Born into modest circumstances in the industrial town of Merthyr Tydfil, Vaughan came to love plants as a boy, while walking in the Brecon Beacons.
After grammar school, he entered the Victoria University of Manchester at the age of 17, to take a degree in botany.
His first post was at a schoolteacher at Hele's School, Plympton, during which he published his first paper, and resolved on a career in research.
He was an excellent teacher, meticulous and lucid, and kindly, and much in demand as an examiner of doctoral theses.
Much of Vaughan’s research was concerned with the genus Brassica, which includes many important crops, such as oilseed rape, cabbage, and mustard.
In the 1960s Vaughan’s research team used the newly developed technique of electrophoresis to study the proteins of Brassica seeds, using similarities in their properties to clarify their taxonomic relationships.
This led to the publication in 1970 of The Structure and Utilization of Oil Seeds, still the standard work on the subject.
The research for these was carried out in the library of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, not far from his home in Petersham.
As well as providing a congenial home from home, Kew provided many of the plants painted specially for the New Oxford Book of Food Plants, and was the source of the historic illustrations used for the Oxford Book of Health Foods.
These books achieved a rare synthesis of up-to-date and accessible scientific content, combined with beautiful illustrations of plants.
As awareness increases of the role of plant foods in health, these books are timely works which have established themselves as standard texts.
The New Oxford book of food plants : a guide to the fruit, vegetables, herbs and spices of the world.