Ireland’s First Female Botanist

'Dasya arbuscula Agardh', collected by Ellen Hutchins, specimen in Natural History Museum, London.

Ellen Hutchins

Ellen Hutchins was born in Ballylickey in the Bantry Bay area of West Cork in 1785. While in school in Dublin, Ellen’s health began to deteriorate and she was placed in the care of a family friend, Dr Whitley Stokes. Stokes encouraged Ellen to spend time outdoors in order to improve her health and suggested that she embark upon the study of natural history and specifically botany. 

​She soon returned home to Ballylickey to take care of her widowed elderly mother and paralysed brother. There she became a field botanist and specialised in non-flowering plants (cryptogams) including seaweeds, algae, lichens, mosses and liverworts. Ellen became an avid scholar, cataloguing and accurately illustrating the very many marine and terrestrial specimens she discovered in Cork, some of which were newly identified.

Among her achievements was a large corpus of detailed watercolour illustrations, as well as dried specimens that she annotated in detail. In an age when women had little access to education or academic pursuits, Ellen’s ability to identify new plant species and her meticulous drawings gained admiration from the leading botanists of the day. James Townsend Mackay, curator at the Botanic Garden of Trinity College, used Ellen’s drawings in his publication Flora Hibernica, while Dawson Turner – eminent botanist from Great Yarmouth (Norfolk) – printed her drawings in Muscologia Hibernicae and Historium Fuci. However, by 1812 Ellen's health had deteriorated once again and soon a family dispute forced Ellen and her mother to leave Ballylickey and move to Bandon. After her mother died, she returned to the Ballylickey area and was cared for by her brother Arthur and his wife Matilda at Ardnagashel (which now houses the Ellen Hutchins Arboretum). Ellen died there on 9 February 1815, shortly before her thirtieth birthday. Ellen’s short life was marred by intermittent ill health and family problems, making her achievements in the sciences all the more admirable. She was buried in Garryvurcha churchyard, Bantry, in an unmarked grave. On her death, her collection of specimens and drawings passed to her greatest mentor and friend Dawson Turner. Ellen is memorialised in the names of a number of plants including the lichen ‘Lecania hutchinsiae’, the marine algae ‘Cladophora hutchinsiae’ and the moss ‘Ulota hutchinsiae (Sm.) Hammar’. Most of her drawings are now in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, while her specimens are in the Natural History Museum in London. In 2015, a plaque was unveiled in Garryvurcha graveyard to mark the bicentenary of Ellen’s death, as part of the Ellen Hutchins Festival organised by Bantry Historical Society and the National Parks and Wildlife Services.

​An exhibition celebrating the short life and ground-breaking work of Ellen Hutchins is currently on display in the Boole Library, in the main campus of University College Cork (UCC), and runs until 21 December (2018). Admission is free. To learn more about Ellen Hutchins, click here: http://www.ellenhutchins.com  To view some of the specimens collected by Ellen, and now in the Natural History Museum, London, follow this link and search "Ellen Hutchins": http://data.nhm.ac.uk