A world-renowned gardener and photographer who worked for many years in Oxfordshire, has died, aged 81.

Alpine plants expert Valerie Finnis was a teacher for 28 years at the Waterperry Horticultural School for Women, near Wheatley.

She started her botanist life there as an 18-year-old student in 1942.

During this time, she learned how to drive a tractor and a lorry, which was used to get home-grown blackcurrants and potatoes to the Covered Market in Oxford, and crates of Waterperry apples and pears up to Covent Garden in London.

Mrs Finnis developed a passion for photography in the 1950s when she acquired her first camera from Wilhelm Schacht, the curator of the Munich Botanic Garden.

She used the same camera for 40 years, and was one of the first women in the UK to specialise in photographing plants and gardens.

In 1963, Mrs Finnis broke a record by becoming the first person to gain three awards in the same day from the Royal Horticultural Society.

Such was her expertise that in the following year she became the first woman botanist to be asked by Sir Mortimer Wheeler to lecture on flowers during a cruise around the Greek islands.

In 1966, she was invited to Holland by the British Ambassador to talk to members of the Netherlands-England Society.

She also gave a lecture to leading horticulturists at the British Embassy in Hague.

In 1970, Mrs Finnish met her husband to be, fellow gardening lover Sir David Scott, a cousin of the eighth Duke of Buccleuch.

After retiring from the Foreign Office, he had spent 40 years cultivating his spectacular garden at the Dower House of Boughton House in Northamptonshire.

Her treasured collection of alpines went with her to Dower House when they married, when she was 46 and he was 82.

He died in 1986.

She did not have children but set up a trust in memory of her husband's late and only son Merlin, who was killed in North Africa in 1941.

The trust provides grants for young gardeners who need money for projects or travel associated with their studies.