When the plant closed 18 months later, Crozier moved to Wellington where she worked for the Department of Agriculture's Dairy Division testing milk powder and cheese for export.

[6] She remained in the Department of Microbiology until 1955 to carry out research on bacteria responsible for producing brightly coloured stains in wool fleeces.

[1] From 1955 to 1962, Melva Philipson was a full-time mother and spent her spare time studying the genus Rhododendron; the gardens at Ilam, which the University of Canterbury had purchased for a new campus, had previously belonged to Edgar Stead, a rhododendron hybridist, and were filled with a wide range of species which Philipson began to study.

[1] In 1974, Philipson began to work on a PhD at the University of Canterbury, supervised by Brian Fineran, which she completed in 1977; her thesis, which involved the use of an electron microscope, was on embryology and ultrastructure.

Together, the couple produced three major joint publications and their research became the largest embryological survey of a plant genus.