Frances Margaret Leighton

Frances Margaret Leighton (8 March 1909 King William's Town – 8 January 2006 Blairgowrie, Victoria) was a South African botanist and the daughter of James Leighton (1855–1930), a Scotsman and Kew horticulturist and plant collector. He settled in South Africa in 1881, and was curator of the King William's Town Botanic Garden. He is commemorated in Haworthia leightonii.

Frances was educated at Rhodes University between 1927 and 1931, and graduated with an M.Sc., subsequently joining the staff of the Bolus Herbarium in 1931 and remaining until 1947. Her primary interest was the monocots, leading to a revision of Ornithogalum (1944-5) and Agapanthus, and monographs published on the two taxa.

At the Bolus Herbarium she met William Edwyn Isaac, a young Welsh botanist, whom she married in 1936 - a union that lasted until his death in 1995. William, a marine botanist, published "Marine biological research and the South African fishing industry" in 1943, and delivered his inaugural lecture, "Plants of the Sea", before the University of Cape Town in April 1955. The couple had three children - Rhys and Glynn, twin sons born in 1937, and a daughter in 1948. Rhys won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for History for his book "The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790". Frances Leighton also taught at a school in South Africa. By the late 1950s she had become politically active and joined the Black Sash movement, one of the first white organisations to protest against Apartheid.

In 1961 the couple moved to Nairobi. William became the foundation professor of botany at the University of Nairobi on the eve of Kenya's independence, and wrote "Marine botany of the Kenya coast" in 1967. Frances embarked on a study of seagrasses of the East African coast, and volunteered to manage an adult-literacy and life-skills program for women, involving teaching in a hostel housing prostitutes.

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