Marjorie Arundel, 104; active in flora and fauna conservation worldwide

Marjorie S. Arundel, 104, who became active in flora and fauna conservation efforts worldwide and was an effective advocate of ending the illegal harvesting of bulbs in Asia Minor, died Monday at her home in The Plains, Va. The cause of death was listed as inanition, a term for exhaustion brought on by an inability to assimilate food.

Arundel, the daughter of professional gardeners, became an advisor to the Garden Club of America and the World Wildlife Fund, through which she championed conservation efforts.

In the early 1980s, she was particularly concerned with the illegal trade of bulbs, such as cyclamens. “People were digging plants up on hillsides in Turkey and smuggled them into Holland and reexported them labeled as bulbs that had been cultivated in legitimate growers’ places,” said Kathryn S. Fuller, a former president of the World Wildlife Fund.

Arundel worked to bring government and industry oversight to the bulb trade, traveling several times to the Netherlands and lobbying growers and Dutch officials. “Through her effort, all major growers took on their responsibilities very seriously,” said Fuller, board chairman of the Ford Foundation.

The daughter of English immigrants, Marjorie Sale Arundel was born in Mason City, Iowa. After attending Grinnell College in Iowa, she was briefly a reporter in Chicago and met her husband, Russell M. Arundel, a journalist who became an executive with the Pepsi-Cola Bottling Co.

They moved to the Washington, D.C., area in the mid-1930s, and in the late ‘40s settled on Wildcat Mountain Farm, a 600-acre property in The Plains. She cultivated gardens of roses, herbs popular in medieval times and plants mentioned in the Bible.