Exhibitions
Celebrating Ellen Hutchins
The Ellen Hutchins Festival team mount their own exhibitions and can be asked to do so by other organisations. Information on any current exhibitions is given here and on the Current and Upcoming Events page.
There is a small permanent display board celebrating Ellen Hutchins in Bantry Library and permanent mini exhibitions in Bantry Tourist Office (open in season) and in the Future Forests plant centre in Kealkill. There is a plaque to Ellen on the west wall of the ruined Garryvurcha church in Bantry and the churchyard gate is unlocked most days.
The Ellen Hutchins Reading Room in the Sustainability Institute of University College Cork (UCC) in Cork City provides access to the Ellen Hutchins Archives cabinet and a broad range of other Ellen related materials. If you are interested in visiting, use the Contact Us email below to book a time (weekdays in term time). There is an Open House session in early February with activities as well as the archives.
Information on Past Exhibitions is also given here.
If you are interested in mounting an exhibition about Ellen, please contact us.
In West Cork: three permanent mini displays
There are three permanent mini displays on Ellen Hutchins in West Cork: in Future Forests, Kealkil; in Bantry Library and the Bantry Tourist Office.
Ellen Hutchins Reading Room
There is a Reading Room with Ellen Hutchins display, reference and archival material available to visit by appointment. It is in the Ellen Hutchins Building of the Sustainability Institute (formerly the Environmental Research Institute) at UCC in Cork. There are also Open Morning sessions with more Ellen archives on display and botany, arts and history activities for all ages over 6 years. An Open Morning is held each year on the Saturday closest to 9th February – the Ellen Anniversary.
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 and letters of Ellen’s.
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.
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.
Open House at the Ellen Hutchins Reading Room and Archives
The next Open House session is planned for Saturday 7th February 2026
at the Ellen Hutchins Building, Lee Road, Cork T23 XE10 with easy parking
Free of charge
Drop in and use a microscope or hand lens to see the fascinating miniature world of some of the smallest plants. Try writing with a quill pen and folding a letter in the style of the early 1800s. See the archives, displays and films, browse the books.
This is an opportunity to see the current display in the Ellen Hutchins Archives Cabinet of a drawing, three seaweed specimens and letters of Ellen’s. Also on display will be other archives including books belonging to Ellen. Madeline Hutchins, researcher on Ellen and her great great grandniece, will be there to chat about them.
There will be information and activities suitable for adults and children aged six and above. Drop in or stay all morning.
The Ellen Hutchins Festival publications on botany and the small biography on Ellen will be on sale. Pick up the Festival’s free leaflets introducing seaweeds, lichens and bryophytes (mosses and liverworts) and copies of the Twelve Tree Trail.
The Open House session is to celebrate Ireland’s first female botanist and to mark International Day of Women and Girls in Science.
The Ellen Hutchins reading room was established in September 2022 when the former ERI Lee Road Building was renamed the Ellen Hutchins Building. The room has a collection of books on botany, biodiversity and caring for plants and the planet. There is a display, a short film and information on Ellen’s life and work as botanist of Bantry Bay. See beautiful seaweed specimens and a small exhibition on correspondence from the early 1800s including postage stamps and seals.
The Ellen Hutchins Archives Cabinet displays one of Ellen’s watercolour drawings of seaweed and currently has three seaweed specimens of Ellen’s on loan from the Herbarium, Botany Department, Trinity College Dublin. There are also on display, specifically for the Open House, some of Ellen’s letters, books she owned, as well as botany books related to her story. See where Ellen pressed plant specimens in between the pages of a French commercial dictionary that had belonged to her father, and a natural history book that she dated 1st January 1810.
This is a joint event of the Ellen Hutchins Festival and the Environmental Research Institute of UCC.
Significant dates
The 9th February is the anniversary of Ellen’s death in 1815, aged just 29. The date is now perfectly placed between St Brigid’s Day National Holiday on Monday 2nd February and the International Day of Women and Girls in Science on 11th February.
Possibilities for the future
The Ellen Hutchins Festival Team has two series of panels available as touring exhibitions. If you are interested in hosting this, or in the Ellen Hutchins Festival Team working with you to develop a specific exhibition for your venue, please use the Contact Us button at the bottom of the website pages to get in contact with us.
Most recent exhibition: August 2025
Exhibition: Ellen Hutchins (1785 – 1815) Ireland’s First Female Botanist
This exhibition in Bantry Bookshop allowed you to discover Ellen’s story and appreciate, as Ellen did, the beauty of the seaweeds of Bantry Bay, through her drawings and specimens. The exhibition celebrated Ellen Hutchins’ life and work, in the context of the rich plant biodiversity of the Bantry Bay and Beara area. The exhibition used material previously shown in the Boole Library at UCC in 2018.
Bantry Bookshop, William Street, Bantry. Free.
19th to 27th August 2025
Recent Years
Bantry Library: Ellen Hutchins Archives Cabinet: August 2025, 2024 and 2023
The beautiful oak Ellen Hutchins Archives Cabinet returned to the reference section of Bantry Library during the Ellen Hutchins Festival in Heritage Week 2023 and 2024 and 2025.
In it were a different selection of Ellen archives. The Festival had organised the loan of some of Ellen’s specimens of seaweeds, back in Bantry more than two hundred years since she collected them from the bay and carefully spread and dried them before sending them off to Dr Whitley Stokes and James Townsend Mackay at Trinity College Dublin. They have been in the herbarium at the Botany Department at Trinity ever since, available for botanists to study.
They came back to Bantry to be seen beside letters Ellen wrote to her brothers with postal marks from the early 1800s and one of her detailed and accurate watercolour drawings of a red seaweed.
On a table nearby, there were photographs of more of Ellen’s seaweed drawings and her specimens as well as transcripts of extracts from her letters.
The cabinet was commissioned by the Ellen Hutchins Festival to house the Ellen Hutchins Archives, enabling them to be displayed in various settings. It was designed and made by notable furniture designer and maker, Matthew Burt.
Matthew used ‘pippy’ oak with bog oak featured on the drawer handles.
The Cabinet was funded by a Heritage Council grant with contributions from the Hutchins Family and the Ellen Hutchins Festival. The design work involved in the cabinet and the building of the plinth were generously gifted by Matthew Burt.
The seaweed specimens and other archives can be seen in the cabinet in its semi-permanent home in the Ellen Hutchins Reading Room in the Ellen Hutchins building, Lee Road, Cork. This is the Headquarters of the Sustainability Institute (formerly the Environmental Research Institute) of UCC. Use Contact Us below to organise access during weekday working hours.
Ellen Hutchins at Ballylickey: Archives in the Afternoon
Ellen (1785-1815) botanist and botanical artist, lived almost all of her short life in Ballylickey and this is where she made her specimens, drawings and wrote her letters. At Ballylickey, in the lovely Manning’s Emporium, there was an opportunity to find out more about Ellen from her great-great-grandniece, Madeline Hutchins, and treat yourselves to an excellent afternoon snack of your own choice. This was an informal drop-in event, with information to browse, archives on display and your questions answered.
There was a selection of Ellen’ letters to her brothers about botany and books that she owned on a range of subjects from botany to poetry. Some books had the remains of pressed plants between their pages. Also on display were botany books and illustrations of the period that we know that Ellen used.
Crawford Art Gallery: Behind the Scenes: 2023
Crawford Art Gallery, in its exhibition, Behind the Scenes, in 2023, featured a detailed and beautiful watercolour painting by the highly talented botanical artist Shevaun Doherty of a seaweed specimen collected by Ellen Hutchins in 1805 on Whiddy Island.
Crawford Art Gallery, Emmett Place, Cork, T12 TNE6
If you were not able to go to the gallery but want to know the story see In Ellen Hutchins Footsteps
Bantry Library: Ellen Hutchins exhibition: August 2022
From 13th August to 24th September 2022, in the foyer of Bantry Library, six panels with stunning photographs told the story of Ellen Hutchins and the rich plant biodiversity of Bantry Bay and Beara. You could see why Ellen was passionate about the landscape and plants of her home territory. It explained the contribution she made to science and how we can follow in her footsteps.
Ellen Hutchins Archives Cabinet Launch: Bantry Library: August 2022
Ellen Hutchins Archives Cabinet
This was in Bantry Library from 13th to 20th August as part of the Ellen Hutchins Festival 2022.
The newly commissioned, beautiful oak cabinet was made by furniture maker, Matthew Burt. In its drawers were an original watercolour by Ellen of a red seaweed, a selection of her letters to her brothers about her botanising with postal stamps from the early 1800s, and a number of books that belonged to her.
On a table nearby, there were photographs of more of Ellen’s seaweed drawings and her specimens as well as transcripts of extracts from her letters.
The cabinet was funded by a Heritage Council grant in 2021. This was its first public appearance. It was unveiled by Noel O’Mahony, the recently retired Senior Executive Librarian of Bantry Library, who had been supportive of the Festival since its first year, 2015.
The cabinet is now housed in the Ellen Hutchins Building, headquarters of the Environmental Research Institute (ERI) at University College Cork. Access can be arranged, weekdays during term time, please send an email via ‘Contact Us’ to organise a visit.
The cabinet will be back in Bantry Library for each Ellen Hutchins Festival during Heritage Week in August.
A summary of the past
Past Exhibitions
Autumn 2019
The exhibition, Celebrating Ellen Hutchins, at Kew Gardens ran from 11 September and was extended to 22 November 2019. It featured some of Ellen’s beautiful and accurate watercolour drawings of seaweeds, illustrations and descriptions of plants she found in botanical books of the time, and letters to her from botanists Dawson Turner and James Townsend Mackay. There were transcriptions of letters, facsimiles of seaweed specimens of hers and more drawings.
Autumn 2018
The exhibition invited you to appreciate, as Ellen did, the beauty of the seaweeds of Bantry Bay, through her drawings and specimens. The exhibition celebrated Ellen Hutchins’ life and work, and the wonderful botany, coastal landscapes, woodland and mountains of the Bantry Bay and Beara area of West Cork.
UCC Exhibition
The exhibition was located on the ground floor of the Boole Library building on the main campus of University College Cork. Admission was free and all were welcome during the long opening hours of the Boole Library.
The short films made for this exhibition can be seen here.
Drawing from Nature
Seaweed Specimens and Letters, Drawings and Plants
Garnish Island
In the Casita on Garnish Island from August to October 2017, there were panels of text and images about Ellen Hutchins: the young woman, her work and her world. These were first displayed in Bantry Library in 2015.
Garnish Island. Exhibition
Trinity College Dublin
The Ellen Hutchins exhibition in the old Anatomy Building at Trinity College Dublin ran from 9th February to 28th April 2017.
The third photo shows Shevaun’s painting of an enlargement, done using a microscope in the Herbarium at Trinity. Shevaun had been in the Herbarium from early to late on Wednesday, and sent this photo as she left there that evening.
Shevaun continued work on the painting after the close of the exhibition on Friday 28th April, finishing it the following Tuesday 2nd May. Click on the images to open them fully. Photo 8 shows the finished painting looking absolutely wonderful.
Here is another beautiful seaweed specimen, of Delesarria sanguinea, collected by Ellen Hutchins in Bantry Bay over two hundred years ago.
The exhibition used specimens and letters, words and pictures to tell the story of Ellen’s life, and her significant contribution to the understanding of the non-flowering plants known as cryptogams.
There was a selection of the prints of Ellen’s drawings of seaweeds, first shown in Ireland at Bantry House in August 2015, and seen here being prepared for that exhibition. The prints were reproduced with the kind permission of the Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
Exhibition and Botanical Art Trail: August 2016
A legacy from the Exhibition Trail
The Trail took place during the Ellen Hutchins Festival in Heritage week, August 2016. As a legacy from the Trail, in Bantry you can find an information panel about Ellen in Bantry Library and in the Bantry Tourist Office, as well as at Future Forests near Kealkil.
The Craft Shop in Glengarriff Road, Bantry and Mannings Emporium in Ballylickey had prints of her watercolour drawing of the seaweed Fucus asparagoides for sale at 25 Euros. They are also available online in our shop.
About the Trail
The Trail had fifteen sites, in shop windows and indoors in shops, Bantry Credit Union, the library and the Tourist Office. Each site could be seen and appreciated separately for part of Ellen’s story, and the sites could be undertaken in any order. Taking the trail round all the sites allowed you to discover more about Ellen and see a wonderful range of her seaweed drawings.
The Ellen Hutchins Festival is very grateful indeed for all the support from the shop owners and others who hosted the Exhibition Trail, and says a huge thank you to all of them: Bantry Credit Union, Bantry Library, Bantry Tourist Office, The Craft Shop, The Cookware Company, Phyllis’ Art Shop, Organico, Bantry Charity Shop, the former Kelly’s Hardware Shop, Hi Lites, Bantry Yarns; in Ballylickey – Mannings’ Emporium and Cronin’s Centra; and in Glengarriff – O’Connell’s Shop.
There were also “Ellen’s Treasures” on display; see the Ellen’s Treasures page on this website here.
Disability Access
A Home Coming
The seaweeds came from Bantry Bay and the drawings were done by Ellen at Ballylickey, where she lived for almost all of her short life. 2015 was the ‘home coming’ for the drawings, the first time that they had been seen in Bantry, (and in the Republic of Ireland) since they were drawn here by Ellen over two hundred years ago. The 2016 Festival Trail was an opportunity to see them again, in a very public setting, and close to where she collected the seaweeds.
The first Ellen Hutchins Exhibitions: Bantry: 2015
Heritage Week, August 2015 saw two exhibitions on Ellen Hutchins open in Bantry. In Bantry House an exhibition of prints of Ellen’s watercolour drawings of seaweeds, and in Bantry Library foyer, an exhibition titled: Ellen Hutchins, Botanist: the young woman, her work and her world, with five large panels of images and text.
The seaweed drawings were shown by kind permission of the Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London. The exhibition was on the upper landing of Bantry House and was curated by Madeline Hutchins, Ellen’s great-great-grandniece.
There was an official opening and a public access evening, with a pop-up exhibition of archives including letters written by Ellen, books that she owned, and the one original seaweed drawing by Ellen owned by the Hutchins family. Shevaun Doherty, award-winning Irish botanical artist opened the exhibition, and gave a demonstration of botanical art, showing her wonderful watercolour work.
The Library exhibition pulled together information and images from many sources and included results of new research and recent ‘finds’ relating to Ellen, in particular letters she wrote to James Mackay the botanist at Trinity College Dublin, and to her brothers about her ‘botanising’. The text was written by Madeline Hutchins, and it was designed by the talented Bantry-based graphic designer, Jenny Dempsey.
