COCKAYNE, LEONARD (1855-1934) was born at Norton Lees, Derbyshire, the son of a merchant, and was educated at private schools, at Wesley College, Sheffield, and at Owens College, Manchester. He emigrated to Australia in 1876 and spent several years teaching. There he married (1881) Maria Maude Blakeley, of Harcourt, Victoria. In 1880 Cockayne came to New Zealand, and was employed for a year on the staff of the Tokomairiro Grammar School. Having a bent for botany and natural history, he became interested in New Zealand plant life, and when he took up farming in Canterbury, he devoted much attention to the cultivation of trees and shrubs and the reclamation of sand dunes. Between 1887 and 1903 he conducted a private experimental station for research in the flora of New Zealand, and made botanical explorations of various parts of the Dominion and the Antarctic and Chatham islands. From 1906 he was engaged by the Lands Department making reports on the reclamation of sand dunes, on Kapiti island, the Waipoua forest, Tongariro National Park, and Stewart island.

As early as 1903 Cockayne's work attracted the recognition of learned societies abroad. In that year he received the honorary doctorate of philosophy of Munich University. In 1905 he was elected honorary corresponding member of the Botanic Society of Edinburgh, in 1910 a fellow of the Linnaean Society, and in 1912 of the Royal Society. He received the Hector medal and prize for botany in 1912 and the Hutton medal in 1914; was president of the New Zealand Institute (1918-19) and an original fellow (1919); and the first honorary member of the Philosophical Institute of Canterbury (1923). Cockayne was a member of the royal commission on forestry (1913); of the Cawthron commission (1919); of the pastoral commission (1920); of the Kapiti island board and the Christchurch domain board, and a governor of the Cawthron Institute and of the New Zealand Institute.

In 1916 he was appointed to carry out researches regarding mountain pastures, and in the following year he investigated the causes of yellow leaf in flax. From 1922 he was engaged in an economic study of forests. His contributions to the study of ecology were recognised abroad by honorary membership of such bodies as the Plant-Geographical Society of Sweden (1927), the Botanical Society of America (1927) and the Forestry Society of Finland (1926). The Royal Society in 1928 awarded him the Darwin medal, the first to be awarded to a scientist in the Southern hemisphere. Cockayne received the Mueller medal from the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science. He placed the city of Wellington under a debt of gratitude to him by the creation of the Otari plant reserve. In 1929 he was awarded the C.M.G. Cockayne's publications include: New Zealand Plants and their Story (1910); The Vegetation of New Zealand (1921); The Cultivation of New Zealand Plants (1923); numerous official reports, and about 120 shorter papers and memoirs on floristic, ecological and economic botany, experimental morphology of plants, evolution, plant distribution and life history. He collaborated with E. Phillips Turner in New Zealand Trees (1928).

Cockayne died on 8 Jul 1934 and was interred in the Otari reserve. His son, ALFRED HYDE COCKAYNE (1880-) became Director of Agriculture.

App. H.R., passim; Trans. N.Z. Inst.; Cockayne, op. cit.; The Dominion and Evening Post, 9 Jul 1934.

Reference: Volume 1, page 100

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