Frances Margaret Leighton

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.

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.

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.

On retirement, and with two of their three children living in Australia, William and Frances followed and settled in Blairgowrie on the Mornington Peninsula, their home for the next 35 years.

Frances became closely involved in the welfare of people in the area, and was given to informal lectures on the seagrass ecology of Port Phillip Bay and the dangers of alien species invading the Australian coastal scrub.

With another activist she started a neighbourhood environmental group aimed at maintaining country roads and planting indigenous species along the verges.

A Cape Mercury editorial, in a lengthy report on its formation, called its committee "men of standing in the community, practical and experienced."

Amongst its members were the editor of the Daily Watchman, the District Forest Officer, some of the leading merchants, the Curator of the Botanical Gardens and a nurseryman (who was also a municipal councillor viz.