My aunt Margaret Waddy, who has died aged 77 of a pulmonary embolism, was a horticulturist and a teacher, a quiz fan and a committed volunteer with Samaritans in Cambridge.
Margaret was born in London but her early life was spent in the Gold Coast, now Ghana, where her parents, Bernard (known as BB) Waddy, a doctor in tropical medicine, and Mary (nee Lawrence), worked for the Colonial Service. At the age of five she was sent to Britain to be educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, a Roman Catholic boarding school.
Margaret had a talent for languages. She gained a degree in classics and Italian from the University of London in 1966, and was fluent in French. After graduating she worked as an au pair and then taught at various places, including the Arts Educational School in London between 1967 and 1970.
Inspired by her father, Margaret decided to change her career path, took science A-levels, worked in laboratories and tried several times to get into medical school between 1970 and 1976. She was unsuccessful, but then combined her newfound knowledge of biology with her passion for gardening (inherited from her mother) and took a degree in horticulture at the University of Bath in 1977, graduating in 1981. At Bath she became a keen quizzer and captained the University Challenge team.
She moved to Cambridge in 1981 when she took a job propagating plants by tissue culture at the National Seed Development Organisation (which later became the Plant Breeding Institute). She also taught evening classes in horticulture at Bottisham College from 2008.
When the PBI was taken over by Monsanto in 2014, she retired from her job, but continued at Bottisham College until 2018. She was devoted to her students, many of whom kept in touch afterwards with news of their careers.
Margaret was a member of Samaritans, and for the rest of her life devoted much time and energy to volunteering – not only as a listener, but also helping with recruitment and training. She was briefly director of the Cambridge branch.
In recent years she also trained as a Cambridge guide, and had just started taking tours in English and in French when the Covid pandemic arrived. She was a longtime reader of the Guardian and frequent contributor of witty brief letters. She often entered and won competitions, including the prize for imagining the worst opening sentence to a book.
Her house in Cambridge had a narrow but elongated garden, which Margaret filled with shrubs, flowers and fruit trees.
She had a capacity to communicate with real warmth, based on genuine interest in people.
She is survived by four siblings and 10 nephews and nieces; another niece, Jen Lander, died in 2017.
