Researching Ellen
a compilation of information gathered about Ellen
Here you will find:
Information on where Ellen’s letters, specimens and drawings are held, and other primary sources for researching her life. A bibliography from the little book, Ellen Hutchins, Botanist of Bantry Bay, by Madeline Hutchins, 2019. Online articles and books containing biographical information about Ellen.
See also Ellen’s Letters for many transcripts and notes.
If you are undertaking academic research on Ellen, do please use ‘contact us’ and we will be pleased to compare resources found and to try to provide any assistance you need.
Ellen's letters, specimens and drawings: academic institutions & other organisations holding Ellen Hutchins' material
UCC, Cork, Ireland – There is an Ellen Hutchins Reading Room with display, reference and archival material available to visit by appointment. It is in the Ellen Hutchins Building of the Environmental Research Institute (ERI) at UCC in Cork City. There are also Open House sessions (often one in February on the Saturday nearest to 9th February). See the current and upcoming events page.
By arranging a visit, you have the opportunity to see the current display in the Ellen Hutchins Archives Cabinet of a drawing, three seaweed specimens on loan from the herbarium at Trinity College Dublin, letters of Ellen’s and one of her botany books.
There is a small display about letter writing in the early 1800s as the main means of communication between scientists. The Reading Room has reference and display material about botany, botanical art, the biodiversity of Bantry Bay and Ellen’s life and work.
If you are researching Ellen, you can also be given access to various other letters of Ellen’s to her brothers and books that she owned that are stored here.
The Ellen Hutchins Building is on Lee Road, Cork, with a car park. To arrange a visit (week days in term time) use Contact Us below.
National Botanic Gardens of Ireland Glasnevin, Dublin, publishers of Early observations on the flora of Southwest Ireland: Selected letters of Ellen Hutchins and Dawson Turner 1807-1814. Mitchell, M. E. (1999). Scanned versions of books mentioning Ellen are also available online on their website e.g. Flora Hibernica (Mackay, J.T. 1836). They hold a reference folder with photographs of twenty of Ellen’s watercolour drawings of seaweeds from the collection held by Kew.
Royal Botanic Gardens Kew – Library & Archives. The largest collection of Ellen’s original drawings of seaweeds is held at Kew, originally in a bound volume, British Algae. Many of her specimens were here before their move to the Natural History Museum. Kew also holds fifty letters to Ellen from botanist Dawson Turner, six letters from James Mackay of Trinity College Dublin (all these are in Ellen Hutchins Correspondence) and one letter from Ellen to William Jackson Hooker, later Director of Kew. This letter is held in Director’s Correspondence. See also Dawson Turner’s Botanical Memoranda 1800-1810 (2 vols). There are silhouettes of botanists of her time, from a collection owned by Dawson Turner, and copies of botany books, British Confervae by Lewis Dillwyn and Historia Fucorum by Dawson Turner, with Ellen’s illustrations engraved and hand coloured in them. The Historia Fucorum has the original drawings bound into the books (these belonged to Dawson Turner).
Botany Collections, Natural History Museum, London. The majority of Ellen’s specimens are in the herbarium here, including at least seventeen Type Specimens; see Online Herbaria below. (Cryptogamic specimens were moved from Kew in a reorganisation of herbaria in the 1970s.) The Library has the manuscript List of Irish Plants handwritten by Ellen, and complied by her from 1809 to 1811.
The Herbarium, Trinity College Dublin. Some of Ellen’s specimens are in TCD’s herbarium, indeed the oldest algae specimens (1805-1810) in the herbarium are Ellen’s. Letters from Ellen to James Mackay are also held in TCD’s herbarium, in the Mackay correspondence, along with letters from John Templeton and other contemporaries of Ellen’s. There is a list of 77 lichens sent by Dawson Turner to Ellen in October 1809.
Trinity College Cambridge, Wren Library. Ellen’s seventy letters to Dawson Turner are here, in bound volumes beside letters from many leading botanists of her day, in this splendid building. See Dawson Turner correspondence – descriptions of the contents of the volumes in the main series are available in the online catalogue, starting HERE.
Sheffield Museums (for listing of the items in the National Archives database) and HERE for Sheffield Museums collections page. Forty six of Ellen drawings of seaweeds from 1809-1810 are in the museum’s archives. Contact the museum to arrange a date for a visit to see them. They have found one Ellen Hutchins specimen; a Snowdrop (Galanthus nivalis).
The William and Lynda Steere Herbarium at New York Botanical Garden holds hundreds of Ellen’s specimens; seaweeds, lichens, mosses and liverworts, and two drawings of hers have been found there recently. One tiny liverwort specimen is sealed between two sheets of glass from Ellen’s microscope. See Online Herbaria below.
The Ellen’s letters page has transcriptions of Ellen’s correspondence with Dawson Turner and James Mackay.
The Ellen Hutchins Festival can provide access to archives relating to Ellen held by the Hutchins Family. These include one of Ellen’s drawings of seaweed, letters she wrote to two of her brothers (Emanuel and Samuel), and books she owned. Also some early 1800s editions and recent reprints of botany books that include Ellen’s finds, and copies of botany books she used. Use the ‘contact us’ button at the bottom of the page.
Online herbaria
The New York Botanical Garden’s CV Starr Virtual Herbarium has digitised its European seaweeds and started on other European cryptogams. This is a link to the search results of specimens collected by Ellen Hutchins and stored at the Steere Herbarium which includes Enterographa hutchinsiae and Polysiphonia fruticulosa
The Smith Herbarium: Images of the specimens from the Herbarium of Sir James Edward Smith (1759-1828) held at the Linnean Society of London which include some of Ellen’s specimens e.g. Jungermannia trichophylla.
This LINK brings up Ellen’s specimens and the letters mentioning her.
The Natural History Museum’s Data Portal can be searched on Hutchins to show specimens that have been catalogued. You can also search on Hutchins in Botany Collections for specimens HERE. Specimens cover algae (seaweeds and freshwater algae), bryophytes (mosses and liverworts), lichens, slime moulds, and diatoms.
Bibliography
from the book, Ellen Hutchins (1785-1815) Botanist of Bantry Bay by Madeline Hutchins (Published 2019)
M.E. Mitchell, Early observations on the flora of southwest Ireland
Selected letters of Ellen Hutchins and Dawson Turner 1807-1814, Occasional Papers, 12 (Glasnevin, Dublin, 1999).
L.W. Dillwyn, British Confervae, 1809 including plates 107 and 109.
G.J. Lyne, ‘Lewis Dillwyn’s visit to Waterford, Cork and Tipperary in 1809’, Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, (1986), 85-104.
W.J. Hooker, British Jungermanniae, 1812-1816, including J. Hutchinsiae.
A. Hutchins, Ellen Hutchins: a botanist, MS 47, Representative Church Body Library, Dublin (RCB).
G.J. Lyne & M.E. Mitchell, ‘A scientific tour through Munster: the travels of Joseph Woods, architect and botanist, in 1809’, North Munster Antiquarian Journal, 27 (1988), 15-61.
J.T. Mackay, ‘Systematic catalogue of rare plants found in Ireland’, Transactions of the Royal Dublin Society vol. 5, 1806, p. 121-183.
J.T. Mackay, Flora Hibernica, 1836, including Introduction p. x.
A. Secord, ‘Nature’s Treasures’, chapter in Dawson Turner A Norfolk Antiquary and his remarkable family, ed. N. Goodman, 2007
D. Turner Historia Fucorum (London, 1808-1819) including Vol. 3, Plate 1 and Vol. 4, 74. The author’s tribute to Ellen is at the end of Volume 4.
Note: free access to many of the botany books listed above is available online in the Biodiversity Heritage Library here.
Online Articles
A summary of Ellen’s life, as used in the first Wikipedia entry for her in 2015, written by Madeline Hutchins, her great-great-grandniece. READ MORE »
Ellen Hutchins – Wikipedia entry
Women’s Museum of Ireland An online museum featuring exhibits that give formal recognition to Irish women in history. The link goes to the exhibit on Ellen Hutchins.
The Story of Ellen Hutchins, Ireland’s forgotten first female botanist – by Dr Paul Bolger (UCC) and Madeline Hutchins. RTÉ Brainstorm 21 September 2022. HERE.
New finds add to the story of Ireland’s first female botanist, Ellen Hutchins – by Madeline Hutchins. Irish Heritage News, 1st January 2024. HERE.
Letters from 1812 written by noted botanist, Ellen Hutchins, explored in new podcast. Irish Heritage News 7th March 2023. HERE.
She painted seaweeds from the seashore – Ellen Hutchins (1785-1815) – talented botanical artist and Ireland’s first female botanist – by Madeline Hutchins. Article / pdf for Bantry Historical Society website under Bantry Culture & Creativity 2020. HERE.
Ellen Hutchins (1785-1815) Botanist and Artist – Archive of the Month: Church of Ireland, February 2016. Paper by John Lucey and Madeline Hutchins on the provenance and background of Alicia Hutchins’ memoir on Ellen, and including the memoir itself. (2016) The introductory piece is HERE. The full paper with the memoir (at the end of it) is HERE.
Ellen Hutchins – Ireland’s First Female Botanist. Paper by Sarah Dutton (Project coordinator in the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium), The New York Botanical Garden’s Talk Science Talk Archive January 2nd, 2015 HERE.
The Hand Lens – Ellen Hutchins: Ireland’s First Female Botanist. By Madeline Hutchins, Laura Briscoe, April 7th, 2019 HERE.
Ellen Hutchins (1785-1815) a paper by Mark Lawley (British Bryological Society). First link takes you directly to the download of the paper.
Anne Secord’s paper Nature’s Treasures (see above on Bibliography) is available HERE.
BOOKS CONTAINING BIOGRAPHICAL MATERIAL ON ELLEN HUTCHINS
(Alphabetical by author)
Bersweden, Leif. Where the Wildfowers Grow: My Botanical Journey Through Britain and Ireland. London. Holder & Stoughton 2022.
Boran, Elizabethanne; Nelson, Charles E.; Lawlor, Emer, ed. Botany & Gardens in Early Modern Ireland. Dublin. Four Courts Press, 2022. In it, Ellen Hutchins (1785-1815) Botanist in West Cork: how did her garden grow? By Madeline Hutchins.
Butler, Patricia. Drawn from Nature: The Flowering of Irish Botanical Art. Woodbridge, UK. ACC Art Books, 2023.
Finn, Clodagh. Through Her Eyes: a new history of Ireland in 21 women. Dublin. Gill Books, 2019.
Foster, John Wilson, ed. Nature in Ireland: A Scientific and Cultural History. Dublin. The Lilliput Press, 1997 In it, Botany in Ireland, by Donal Synnott.
Goodman, Nigel, ed. Dawson Turner: a Norfolk Antiquary and his Remarkable Family. Chichester, UK. Phillimore & Co, 2007. In it, Nature’s Treasures by Anne Secord
Hutchins, Madeline. Ellen’s Hutchins (1785-1815) Botanist of Bantry Bay. Bantry. Ellen Hutchins Festival, 2019.