Jennifer Owen

Career Jennifer Bak was the daughter of Kate and Frank Alan Bak. Her father was a noted amateur ornithologist and Leicester based textile manufacturer. She studied zoology at the University of Oxford in 1955. She studied under academics such as Charles Sutherland Elton and gradudated with a first class degree. At university she met Denis Owen. They married on 12 July 1958, after graduation, and together they had two children. After her doctorate she took up teaching positions from 1962 in Makerere University, Uganda and Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone as well as Sweden. While in Africa she noted that her garden had more species of butterfly than the nearby rainforest, due to hosting the savanna species too.

On Owen's return to the department of zoology at the University of Leicester in 1971 she noticed the large number of insects in her garden in the Humberstone suburb of Leicester, so she started to record them in 1972. Her home was a four bedroom, 1920s house at 66 Scraptoft Lane.

Owens noted that her garden was in the centre of England, on the outskirts of a city, and so "a larger garden with greater structural diversity, near the coast or a large body of inland water, would have a far longer list" of inhabiting species than her own garden. followed by a later study on ichneumonids and hoverflies. Her broader results of garden monitoring were then presented in a popular book, Garden Life (1983). But after 15 years she was able to present a more complete picture in The Ecology of a Garden: The First Fifteen Years (1991), described by biologist Ken Thompson as "the most complete account of the wildlife of any garden anywhere in the world". It contained records of 2,204 species (1,782 animals and 422 plants) recorded from the garden.

A gardener crowds together in one place a far greater diversity of plants than is ever found in one place in the wild. Even in tropical rainforest an area equivalent to a typical garden would not contain so many different plant species.|source =Jennifer Owen She discovered in her garden six species of parasitic wasps (Ichneumonidae) previously unknown to science.

In 2010 Owen was awarded the Royal Horticultural Society's Veitch Memorial Medal for outstanding contribution to the advancement and improvement of the science and practice of horticulture and the British Ecological Society's Ecological Engagement Award.

Personal life Owen had a son and a daughter with Denis Owen. They divorced in 1994. In the 1980s she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and she was a wheelchair user in later life. She died on 8 November 2015 and is interred at Scraptoft Natural Burial Ground.