About Ellen
Ellen Hutchins was a field botanist who was plant hunting in the Bantry Bay area of West Cork, Ireland in the early 1800s. She specialised in seaweeds, lichens, mosses and liverworts. She found a great many plants ‘new to science’ and ‘new to Ireland’ and helped develop our understanding of seaweeds and the other non-flowering plants. Contemporary botanists described her “zeal and knowledge in these plants”, “her extraordinary talents and no less extraordinary industry” and praised her for her determination and for being “indefatigable”. Many named plants after her, which is a great honour in botany. She was Ireland’s first female botanist, and part of a specialist community of botanists studying the non-flowering plants (cryptogams) that included some of the leading names of the day, such as William Jackson Hooker, Dawson Turner and Lewis Dillwyn. She made beautiful and accurate drawings of seaweeds and other plants, some of which were used by botanists in their publications.
Ellen returned home to Ballylickey, living with and caring for her now elderly mother and a disabled brother, and spending any free time she had in the study of plants, particularly mosses, liverworts, lichen, and seaweeds. She learnt quickly and clearly had a gift for plant identification, and also produced very detailed watercolour drawings, and meticulously prepared specimens. She sent specimens to Dr Stokes. Through Dr Stokes she had become acquainted with James Townsend Mackay (1775–1862), curator at the Botanic Garden of Trinity College. Much later, when writing his Flora Hibernica (1836) he would include many of Ellen’s finds.
On a visit to Ballylickey in the summer of 1805, Mackay suggested to Ellen that she study seaweeds, an under-researched branch of botany at that time. Mackay sent specimens of seaweeds Ellen had collected to specialist botanists including Dawson Turner (1775 – 1858) in Great Yarmouth, who was working on his publication on seaweeds, Historia Fucorum. When in April 1807 Dawson Turner sent a thank you note to Ellen, this was the beginning of a seven year correspondence between them and exchange of specimens. He sent her books, on botany, and literature too. Starting in late 1808, Ellen also sent Dawson Turner drawings of seaweeds, and he was delighted with their quality, requested more and he used them in later parts of his Historia Fucorum. A selection of the Ellen Hutchins and Dawson Turner letters, edited by Professor Michael Mitchell, was published as an Occasional Paper, by the National Botanic Gardens Glasnevin, Dublin in 1999. This publication also reprinted the list of nearly 1100 plants that Ellen prepared at the request of Dawson Turner for “a complete catalogue of plants of all kinds that you have found in your neighbourhood”. Ellen began work on this in 1809 and finished the list in 1812. It was intended to be published by the Linnean Society, but for some reason was not submitted by Dawson Turner to the Society for publication.
Ellen’s ability to find new plants, identify them accurately, and the quality of her drawings and specimens drew admiration from the leading botanists of the day, and her work was featured in many of the leading publications, so although she never published herself, she was a major contributor to the new and developing plant science of her era. At first refusing to have her name associated with her finds, she soon relented, and her name appears on her specimens now in the most significant collections in the UK, Ireland and the USA. Sir James Smith wrote of her that “she could find almost anything”. Dawson Turner, in his Fuci in 1819, after her death says “that botany had lost a votary as indefatigable as she was acute, and as successful as she was indefatigable.” In William Jackson Hooker’s Jungermanniae Ellen’s name is more or less connected with nearly every rare species contained in the work.
All her collecting was undertaken in the Banty Bay area, Co Cork. She contributed to Lewis Weston Dillwyn’s work British Confervae. In 1809, Lewis Dillwyn and another botanist, Joseph Woods, visited Ellen at home at Ballylickey, and were very impressed with her depth of knowledge and her extensive collections of plant specimens.
- Her rare finds included lichens, and three species are called after her:
- Lecania hutchinsiae
- Pertusaria hutchinsiae
- Enterographa hutchinsiae
- Seaweeds Two marine algae are named in her honour:
- Cladophora hutchinsiae (Dillwyn) Kützing (= Conferva hutchinsiae Dillwyn)
- Dasya hutchinsiae (Harvey)
- Bryophytes (mosses and liverworts) – two species still carry her name, in both their Latin and their common names.
- Hutchins’ Hollywort Jubula hutchinsiae (Hooker W.J) Dumortier
- Hutchins’ Pincushion Ulota hutchinsiae (Sm.) Hammar
Click on binomial names above to access hyperlinks to NHM Data Portal catalogue records. These are mostly Type Specimens collected by Ellen.
A great many more plants were named after her, but their classification and so their names have changed as more has been learnt about them. There are at least seventeen of the marine algae, lichen and bryophyte Type Specimens at the Natural History Museum, London with her name on them, and the Cladophora hutchinsia (seaweed) Type Specimen at Trinity College, Dublin was collected by her. There are also Type Specimens of Ellen’s in the Herbarium at the New York Botanical Garden.
Ellen was also a keen gardener, and she tended plants including ones sent her by Mackay in a field at Ballylickey, known as Miss Ellen’s Garden.
She was buried in the Garryvurcha churchyard, Bantry. Her grave is unmarked, and a plaque was unveiled there during Heritage Week 2015, the bicentenary of her death, as part of the first Ellen Hutchins Festival celebrating her life and work, organised by the Bantry Historical Society and the National Parks and Wildlife Services (Glengarriff Woods Nature Reserve).
On her death her collection of specimens and drawings passed to Dawson Turner and most of her drawings are in the library and archive at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, with some in Museums Sheffield. Her specimens are mostly in the herbarium at the Natural History Museum in London. Other specimens and drawings had been sent to leading botanists of her day and featured in their publications, and the specimens went into their collections. Today they can be found (and in some cases seen online) at Trinity College, Dublin; the Natural History Museum, London; the Linnean Society, London (Smith collection); and the New York Botanical Garden (William and Lynda Steere Herbarium). Her letters to Dawson Turner are in Trinity College, Cambridge; and Dawson Turner’s and James Mackay’s letters to her are in Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew’s library and archives. Her letters to James Mackay are in the Herbarium of the Botany Department, Trinity College Dublin.
The genus Hutchinsia (Brassicaceae) was named in her honour by Robert Brown, (later famous for the discovery of the jittery movement of tiny particles known as Brownian motion). The little cress like plant has had its name Hutchinsia replaced by the name Hornungia, but plant labels in the U.K. still often use the common name “Hutchinsia” for Hornungia alpina.