey Gilbert-Carter and gaining a half-blue for rifle shooting. Examinations however, wore not his forte and rather than take Part 11 of the Tripos he applied for a post at Kew. No posts being available he accepted an unpaid position for several months. A terse announcement in the Bulletin of miscellaneous information Kew records that in 1929 C B. Hubbard and E, Milne-Redhead had been appointed Temporary Subassistant in the Herbarioum - there were no flattering titles for the lower ranks in those days! For a year he worked successively on plants d Europe, Canada Fiji and elsewhere; then a remarkable opportunity occurred in Much 1930. The then Director of Kew Sir Arthur Hill, was asked by the Colonial Office to suggest a botanist to assist with an aerial survey of what is now Zambia and offered to second Edgar to the scheme. The offer was eagerly accepted and he spent four and half months in Mwimilunga District where he prepared some of the most elegant herbarium barium specimens ever to have come out of Africa. His unpublished report on the interpretation of vegetation by aerial surveys is in the library at Kew,

In 1933 he married Olive, the sister of a senior colleague Kenneth Airy Shaw. She became an excellent botanical artist and her drawings of African plants grace the work of many botanists (including one of my earliest papers). Their golden wedding was celebrated with friends at Great Horkesley She survived him until September 1997

For some years the Empire Marketing Board had funded several posts at Kew including Edgar's, but in 1935 the Board came to an end and Edgar and others joined the official Kew staff. In 1936 he succeeded John Hutchinson as head of the tropical African Section, a position he held until 1959. Leading a University Travel Club expedition to the Austrian Tyrol he gained some insight into the European mountain flora. A return to Mwinilunga was possible in 1937, thanks mostly to the hospitality of his friends Capt. and Mrs K. R. Patterson, but after four and a half months his request to stay longer in order to encompass the second half of the rainy season was refused for no obvious reason. Edgar was embittered by this ill-considered decision typical of the attitude of half-witted administrators to scientists everywhere.

The second collection was even better than the first, and it is a great pity it was not written up as a whole. Nevertheless many of the more striking new species were described in a series of contributions to Hooker's Icones Plantarum and in a series entitled African Plants in the Bulletin of miscellaneous information, Kew. The collection was kept in the basement and often missed by visiting researchers, in fact frequently hidden from them; only people judged to be good workers were given access. In my opinion it would have been preferable if the whole collection had been named up even if only to genus and the duplicates distributed. In the end decades were to pass before it was all dealt with and accessible to everyone. This collection has been one of the main sources of information for Mwinilunga District for Flora Zambesiaca. Before the war Edgar gave up quite a lot of time (unlike most of his colleagues) encouraging the student gardeners by giving talks and taking them out on botanical excursions.

Work at Kew was of course totally disrupted by the war. Edgar, who had been commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Territorial Army in 1929 and served for ten years with the 300th (Surrey) Searchlight Battalion Royal Engineers, was called up when the Air Defence services were mobilised in August 1939. He became a gunner in 1940 when the searchlight units were transferred to the Royal Artillery and in November were drafted to West Africa and attached to the Royal West African Force. Edgar rose from the rank of Captain to Temporary Major, and managed to collect a few plants and make some observations in Nigeria Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast (now Ghana).

On his return to England in early 1942 he became a Sector Searchlight Control Officer working with R.A.F. Fighter Command stationed at the R.A.F. Radar Station at East Hilt near Houghton Regis on night interception of German bombers. Daylight hours were spent exploring on a bicycle around Dunstable and the nearby chalk hill flora. He also collected Hemiptera-Heteroptera, at that time very poorly known in Bedfordshire, and the results were written up by Airy Shaw. He soon made friends with local naturalists, particularly John Dony and Vie Chambers, and also with two youngsters, myself and Peter Taylor who both owe him a great deal. Peter was later to leave his engineering job to join him at Kew and Edgar was instrumental in obtaining a job for me with Peter Greenway in what was then Tanganyika.

At the request of James Fisher Edgar undertook the rook census for South Bedfordshire in 1944. Luton Hoo was rich in rookeries but was the local testing ground for tanks by Commer Cars in Luton. It was definitely off Limits to everyone. Edgar decided that if he wrote to the War Office for permission by the time it had arrived the rooks would have left, so he put on his uniform and walked smartly in, receiving a salute from the sentry who did not ask him his business. Once in he was free to wander all over the area counting nests with tanks charging about the drives and tracks. He completed the task in about two hours and walked out past the sentry with no questions asked it resulted in a very big count, more nests per hectare than anywhere else in his allotted area.

When he returned to Kew after the war he soon gained the rank of Principal Scientific Officer and set out to build up the African section. He encouraged many local amateur collectors (mostly but not all colonial government officers) in Tropical Africa to send in material and most responded to his request to collect only high quality material with meticulous notes. His great success is immediately apparent to anyone working at Kew who has to compare African plants with those from other areas His standard slowly spread to all collectors on expeditions from Kew Nothing annoyed him more than a poor specimen with scrappy notes.

The Flora of West Tropical Africa had long been completed and in fact work on a new edition was shortly to begin. A Flora for the other side of the continent was mooted some years before the war and Edgar was instrumental in 1949 in initiating the Colonial Office programme for such a project with provisions built in for a number of major expeditions. This vast undertaking was supposed to be finished in 20 years, but is still far from completion. Edgar was the main editor until his retirement. His first co-editor was the Keeper of the Herbarium, W.B.Turrill, who thought a species could be written up in 10 minutes whereas a week is nearer the mark. Hubbard followed Turrill, and in 1965 Roger Polhill, who continued alone after Edgar's retirement.

It is equally true of both professional and amateur botanists that they are associations of friends, and the founding of A. E. T. F..A .T. in 1949 by Edgar, together with Arthur Exell of the British Museum and Jean Léonard of Brussells, was from the first an informal organisatlon of friends which has been of immense importance to students of African botany. It still flourishes, and membership has grown over twenty fold but the informality of the small band of original friends still to some extent prevails

In 1956 Edgar and Peter Taylor undertook an eight month collecting expedition to East Africa spending most of their time in Songea District in southernmost Tanzania, an area where only a very few small collections had been made. Their collaboration resulted in 5000 quite perfectly prepared gatherings of plants, mostly with many duplicates, which added immensely to the knowledge of East African plants

In 1959 Edgar became Deputy Keeper of the Herbarium and editor of the Kew bulletin (the channel for publication of most scientific work at Kew), posts he retained until his retirement in 1971. He was very disappointed not to get the post of Keeper (for which he was ideally suited) -it went instead to C E Hubbard who had come into scientific work from the gardens and was academically unqualified.

Edgar had long been deeply involved in various aspects of conservation, being an Associate of the Royal Society for Nature Conservation from 1948 and on the Standing Committee of "The Countryside in 1970", the third of a series of conferences supported by the Duke of Edinburgh and the then Prime Minister Edward Heath, to assess land use and environmental responsibilities. One of his last successes at Kew was to persuade the new Director, Prof. Heslop-Harrison, to set up a conservation unit at Kew. This was achieved in 1972 in time for Kew to participate in the first meeting of the Convention for International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) (in Washington in 973). Kew has been concerned with conservation ever since.

The retirement dinner for Edgar was a very well attended affair with hand-painted menus by Pat Halliday. I think he was pleased to be going and looking forward to having time for other interests, which was fortunately vouchsafed him.

He had of course always been deeply interested in British botany, and participated fully in the mapping schemes which resulted in the Atlas of the British flora in 1962. He joined the B. S. B I in 1929 and was on the Council as early as 1939 and at various other times, 1946~1950, 1951-1955 and again in 1957. He served on the Development Committee (later Development and Rules) from 1947-1967 being secretary in 1950, also on the Field Work Committee (from 1947), Maps Committee (1952-1965), Records Committee (1966-1967) and Conservation Committee (1952-1955), serving as its chairman for over 10 years. This committee was very involved with the "Conservation of wild creatures and wild plants" Bill completed in 1975. Edgar represented the B.S.B.I. on the Council for Nature (1960~1969) of which he was a founder member and on the Wild Plant Protection Working Party in I965 formed to promote legislation for wild plants in Britain.

The publication and wide distribution to the public of the Code of Conduct for the Conservation of Wild Plants and the "Save our endangered wild flowers" poster were mainly due to him. He became President in 1970-1971 and was eventually rewarded with honorary membership; at the end he was the Society's oldest living member.

In 1964-1967 he was a leading campaigner on the Teesdale Appeal Committee to save the wonderful relict flora of Cow Green from being destroyed by a reservoir, and representing B.S.B.I. he founded the Cypripedium Committee in 1970 to look after the single remaining specimen of the Lady's slipper orchid. Edgar used to tell how he persuaded the rather suspicious local naturalists to a first meeting held in a Grassington pub after a good lunch. The policy agreed differed from that of the locals who had previously believed in total secrecy, but now with cooperation and wider resources available the single remaining plant was saved. the seed collected and after many years seedlings successfully raised and now planted out at the original and new sites.

Edgar also helped organise the annual scrub clearance on the Goriag Scarp to preserve other scheduled orchids. He also encouraged one of the first County Wildlife Roadside Verge Schemes. He was also instrumental in setting up the smallest nature reserve in the world to conserve Ranunculus ophloglossifolius in Gloucestershire at Badgworth, designated an S.S.S.I. in 1949. It was leased by the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves to the Gloucestershire Trust for Nature Conservation in 1962 when Edgar was Chairman of the Management Committee of that Trust (of which he was a founder member). Its success was due to him noticing that the species responded well to trampling and recommending that cattle should be allowed to disturb the ground.

His well-known survey of the native black poplar occupied him for many years, and was his chief interest - in fact he was identifying specimens until a few weeks before his death. His fondness for the tree he attributed to Gilbert-Carter (reports that Edgar searched for it as a schoolboy are incorrect but he and his father certainly made special records of it for the FIora of Gloucestershire). He published many reports on the progress of the survey which grew to national dimensions when it was taken up by the Daily Telegraph.

His involvement with societies on various aspects of conservation was endless - he seemed to collect societies like some collect stamps (in fact he did that also). They include the Bedfordshire Natural History Society, B.B.O.N.T., Cotteswold Naturalists' Field Club (Vice-President), Essex Naturalists' Trust, Gloucestershire Naturalists' Trust, Thc Kew Guild (President 1968- 1969), Kew Lawn Tennis Club 1930-1970 (of which he was secretary for many years) (Olive was ladies' champion on many occasions), Linnean Society (Vice-President 1953-54), London Natural History Society (Chairman of Nature Conservation Committee), his own local Nayland with Wissington Conservation Society (President), Norfolk Naturalists' Trust, North Gloucestershire Naturalists Society (President), Ray Society (President' 19681-971), Richmond Society, Sociètè Royale de Botanique de Belgique (Honorary Member), Somerset Naturalists' Trust, Suffolk Naturalists' Trust (Hon. Vice President) Surrey Naturalists' Trust (Regional Representative for Western Boroughs of Greater London", Regional Secretary for Richmond, Representative on the County Naturalists' Trust Committee of the Society (or the Pro motion of Nature Reserves later the Royal Society for Nature Conservation and now the Wildlife Trust.

Edgar certainly had his faults (who of any value does not), a short temper being one of them but it soon passed and he bore no grudge to its recipient, and to counter it his sense of humour was pronounced. He could be a most annoying editor both to authors and printers, suddenly deciding to alter something in page proof and not doing it properly so that a paper initially consistent in some recurring feature had some items half one way and half another; adding a last minute triviality could result in a real error and I and many authors were livid at the gratuitous mistakes in our work due to last minute fiddling, but he did bring new standards into the editing of the Kew bulletin. Little foibles could irritate - his habit of using the unit decimetre which was confusing to most people and his insistence that orbicular meant round and disk-like whereas I (and the Queen) used it for something spherical. He could be impractical; Peter Taylor was saddled with all the chores during their African trip and Edgar, who was a poor linguist, learnt no Swahili so was unable to communicate with their local staff.

He did not write a great deal himself and was, I believe, temperamentally incapable of spending the immense time needed to revise a large group or write a long floristic account when no matter how long one spends errors and omissions are inevitable. Edgar was scathing about large works produced quickly by J. Hutchinson, W. Robyns and others, rather forgetting that one just had to have these practical works. He liked to attack more circumscribed problems thoroughly and excelled at producing published accounts of small groups - that on Montiniaceae,for example, is a typical gem. This sort of work gave full scope for his meticulous nature. This did not prevent him being interested in large groups. His long-term work on Crotalarie and the Acanthaceae involved putting the herbarium material in order, sorting out the new species, which needed describing but not actually doing much of the writing. Roger Polhill who joined Edgar at Kew in 1962 (following a collecting expedition arranged by Edgar in 1961 and after working with me in Nairobi for about a year) brought the revision of African Crotalaria (some 500 species) to fruition but would be the first to acknowledge Edgar's considerable spade work

MR (as we all knew him) was awarded the Imperial Service Order in the 1967 New Year's Honours List in recognition of his distinguished service a Kew and an M B. E in 1996 for his conservation work (it should have been more). Although he did not reach what a career pusher would consider any position of importance and is not mentioned in the recent history of Kew his work on Tropical African botany assures him of an honoured place in its history and 25 species have epithets commemorating him (list below). His beautifully prepared material will be valued by workers for as long as they last. His handwriting, exceedingly elegant and completely unmistakable will join those which when found on a label pronounce the determination as reliable. We at Kew are constantly and pleasantly reminded of our old friend since we use their determinations daily. His last months were spent at Nayland near his daughter Annette and her husband Basil Harley (well known for their natural history publishing) and later living with them at Martins, Gt. Horkesley. Annette's interest in entomology had been aroused by her uncle Kenneth Airy Shaw who was at Daglingworth (where much of Kew's material was sent during the war) when she and her mother were at Cirencester during Edgar's wartime absence.

Edgar's funeral al All Saints Church Gt. Horkesley was a joyous, beautifully conducted celebration of a full life devoted to natural history The church was decorated and his coffin strewn with branches from the Black Poplar he had planted at Martins