Leonard Cockayne

Leonard Cockayne

… "remarkable" is too weak a word for a plant population which can boast of including amongst its members the largest buttercup in the world, a forget-me-not with leaves as big as those of rhubarb, a speedwell 40 ft in height, the smallest member of the pine-tree family, tree-like daisies, arborescent lillies, plants of the carrot family with stiff leaves sharp as bayonets, mosses more than a foot tall, a brown seaweed hundreds of feet in length, and those strange anomalies of the plant world, the vegetable sheep.

Leonard Cockayne marvels at New Zealand’s plant life in his 1910 book New Zealand Plants and Their Story, pp18-19 (NB: Vegetable sheep are species of Raoulia, a compact, rounded, cushion-like plant with white flowers and hairy leaves, which from a distance can look like sheep)

While Leonard Cockayne was preceeded by many eminent botantists, including Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, William Colenso, and Thomas Kirk and Thomas Cheeseman, Cockayne’s work was pioneering and marked the transition between the collecting and cataloguing phase of botany and a more holistic study of plants and their environment.

Leonard Cockayne was born in England and arrived in New Zealand in 1881, after four years teaching in Australia. An independent income following his father’s death gave Cockayne the means to leave his job as a schoolteacher to  pursue his interest in botany and horticulture. In 1892, he purchased several acres of land in the sand dunes near New Brighton, in Christchurch. Here he established an experimental garden, Tarata, in which he grew and studied thousands of seedlings of native and exotic plants, carefully noting the best conditions for germination and growth of each species.

With money from his father’s will running low, Cockayne petitioned the government to appoint him government botanist. He was unsuccessful, but was able to secure some financial support for his botanical surveys. Cockayne sold Tarata and began to travel extensively throughout New Zealand and its offshore and subantarctic islands, studying the effects of different environments on plants and publishing his results. In some of his most significant work, he surveyed and described the different plant regions of New Zealand (eg, alpine, sub-alpine, lowland), noting the characteristics of plants particular to each region and cataloguing the successional changes in vegetation. His work on New Zealand’s hybrid plants – crosses between two different species – was also pioneering, and Cockayne’s research led him to promote hybridisation as a driving force in evolution.

In 1914, Cockayne moved to Wellington, where he instigated the establishment of the Otari Open Air Native Plant Museum in Wilton, a national collection of native plants which now contains some 1200 species and cultivars. This popular recreational reserve and valuable scientific resource, as well as Cockayne’s many scientific articles and books, commemorate his role as a leading botantist and New Zealand’s pioneer ecologist.

Leonard Cockayne’s son Alfred, born in 1880, also became a botanist, concentrating on New Zealand grasslands and their role in animal production. In 1936, he rose to the position of director-general of agriculture in which role he set up the Department of Agriculture’s Animal Research Division.

By Rebecca Priestley

Medals and awards

FLS 1910, FRS 1912, FNZI 1919, Hector Medal 1913, Hutton Medal 1914, Darwin Medal 1928, CMG 1929

Further reading 

Leonard Cockayne biography – Dictionary of New Zealand Biography website

Leonard Cockayne, New Zealand Plants and Their Story, (fourth ed), RE Owen, Government Printer, 1967

49 articles written or co-authored by Cockayne, published in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, are available online:

Articles by Leonard Cockayne – Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand website

Permission of the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga O Aotearoa, must be obtained before any reuse of this image

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