Every year from the age of 20 my mother, Jean Combes, who has died aged 96, recorded the time of year that four tree species – oak, ash, horse chestnut and lime – came into leaf. What started in 1947 as a personal project, driven by a simple love of nature, turned out to demonstrate with textbook clarity that the long-term trend in Britain has been for spring to start much earlier than it used to. Her 76-year dataset has been used by scientists in climate change modelling, and earned her national recognition in 2008 with appointment as an OBE for services to phenology, the study of periodic events in biological life cycles.
Jean’s data first came to the attention of scientists in 1995, when she read about the work of the Coventry University climate expert Tim Sparks, and contacted him about what she had been doing. Tim later described her records as “probably unique in phenological recording and, as far as we know, the longest recording by a single person anywhere in the world”.
Born in south London to Ernest Laney, an insurance salesman, and Dorothy (nee Martin), a seamstress, Jean acquired her interest in the natural world when she was evacuated to the countryside with her sister, Pauline, at the start of the second world war. First they lived in Hertfordshire and then in Sussex.
After being educated at Chichester girls grammar school she went on to work as a housing manager at various local authorities in the London area. While at Merton council she met Reg Combes, a payroll clerk, and they married in 1951.
After raising three daughters as a full-time mother, Jean completed a three-year field biology qualification at London University in 1977. This was the springboard for 25 years of teaching natural history adult education classes, first for the WEA in Surrey, then at Surrey University in Guildford and for the Field Studies Council.
Jean also undertook survey work, including 20 years of the common bird census on Ashtead common in Surrey, and was commissioned by the Local Agenda 21 Committee for Surrey to carry out a study of a proposed oil pipeline route through Surrey and Sussex, which got the go-ahead only on the basis that hundreds of rare wild daffodils identified by her were first transplanted to safety.
She was involved with a number of wildlife bodies, including on the committees of the Surrey Wildlife Trust and of the City of London body that manages Ashtead Common. After the award of her OBE there was considerable media interest in her exploits, and she appeared on The One Show in 2009 and Springwatch in 2010.
Her fine pencil drawings of tree buds, catkins and leaves were exhibited annually for 10 years at the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland. She also had a love for Scottish landscapes, literature, poetry and art, and remained interested in politics and the state of the world.
Reg died in 2006. She is survived by her daughters, Sue and me, and four grandchildren, Alex, Lewis, Joe and Jenna. Another daughter, Jenny, died in 2018.
