Heritage on Your Doorstep Competition

Today, Sunday 23rd August at 5pm is the deadline for entries to be sent by email for our competition. With the focus on natural heritage on your doorstep, we challenge you to paint or photograph a wildflower, moss, lichen or seaweed, and/or write a poem or a piece of prose (1000 words max) inspired by the nature on your doorstep, or by the story of Ellen Hutchins, botanist and botanical artist of Bantry Bay.

The picture above shows a moment in the Ellen Hutchins Festival in 2016, when lichenologist, Maria Cullen, spotted a beautiful pixie-cup lichen, Cladonia pyxidata on the doorstep of the little house we were based in for a Lichen Foray. We’d stopped for lunch, and were sitting around in the garden, when it caught Maria’s eye. Sometimes the most beautiful things can be right there, under our noses, on our doorstep, but in the ordinary flow of life they can be overlooked. We encourage you to look more closely, and value the natural heritage, including that which is, quite literally sometimes, on your doorstep.

Ellen Hutchins as a young woman in her twenties was almost entirely confined to her house and garden in Ballylickey, mostly through her role caring for her ill mother and disabled brother, and also because of her own poor health which often prevented her from getting out. Her greatest delight, when she could manage it, was getting out for a walk or up into the mountains behind where she lived on the north shore of inner Bantry Bay. She had been ‘prescribed’ botany, by a doctor who was also a family friend, as something that would give her an interesting occupation and could be done close to home. As well as going out to find and collect plants, there was the indoor element of identifying them, drying them and drawing and painting them, for when the weather was bad, or in the dark winter evenings. Ellen proved to be extremely good at finding and identifying rare plants, helped hugely by the fact that she lived on Bantry Bay which has a very rich range of habitats and plants. She was also a talented botanical artist. She specialised in non-flowering plants – mosses, lichens and seaweeds.

In Ellen’s time, she was ‘botanising’ in the early 1800s, paintings were really the only way of showing the colour and detail of a ‘new’ plant to other botanists who were not at your side when you found it in the wild. Ellen was passionate about plants and about sharing knowledge about them. She made hundreds of specimens of dried seaweeds and other plants, and of detailed and accurate watercolour drawings of seaweeds and sent these to fellow botanists. Through her, the incredibly rich botany of Bantry Bay became known to the world.

Tragically, her health deteriorated, and after just eight years of botanising, in which she had discovered many new plants, Ellen became seriously ill, and she died just before her 30th birthday.