Professor Wardrop is well known internationally for his distinguished work on the structure and formation of the cell wall in plants, on the nature of lignification, and on the structure and development of reaction wood in angiosperms and gymnosperms. His skill with the electron microscope and with microspectrophotometry has contributed much to our understanding of how plant cell walls form, elongate, thicken and differentiate, and of how these processes influence the technical properties of wood. His recent work has been more concerned with cytological phenomena, such as the structure and arrangement of pores in the nuclear membrane.