Desiderata

On This Day, 215 years ago, 17th September 1810, Ellen Hutchins wrote to Dawson Turner. She covers a wide range of subjects and it has some great passages within it. Read the full letter HERE.

The letter ends with a list of 48 Confervae (at that time a genus of marine and freshwater algae) that Ellen was asking Dawson Turner to send to her. A list like this given by one botanist to another was called a Desiderata, from the Latin for things desired / wanted or needed. (Desiderata is also the title of a famous prose poem by Max Ehrmann and you can read the text of the poem HERE)

Just over half of the names on Ellen’s list are crossed out and this will have been done by Dawson Turner as he noted which specimens he had prepared to send to her. The slight puzzle is that in the last letter that Dawson Turner wrote to Ellen, on 13th September, he wrote that he had found her letter with the list of Confervae that she had wanted and had sent her all but two of them. 

The crossings out make the list difficult to read and one name has not been deciphered yet. See the photo below with the problem word underlined in red (bottom left). Do use Contact Us to give us your suggestion.

In the letter Ellen wrote that she had had ‘the care of my brothers little children while he & their Mother are from home’. This was her brother Arthur (born 1770) who was married to Matilda O’Donel and they lived at Ardnagashel, close to Ballylickey, Ellen’s home. They had five children by now, the sixth was born in 1810 and two more in 1811 and 1814.

Read the full letter of 17th September 1810 HERE.

The next letter in the correspondence from 1810 is another one written by Ellen Hutchins to Dawson Turner on 22nd September and there will be a blog post about it here on 22nd September 2025.

Madeline Hutchins

Researcher on Ellen and her great-great-grandniece

17th September 2025

Ellen Hutchins to Dawson Turner, 17 September 1810, desiderata