Deni Bown is a British author, photographer, botanical horticulturist and environmentalist. She is best known for writing and illustrating The Royal Horticultural Society Encyclopedia of Herbs & Their Uses (1995), which was published internationally and remains a widely published reference work on culinary, medicinal and aromatic plants. [1] [2]
Bown began her career in publishing as a lexicographer with Laurence Urdang Associates and contributed as editor to several editions of the Collins English Dictionary. [3] [4]
Her first book, Aroids - Plants of the Arum Family (1988), was supported by the Manpower Services Commission Enterprise Allowance Scheme and the Stanley Smith Horticultural Trust UK. [5] [6] The book helped bring wider public attention to the titan arum (Amorphophallus titanum), later popularised in David Attenborough’s BBC series The Private Life of Plants. [7]
From 1999 to 2009 she developed a seven-acre garden at Yaxham Park, Norfolk, featuring culinary and medicinal herbs, rare plants, wildflower meadows and water gardens. It was featured by local media and was open to visitors through the Invitation to View programme. [8] [9]
Her conservation work began in the 1970s with Friends of the Earth and the Henry Doubleday Research Association, now Garden Organic. [10] [11]
In 2009 Bown became coordinator of a forest conservation project at IITA, taking over as manager in 2012 and becoming Head of the IITA Forest Unit (now Forest Center) in 2014. [12] She managed the 350 ha IITA Forest Reserve and an indigenous plant nursery while leading projects including the Nigerian Threatened Native Trees Project supported by the Mohammed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund. [13] She also relaunched the Ibadan Bird Club and developed a Forest School, an Ethnobotanical Garden for Yorubaland, and a West African Tree Heritage Park.
She returned to Europe in 2019 and continues to write on plants and conservation.