Born Adeline May Organe in
Chennai in 1892, she was the youngest daughter of the missionary Stephen Walker Organe. She studied Botany at
Somerville College, Oxford, from 1912 until 1915, after her secondary education at
Walthamstow Hall. She was unable to take her degree until the University of Oxford awarded degrees to women in 1920. From 1915 to 1919 she taught science subjects at
Sherborne School for Girls and at
Polam Hall School. In 1919 she sailed for India and married the botanist
John Macqueen Cowan the day after she arrived in
Calcutta. For the next two years she and her husband collected and classified plants and caught elephants. Afterwards they settled in
Edinburgh, where she was a member of the
Federation of University Women. Later she worked at
Inverewe Garden, of which she was appointed curator by the
National Trust for Scotland when her husband died in 1960, but she retired a year later as she found Inverewe lonely. Aged 87, she wrote an unpublished monograph called
The Forests of Bengal. Life with my husband in the Indian Forest Service. She was the mother of biochemist
Pauline Harrison, who also went up to Somerville College. == Publications ==