Happy St Patrick’s Day and Happy Birthday Ellen and Grace!
Three weeks ago I was in the archives at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and in the Cryptogamic Herbarium at the Natural History Museum (NHM), London on Ellen research. I had a young researcher, Grace Barrett, to help me take photographs of Ellen’s drawings of seaweed (Kew) and specimens of liverworts (NHM). The purpose of our visits was to capture any notes, dates and places that Ellen had written on the drawings and specimens that would enable me to match these to mentions in Ellen’s letters of drawings or specimens she had sent to Dawson Turner. A case of putting words and pictures together to tell Ellen’s story more fully.
I love coincidence and serendipity, so image my delight when I mentioned to Grace that Ellen’s birthday was 17th March, St Patrick’s Day, and Grace said “My birthday is 17th March”. I had already found out that Grace turns twenty this year, the age that Ellen was at the point that she defined as the start of her serious study of botany. This was the summer of 1805, when James Townsend Mackay from Trinity College Dublin travelled to west Cork, met Ellen in Ballylickey, showed her how to make specimens of seaweeds and enlisted her as a plant collector to help him in his studies. Summer 1805 was 220 years ago.
Grace, the daughter of a work friend of mine from some years ago, is studying documentary photography at University in Cardiff, and found Ellen’s story online when exploring seaweeds and coastal plants as an add-on to a project on the coastal fishing industry in South Wales. The photo above is of Grace with some of Ellen’s seaweed specimens in the Cryptogamic Herbarium at the Natural History Museum, London.
There is a strong Welsh connection in Ellen’s story. Ellen’s specimens of one genus of seaweeds (or sea plants as she and her fellow botanists called them) – Confervae – were sent by James Mackay to Lewis Dillwyn in Swansea, South Wales, as Dillwyn was preparing a significant book on them. Ellen proved very useful to Lewis Dillwyn as she found a number of Confervae species new to science and new to Britain and Ireland, which Dillwyn included in his book. When he finished his work on it, Lewis Dillwyn gave himself a holiday, and travelling with two fellow botanists, Joseph Woods and William Leach, came to Ireland and included a visit to Ellen at Ballylickey. This was in the summer of 1809.
Ellen had been very busy over the four years since James Mackay’s visit in 1805. Mackay wrote of Ellen:
‘I am a little proud of having been instrumental in setting her a going in a branch of botany in which she has made such a conspicuous figure – she had never examined nor dried a sea plant until I gave her the hint in the summer of 1805 when I had the pleasure of spending a few days with her at Ballylickey.’
Lewis Dillwyn wrote in his Journal from July 1809 that ‘I had an introductory letter to Miss Hutchins who is well known by her numerous Discoveries in Natural History.’ He was invited for breakfast and to spend the day with the Hutchins family. After breakfast:
‘I busied myself until noon in looking over a part of Miss Hutchins’s extensive and well arranged collection of algae [seaweeds and freshwater algae] etc and we then, accompanied by her younger brother [Sam] embarked on board the family pleasure boat for a sail on the bay. We landed on a rather large island called Whittie [Whiddy], the shores of which are very steep and rocky & there I gathered several marine algae which I never saw growing before.
We returned to Ballylickey and after dinner employed ourselves until 10 o’clock in examining different parts of Miss Hutchins’s extensive collections.’
Dillwyn also wrote ‘Miss Hutchins amazed me by the extent and depth of her botanical knowledge.’ And, in a letter to Dawson Turner, he wrote that he and his companions considered Ellen ‘almost the best Botanist, either Male or Female that we ever met with’. This is all quite an achievement in four years of study and by the age of 24. I think that it is very possible that Ellen had been ‘amusing herself with botany’, as she put it, for some time before 1805, but did not count it as real study as it was for herself not for others, but it does appear that her study of seaweeds began in 1805.
The photos below are of Ellen’s seaweed drawings from the volume that belonged to Dawson Turner and that is now held by the Archives at Kew Gardens. The note reads ‘I thought this beautiful species was Conferva Hookeri until Mr Dillwyn told me it was not. How very like rosea to the naked eye. Mr Dillwyn has a copy of this sketch.’ Ellen clearly made multiple copies of her drawings, or sketches as she called them. The second photo, with the consecutive page number of 98 is from the same specimen and has a date written in pencil by Ellen in the right hand bottom corner – May 31st 1809. (This is probably not visible online.)
In a letter of 4th July 1809, Ellen wrote ‘C Hookeri is a rare plant. I am not sure that any specimens I sent were distinct from rosea, but a few on one sheet in one of the last parcels, the large ones No 19 are certainly rosea. I have a drawing to send you of C Hookeri.’
Later that month, Dawson Turner wrote to Ellen:
You cannot oblige me, my dear Madam, more than by continuing to send me drawings of marine plants from fresh specimens: any whether previously figured or not, have the greatest value in my eyes: I only lament thus occupying your time, nor can your liberality, which is unexampled, prevent me from feeling on this head the regret I ought.’
In the left hand bottom corner of the second drawing below, 98, it looks as if ‘Hookeri’ has been rubbed out from the name written by Ellen. Looking at Ellen’s plant list, worked on from early in 1809 and sent to Dawson Turner in January 1812, this Conferva is still listed as No 13 and there is a note that Ellen found it ‘on C Byssoides & on rocks in Chapel Island.’ Chapel Island is just off Whiddy Island in Bantry Bay.
In the contents list for the volume of Ellen’s drawings that belonged to Dawson Turner, drawings numbered 97 and 98 are named as Callithamnion but without the second half of the binomial name that determines the species.
So, with these interesting connections made, let’s come back to my starting point – Happy St Patrick’s Day and Happy Birthday to Ellen (born 1785) and Grace (born 2005)!
Madeline Hutchins
Researcher on Ellen and her great-great-grandniece
17th March 2025
