Miss Dora Stafford was admired in 1930s society gossip columns but scandalised newspaper editors with her ‘solo’ plant hunting exploits at the age of 40. Today, she is never mentioned in the official plant hunting histories. I found her name by accident on an index card scrawled by Major Stern from Highdown Gardens in Sussex. She then reappeared in my later research at RBG Kew Library and Archives in letters to Stern and Sir Arthur Hill then director of Kew. The correspondence tells the amazing story of Miss Stafford’s courage to organise a syndicate of very wealthy men to fund her 6 expeditions in southern Peru.

The next surprise was Dora’s love of climbing volcanic mountains from 9,000 to 19,000 feet  to find rare plants (Ben Nevis is only 4413 feet). A precedent was set by the mountaineering legend Annie Peck who climbed  the heights of South America pre-1914. The other advantage Miss Stafford had over her male European peers was local knowledge. Her family traded alpaca wool in the city of Arequipa to merchants in Bradford for 80 years. She described to Coster “The Peruvian farmers are my friends. They are cultured and hospitable. The Indian* guides are perfectly dependable.”

*This term was used to describe indigenous hill people of South America