Jayne Vanessa Armstrong (

fl. ''Floruit'' (; abbreviated fl. or occasionally flor.; from Latin for "they flourished") denotes a date or period during which a person was known to have been alive or active. In English, the unabbreviated word may also be used as a noun indicatin ...

1996) is a British

botanist Botany, also called , plant biology or phytology, is the science of plant life and a branch of biology. A botanist, plant scientist or phytologist is a scientist who specialises in this field. The term "botany" comes from the Ancient Greek wo ...

who challenged the two-species taxonomy of British

elms Elms are deciduous and semi-deciduous trees comprising the flowering plant genus ''Ulmus'' in the plant family Ulmaceae. They are distributed over most of the Northern Hemisphere, inhabiting the temperate and tropical-montane regions of Nor ...

proposed by fellow

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

alumnus Alumni (singular: alumnus (masculine) or alumna (feminine)) are former students of a school, college, or university who have either attended or graduated in some fashion from the institution. The feminine plural alumnae is sometimes used for grou ...

Richard Hook Richens Richard Hook Richens (1919–1984) was a botanist and an early researcher in Computational Linguistics. Botany R. H. Richens was the Director of the Commonwealth Bureau of Plant Breeding and Genetics (part of the Commonwealth Agricultural Bure ...

in 1984.Richens, R. H. (1984). ''Elm''. Cambridge University Press. Armstrong in her Ph.D. thesis proposed a classification featuring 40

species In biology, a species is the basic unit of classification and a taxonomic rank of an organism, as well as a unit of biodiversity. A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate s ...

subspecies In biological classification, subspecies is a rank below species, used for populations that live in different areas and vary in size, shape, or other physical characteristics (morphology), but that can successfully interbreed. Not all species ...

and

microspecies In biology, a species complex is a group of closely related organisms that are so similar in appearance and other features that the boundaries between them are often unclear. The taxa in the complex may be able to hybridize readily with each oth ...

. An introduction to her work was later published in the

Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society The ''Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society'' is a scientific journal publishing original papers relating to the taxonomy of all plant groups and fungi, including anatomy, biosystematics, cytology, ecology, ethnobotany, electron microscopy, mo ...

Armstrong, J. V. & Sell, P. D. (1996). A revision of the British elms (Ulmus L., Ulmaceae): the historical background. ''Bot. J. Linn. Soc.'' 120: 39-50. as part of a series which was not forthcoming. However, her classification formed the basis of that adopted by Sell and Murrell in their ''Flora of Great Britain and Ireland'', published in 2018.Sell, P. & Murrell, G. (2018). ''Flora of Great Britain and Ireland''. Volume 1. Lycopodiaceae – Salicaceae. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Publications

*Armstrong, J. V. & Sell, P. D. (1996). A revision of the British elms (Ulmus L., Ulmaceae): the historical background. ''Bot. J. Linn. Soc''. 120: 39–50. *Armstrong, J, Gibbs, J, Webber, J, and Brasier, C. 1997. Elm Workshop Proceedings. ''Elm Newsletter No. 1.'' April 1997. The Conservation Foundation.

References

Armstrong J. V. Living people Women botanists 20th-century British women scientists Year of birth missing (living people) Place of birth missing (living people) {{UK-botanist-stub