She studied Botany at Somerville College, Oxford, from 1912 until 1915, after her secondary education at Walthamstow Hall.
In 1919 she sailed for India and married the botanist John Macqueen Cowan the day after she arrived in Calcutta.
For the next two years she and her husband collected and classified plants and caught elephants.
Later she worked at Inverewe Garden, of which she was appointed curator by the National Trust for Scotland when her husband died in 1960, but she retired a year later as she found Inverewe lonely.
[2] Aged 87, she wrote an unpublished monograph called The Forests of Bengal.