“Language of Flowers”, a popular literary trend in the 19th century, presented the world of botany through dictionaries of flowers and associated meanings, floral poetry and prose, offering a sentimental view of natural history.  These charming books with colorful illustrations of flowers and bouquets are at the intersection of botany, horticulture, natural history, art, poetry, and women’s studies.  This Victorian fad saw many editions of works published, with multiple titles by successful authors.  The following provides a glimpse into the work of four women authors of this genre.

Sarah Carter Edgarton Mayo (1819-1848) from Selections From the Writings of Mrs. Sarah C. Edgarton Mayo: With a Memoir

Sarah Carter Edgarton Mayo (1819-1848) was an American writer.

Born in Shirley, Massachusetts, she was the tenth of fifteen children, and her mother was her father’s second wife.  The household offered many intellectual opportunities, and Sarah was home-schooled.  Her gift for language launched her writing career, which began when she was 16 years old.  Sarah’s early works were crafted for the Universalist church, her family’s faith.  She wrote poems and short stories for The Universalist and Ladies’ Repository and later served as the associate editor from 1839-1842.

With her deep interest in botany, combined with her love of poetry, she wrote three language of flower genre books. The Flower Vase, The Fables of Flora, and Floral Fortune-Teller.

Floral Fortune-Teller, by Miss S. C. Edgarton, 1847. Contributed in BHL from the Lenhardt Library of the Chicago Botanic Garden.

Floral Fortune-Teller:  A Game for all Seasons is an imaginative book assembled with poems and phrases of well-known English and German writers, each assigned to a particular flower, in alphabetical order, in five parts.  Readers are instructed to assemble a bouquet of five different color flowers, one each of white, blue, purple, yellow, and red. Each part reveals one’s fortune based on the flower.

Page featuring Camellia from Floral Fortune-Teller, by Miss S. C. Edgarton, 1847. Contributed in BHL from the Lenhardt Library of the Chicago Botanic Garden.

Sarah married Amory Dwight Mayo in July 1846, and they had one daughter who was born in September 1847. Sarah died nine months later at the young age of 29 years. Following her death, her husband honored her memory by publishing a memoir entitled Selections From the Writings of Mrs. Sarah C. Edgarton Mayo: With a Memoir.  The work contains many of her poems and prose. She had a deep connection and love of natural history, which is felt through her writings.

In Selections… her husband describes her as such:

“Geography and the natural sciences were her favorite studies, and among these she was most interested by astronomy and botany. She also read poetry with great taste and feeling. As she grew up, a love for nature grew with her. She had a passionate fondness for flowers and animals of all kinds, and the earliest verses I have seen of hers were addressed to a favorite dog. She was a part of nature, rather than an admirer of it…” [page 14.]

Other Language of Flower women authors were prolific writers.

Mrs. Anna Christian Burke (Mrs. L. Burke) wrote several books in the genre including The Coloured Language of Flowers (1886), The Illustrated Language of Flowers (1858), and The Miniature Language of Flowers (1865). Each work contains floral poetry, lists of flowers with their meanings, and sketches of flowers, all in a similar style.

Coloured Language of Flowers.

The Illustrated Language of Flowers, contributed in BHL from the Lenhardt Library of the Chicago Botanic Garden.

Miniature Language of Flowers.

Lesser known women authors are Estelle Davenport Adams and Mary Keble Grant.

Estelle Davenport Adams is referenced in the 1904 Edition of Who’s Who, but under her husband’s entry, William Davenport Adams. She is however, listed in Allibone’s Supplement, under her own name and entry.

Mrs. Adams’ language of flower work, The Illustrated Floral Text Book: Being a Birthday Book of Flowers and their Language With Selections from the Poets, was published in 1885. She authored additional works on other subjects including Sea Song and River Rhyme from Chaucer to Tennyson.

The Illustrated Floral Text Book, by Estelle Davenport Adams, 1885. Contributed in BHL from the Lenhardt Library of the Chicago Botanic Garden.

Mary Keble Grant’s The Language of Flowers Birthday Book from 1895 is a charming work.  Flip through it to find your birth date and its associated flower, poem and sentiment!

Mary Keble Grant’s The Language of Flowers Birthday Book. Contributed in BHL from the Lenhardt Library of the Chicago Botanic Garden.

The four women featured here are among many other women and men who wrote language of flower works. The 19^th century fascination with natural history and floriography offered numerous opportunities for writers and compilers to produce titles and editions in this genre.

The Lenhardt Library of the Chicago Botanic Garden is digitizing 62 rare and unique “language of flower” books published in the 19th century as part of a grant from a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded to the Chicago Horticultural Society. Over the three-year project period, the volumes are being conserved and digitized by expert staff at the Northeast Document Conservation Center. The volumes highlighted in this post are the first of those digitized for the project. You can explore these and other titles as they are digitized within the Language of Flowers collection on BHL.

References

American Council of Learned Societies. Dictionary of American Biography. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1995.  Volume 6, pages 463-464.  Accessed online.

Benbow-Pfalzgraf, Taryn. American Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide, from Colonial Times to the Present. Detroit: St. James Press, 2000.  Volume 3, p.100-101. Accessed online.

Biography and Genealogy Master Index. Detroit MI: Gale, 2016.  Accessed online.

Kirk, John Foster, and S. Austin Allibone. A Supplement to Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors… Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1892. Volume 1, p. 9, 251. Accessed online.

Low, Sampson. The English Catalogue of Books. Volume 5, 1898.   Accessed online.

Mayo, Sarah C. Edgarton, and A. D. Mayo. Selections from the Writings of Mrs. Sarah C. Edgarton Mayo: With a Memoir, by Her Husband. Boston: A. Tomkins, 1855.

Who’s Who 1904: An Annual Biographical Dictionary. Fifty-Sixth Year of Issue. London: Adam and Charles Black; New York: Macmillan Company, 1904. p. 15-16.  Accessed Online.

Title page of The Fruits of the Lima Market, a collection of manuscript illustrations by Dorothea Eliza Smith.

As we celebrate the role women have played in the natural history sciences, we can find many examples of successful women who have been under-appreciated for the meaningful work they did during their lives. Women like Maria Sibylla Merian, Mary Margaret Smith, and Evelyn Cheesman significantly advanced a variety of sciences, even if they have only recently been gaining attention for doing so. But historic relegation of women has also meant that countless people throughout history were denied the tools to achieve success in these fields. How many women could have been published artists or scientists, if it weren’t for societal expectations that never gave them the chance?

Within the collections of rare botanical texts and seldom seen manuscripts housed at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation is a beautiful work by a largely unknown artist, Dorothea Eliza Smith. Her Fruits of the Lima Market – a collection of watercolors that she completed between 1850 and 1853 – stands out as an exemplary creation made even more impressive by her relative obscurity and the sparse details of her life.

Frontispiece of The Fruits of the Lima Market. These illustrations were never published and would likely have vanished into complete obscurity had the artist’s husband not worked to preserve them in the family collection.

Dorothea was born to Joseph and Dorothy Peers on January 29, 1804, in Wales – the third child and first girl born to the couple. In 1828, when she was twenty-four, she married William Kerr who was a merchant trading primarily out of Caracas, Venezuela, but their marriage was cut short as Kerr seems to have died sometime before 1840. That year, Dorothea married Dr. Archibald Smith, who also had extensive experience living and working in South America.

Smith was born in 1797 in Scotland, received his medical degree from the University of Glasgow in 1820, and moved to Peru five years later. Once there, he was employed by a British mining company to help its workers adjust to the high altitudes at which they worked, but the company’s bankruptcy in 1827 meant that Smith needed to find new work. To this effect, he rented some land and began to grow sugar cane, but by 1830 he had moved to Lima and the next year took a job overseeing the health of British and American sailors stationed in and around the Peruvian capital. (Peru became an independent country in 1824, so the sailors were not part of an occupying force.) At some point during this time he must have become acquainted with Dorothea as they married in Scotland in 1840 where they continued to live for the next few years.

Punica granatum (Pomegranate) by Dorothea Eliza Smith. The folio contains 30 watercolors and eventually made its way to Crewe Hall library, where they were purchased by Rachel and Paul Mellon in 1957.

While their marriage appears to have been strong, they both faced an enormous loss when Archibald and the couple’s daughter Dorothy – who was eight – were shipwrecked off the Peruvian coast, and Dorothy drowned. Dorothea wrote from Liverpool to her husband shortly after the loss in 1849 that “we are all improving in strength not withstanding our recent trial” and would soon join her husband in Peru with their other children – Sophia, Isabella, and John. Interestingly, Dorothea and the children decided to sail around Cape Horn on their journey to South America rather that land in Panama, walk across the isthmus, and catch another ship to Peru. Both trips took similar amounts of time, but supposedly with three children, Dorothea would have rather not tried to keep track of them on an overland trek. The details of the Smiths’ time in Peru are sparse, other than that Dorothea worked on her watercolors of the fruits of the Lima market from 1850 to 1853, and at any rate they all seemed to have returned to the United Kingdom by 1855. Dorothea would die about nine years later, in 1864, and her husband would join her in 1868, both in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Bananas by Dorothea Eliza Smith. The watercolors are remarkably detailed and include botanical details like cross-sections and seed pods. These details underly observations on the artist’s behalf that go beyond a casual or purely aesthetic purpose.

Dorothea Smith’s The Fruits of the Lima Market are significant and worthy of study both for their quality and for their commentary on botanical science and British economic reach. To begin, Dorothea’s watercolors are impressive in that they are thoughtfully detailed in their depiction and with regards to their associated scientific information (Each painting includes notes on its fruit’s scientific name, local name, height, and fruiting months), and in that they have a refined artistic sensibility to them as pertains to the ways in which Smith plays with the juxtaposition of the different colors of the fruits. Smith also provided drawings of cross-sections of the fruits and their seeds. It is further interesting that Smith chose to draw the fruits of the Lima market as opposed to other flora from the Peruvian countryside. Her choice seems to be wrapped up both in her assumedly easy access to such fruits and in her life as spouse to first a merchant then a medical doctor and one-time farmer who both left Britain for opportunities in South America. Even her trip to arrive in Peru followed established trade and tourist routes from Europe to the western South American coast. Her watercolors work on two levels then – the first as an expression of her high scientific and artistic acumen and secondly as a reflection of her proximity to British commercial interests throughout the world. Smith’s manuscript was maintained by her husband after her death as he worked to make it known to knowledgeable scientists (even citing her in his own work), and as such kept it from disappearing into complete obscurity. Thus, the remarkable work of Dorothea Eliza Smith remains and whose story, though very much incomplete, understates the significant contributions of so many unknown female scientists and illustrators to the collected advancement of Western science.

References

Vega, Fernando, Kimberly Fisher, and Tony Willis. “Dorothea Eliza Smith, artist of ‘The Fruits of the Lima Market’” Archives of Natural History 41.2 (October 2014): 223-229.

Four days before becoming a centenarian, Dr. Helia Bravo Hollis passed away, on September 26th, 2001. Her biography is the history of the inclusion of women in the scientific research community and the slow but productive development of academic calling.

Teacher Bravo, as she liked to be called, never bothered or worried about being a pioneer in a discipline at a complicated stage in Mexican history. Although she always had a genuine concern for social inequalities, she believed that only through education this could be changed. To do so, she was a very dedicated researcher and teacher.

Her work is defined by the word vocation, as she describes it in her own words, full of humility:

“I did my job with a sense of responsibility before the National Autonomous University of Mexico UNAM, with love, passion, and courage; It was enjoyable research rather than a job. In spite of everything, I think that my work is still far from being satisfactory because the knowledge of the cacti is not finished, it is always being done”.

Dr. Bravo Hollis’ bookplate. Historic Archive of Biology Institute of UNAM.

Since her childhood, Dr. Bravo Hollis stood out for her hard work. When she was 10 years old, she received a diploma of achievement from President Porfirio Díaz. In high school, she shared the classroom with distinguished personalities such as Octavio Paz, Salvador Novo, Carlos Pellicer, and even Frida Kahlo, among many other brilliant personalities of Mexican culture. As a teenager, she presented her works in the Antonio de Alzate Society and published them in Revista Mexicana de Biología (Mexican Biology Journal). Those tasks motivated her first trip abroad: a summer course at Pomona College, California. All of this gives us an idea of her striving at academic matters.

Helia during her studies with Dr. Ochoterena. Ca. 1930. Historic Archive of Biology Institute of UNAM.

The First Certified Biologist

Bravo Hollis was meant to study Medicine, however, she decided to study Biology against her family’s wishes. The career did not exist formally yet, and the studies were set in combination at the National School of Medicine and at the High Studies School, both part of UNAM.

In 1927, Bravo Hollis became the first certified biologist of Mexico and, in 1929 when the University reached its autonomy and her mentor Dr. Isaac Ochoterena was appointed in charge of the future Institute of Biology, she was chosen to create the Herbarium and was also commissioned with the study of the Cactaceae, one of the most identifiable, diverse plant families in Mexico: cactus, cholla, nopales, … and thus more than 700 species that, for the most part, do not exist anywhere else.

Therefore, Bravo Hollis began a stage in her career where she travelled around Mexico to collect information and samples and photograph different types of cacti. This culminated in 1931 when she graduated as a Master in Biological Sciences at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of UNAM, with the thesis entitled Contribuciones al conocimiento de las cacatáceas de Tehuacán (Contribution to knowledge of the Cacti of Tehuacán). This would set the beginning of her subject of study for the years to come.

Dr. Bravo Hollis in one of her many trips of specimen recollections. Ca. 1940. Historic Archive of Biology Institute of UNAM.

From this moment forward, her research career was unstoppable, focused on systematics of cacti in Mexico and part of North America. In 1937, she published her book Las cactáceas de México (Mexican Cacti), which placed her at the forefront of this field of research around the world. In the autumn of 1951, the Mexican Society of Cactology was founded with Dr. Bravo Hollis as president of Cactaceae and Suculentas Mexicanas, which published its first issue in June 1955. Its members carried out intense field work and with all the collected material contributed to the foundation of what became the Botanical Garden of UNAM. Throughout the 1960s, Dr. Bravo Hollis managed the gardens with passion and was highly respected, to the point that she even says she paid the workers out of her own pocket when a strike left them without a salary. Sorrowfully as she expressed:

“I am retired from working at the Biology Institute at 90 years old, handicapped by painful arthritis that prevents me from walking”.

Bravo Hollis, Helia. Las Cactáceas de México. 1937. Contributed in BHL by Instituto de Biología UNAM as part of BHL México. CC-BY-NC-SA.

In total, Bravo Hollis published almost 170 articles and three books, described 60 scientific classifications and made 59 nomenclature reviews. She received numerous awards and recognitions, including the Cactus d’Or from the International Organization of Succulents, an honorary doctorate and an Emeritus Research Prize at UNAM. Her works received worldwide acclaim from fellow biologists and botanists, and today six species and one subspecies of cacti are named after her. Additionally, the Botanical Garden in Tehuacán pays tribute to her through its name: the Helia Bravo Hollis Botanical Garden.

Dr. Bravo Hollis on fieldwork. Ca. 1980. Historic Archive of Biology Institute of UNAM.

References

Bravo-Hollis, Helia. (2004). Memorias de una vida y una profesión. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Biología, Dirección General de Divulgación de la Ciencia.

Granados Chapa, Miguel Ángel. (2001). La reina de las cactáceas. La Jornada. Recuperado de: https://www.proceso.com.mx/302201/la-reina-de-las-cactaceas

Salcedo Meza, Concepción. (2001). La pasión por la ciencia de una mujer centenaria. ¿Cómo ves? (34). pp. 29-30. Recuperado de: http://www.comoves.unam.mx/assets/revista/34/quienes_34.pdf

Photographs: Historic Archive of Biology Institute of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, UNAM.

This post is the second in a two-part series about the life and legacy of botanist Emma Jane Cole. View the first part by Julie Christianson Stivers.

Cover: Cole, Emma. Grand Rapids Flora: A Catalogue of the Flowering Plants and Ferns Growing Without Cultivation in the Vicinity of Grand Rapids, Michigan. 1901. Contributed in BHL by the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of The New York Botanical Garden.

Nearly 120 years ago Emma Jane Cole (1901) published Grand Rapids Flora: A Catalogue of the Flowering Plants and Ferns Growing Without Cultivation in the Vicinity of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Surprisingly, this botanical account published in 1901 for the Grand Rapids area remains the most recent comprehensive treatment of the plants specific to our region. And we still use it!

Today’s students tend to think that anything published in the scientific literature before they were born must certainly be old and obsolete. However, we have had the opportunity to impress upon students that Emma Cole’s Flora is a “gold mine,” informing us of the landscape of the late 1890s and the plants that occupied the Grand Rapids region at that time (covering 585 square miles). Enormous changes have taken place within and around Grand Rapids since the “horse and buggy” days of Emma Cole’s study. But how have they changed? And what can we learn by comparing Emma Cole’s Grand Rapids to what we see today?

Drs. David Warners, Professor, Calvin University, and perennial Visiting Scholar, Garrett Crow (Professor Emeritus, Univ. of New Hampshire) established a project through the Calvin Herbarium, A Field-based Retrospective Assessment of Emma Cole’s Grand Rapids Flora After 100+ Years of “Progress.” A key component of the study is to conduct field research for the purpose of identifying areas studied by Emma Cole that have persisted into the present time.

David Warners, Professor, Calvin College. Photo by Andrea Lubberts.

Garrett Crow, Visiting Scholar, Calvin College.

Two things were critical at the outset of the project. First, Cole’s Flora had to be brought in line with today’s botanical nomenclature as well as taxonomic changes that have resulted from more than 100 years of botanical investigation. “Emma Cole’s 1901 Grand Rapids Flora: Nomenclaturally updated and revised” (Crow 2017) accomplished that task. Second, we needed to scour Cole’s Flora and identify specific localities that she frequented and determine which of these sites might still retain natural vegetation that we could “field check” as potential study sites. For this, we engaged students. Each summer a research team of 2 students worked with us, focused on areas botanized by Cole, as well as other remnant natural areas our research discovered, that appear to be of potentially high botanical diversity and have unusual features for the Grand Rapids area (e.g. plants considered rare for the State, and/or habitats of special interest).

Over the past 4 years we have been able to study 24 locations in detail, producing a Floristic Quality Assessment of each site as a way of quantifying the natural quality of these historical remnants. We used the online Floristic Quality Assessment (FQA) Calculator to evaluate both the historical species list (compiled from specimens collected by Emma Cole and her students) and recent inventories (done by us and our students) (https://universalfqa.org). This tool utilizes the Michigan FQA Plant Database (Reznicek et al. 2014), which rates each species on a scale of 0–10. Native species with high fidelity for pristine habitats have the highest value (called the coefficient of conservation), whereas the weedy generalists (like cattails) receive low values; non-native species receive a zero. Hence, the FQA Calculator uses the list of species found at a site together with a relatively simple equation to derive a Floristic Quality Index (FQI) for that site. These FQI values, then, can be compared across sites and over time to quantitatively compare the relative natural quality of various parcels of land.

One of the enormously valuable aspects of Cole’s work is that her Flora was extremely well-documented by herbarium specimens; approximately 97% of the plants in her Flora are represented by at least 1 specimen. Remarkably, more than 5,000 specimens collected by Emma Cole, her students, and her colleagues are extant, with most specimens belonging to the Kent Scientific Institution’s herbarium (now Grand Rapids Public Museum, on permanent loan at the University of Michigan Herbarium), but many additional specimens reside in the Michigan State University Herbarium.

DeAnna Clum, Calvin College student, recording field data in a bog. Photo by Garrett E. Crow.

The existence of these specimens has allowed us to make direct comparisons, utilizing Floristic Quality Assessments of specific sites in which Emma or her students collected, with the plants growing in these same sites today. For instance, the woods at the present-day Grand Rapids Home for Veterans seemed to be a favorite place for her to botanize. We were able to generate a list of 62 species based on the 1890s herbarium specimens. Comparatively, our inventory of 2015-16 yielded over twice as many species (139 total) but remarkably, the historic FQI for the 1890s was 41.7, a bit higher than our 38.9 modern FQI. A conclusion from this work is that this site has remained a high-quality landscape over time, as any site with a FQI of 35–50 is regarded as fairly high quality from the perspective of the State.

Another site described in Cole’s Flora was a wooded area along Mill Creek studied by two of her high school students, Homer Skeels and Jennie Shaddick. Based on specimens of the 51 species they collected, the 1890s Mill Creek Woods had an FQI of 40.0, whereas today’s woods has a somewhat higher FQI of 47.6 (Stockdale et al. submitted manuscript). There being so many specimens collected by Homer and Jennie, we began to wonder. Further digging revealed that they married after Homer finished his BS at Michigan Agricultural College. Homer enjoyed a long career with the Plant Introduction Department, USDA, Washington DC (with a specialty of seed identifications). Mentorship by Emma Cole resulted in a number of her students following career paths as professional botanists and zoologists.

Carolyn Lindemulder, Calvin College student, pressing plants in the bog near Emma Cole’s family home. Photo by Garrett E. Crow.

Of the 8 students trained thus far in our project, 7 have been women. From our first year, the 2 women selected for our project began by searching for biographical information on Emma Cole, discovering Julie Stiver’s (2007) brief biosketch written to support the nomination of Emma Cole to Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame. This led to connecting and collaborating with Julie to further flesh out Emma Cole—the person and her work (Stivers and Crow 2018).

You can read more about Julie Stiver’s research and discoveries related to Emma Cole in this past blog post.

Here is what our students from summer 2018 had to say in their Researcher’s Report about their participation in the project.

The Emma Cole project has been both fascinating and fun research. During this project, we were able to appreciate natural areas of Grand Rapids that are rarely seen. We gained considerable skills in identifying plants, by both identifying distinctive flora in the field and becoming familiar with the guides used to identify collected specimens. Finally, we got to appreciate the historic work of a female scientist [Emma J. Cole]. As aspiring female scientists ourselves, it has been inspiring to continue the work of an accomplished female botanist who worked in a time when women in science were much less common and encouraged than they are now.  (DeAnna Clum, Carolyn Lindemulder).

So, even though it was published in 1901, the Grand Rapids Flora continues to be an important contribution to our understanding of the natural landscapes and the plants that grow in them. Furthermore, through this book and the extensive work she did, Emma Cole continues to inspire young scientists today. And it is always more meaningful when you feel like you have been able to get to know the author.

This post is the first in a two-part series about the life and legacy of botanist Emma Jane Cole. View the second part by Drs. Garrett E. Crow and David P. Warners.

In the early years of the 21^st century, I was delving into the archives of the Grand Rapids Public Museum researching a book to celebrate their 150^th anniversary in 2004. Among the lists of men involved in the lyceums and institutes that shaped the beginnings of the western Michigan museum in the 1850s, there finally appears, at the very end of the 19^th century, the name of Emma J. Cole, emerging like the first blossom of hepatica on a spring afternoon.

Emma J. Cole as she appeared in the 1895 Yearbook, Central High School, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Date of photo uncertain, as the same photo was used in all yearbooks from the beginning of her tenure, 1881. Photo courtesy Grand Rapids History & Special Collections, Grand Rapids Public Library.

Emma was elected a Vice President of the Kent Scientific Institute, precursor to the public museum, in 1900, but in 1891 the trustees had voted to pay her expenses while she collected plants to create an extensive herbarium for the institute (the completed sheets numbered nearly 4,000). As far as I have been able to glean, everyone involved with the KSI served without compensation for an organization whose annual budget seems to have been around $100. Emma’s reimbursements amounted to little more than $10 each summer, but as many women in science even today will attest, receiving 10% of an annual budget for a project is a significant vote of confidence at any institution.

Emma recruited students from the local high school, where she had been a teacher since 1881, to help in her field work, eventually resulting in the publication in 1901 of Grand Rapids Flora: A Catalogue of the Flowering Plants and Ferns Growing Without Cultivation in the Vicinity of Grand Rapids Michigan. It remains the only comprehensive survey of wildflowers in this area.

I was intrigued. Who was this woman and how did she undertake what seemed to me to be a truly ambitious project, on her own and in the face of a social structure less than amenable to professional work by women?

I had heard of Emma Cole before. For the past ten years I had been the editor of the Museum’s newsletter, and in 1994 the local Women’s History Council had commissioned a play about significant women in Grand Rapids history, including Emma. After a little scouring of abandoned file cabinets, I found a dusty file of research for the project containing census records about Emma’s early life, as well as copies of her Cornell University transcripts from 1876-79.

Cornell! How did this young woman from Lowell, a small town 15 miles east of Grand Rapids, leave her safe and secure family life to attend an elite eastern institution that had only begun to admit women six years earlier? I was hooked.

I started my search beyond the archives at the museum in the History and Special Collections division at the local library. I quickly stumbled onto the work of Dr. Edward Voss at the University of Michigan. What a treasure trove!

As I’m sure almost every reader of this blog will know, Dr. Voss was a professor of botany at the University of Michigan and curator of the herbarium there for decades, continuing as professor and curator emeritus until his death in 2012 at age 82. He was an internationally renowned expert on plant nomenclature, a fellow of the Linnean Society and author of the highly acclaimed three-volume Michigan Flora. He was the editor of The Michigan Botanist from 1962-1976. In the second issue he edited, September 1962, he published a 1907 manuscript by Emma Cole about her experiments with Green Dragon (Arisaema dracontium) that he found in some archives, and described her as “author of the remarkably fine Grand Rapids Flora.” He added, “She evidently influenced a large number of people in the study of botany, and she will surely be worthy of a biographical treatment one day in The Michigan Botanist.” I wish he had lived to see the July-December 2018 volume of that journal, now called The Great Lakes Botanist, in which Professor Garrett E. Crow and I published just that.

I began corresponding with Ed Voss in October of 2005, and he responded to my first e-mail with characteristic delight and enthusiasm: “I have hoped that someone with Grand Rapids connections would undertake a thorough treatment of Emma Cole!” It turned out that not only had he published her article, he included her in several surveys of historical Michigan botany and referenced her in his Flora.

Dr. Edward G. Voss and author Julie Stivers, at the University of Michigan Herbarium, 2005. Photo by John Stivers.

When Emma Cole died in 1910, she left a very substantial estate that included a bequest to the University of Michigan to establish a scholarship in botany. (I still have not determined how she was able to accumulate an estate that included many property holdings on the salary of a high school teacher.) In the 1953-54 academic year, Edward Voss was an Emma Cole Scholar, and he retained a lifelong interest in “Miss Cole,” as he persisted in addressing her. Not only did he provide me with a wealth of materials he had collected, he spent hours with me pulling Emma’s herbarium sheets from the University of Michigan collection so they could be photographed for various programs about her I was presenting, including tracing her botanical travels through Europe, Cuba, Mexico and all over the U.S. Her herbarium, after serving as the basis of the natural history exhibitions at the Kent Scientific Institute until the 1930s, was put on permanent loan at the University of Michigan in the 1970s. Dr. Voss also became my gentle coach in the labyrinths of botanical terminology, historical and contemporary.

Emma had substantial contact with renowned botanists during her lifetime. As I proceeded in my pursuit of information about her, the Internet became a much more significant source. In those early years, before resources such as the Biodiversity Heritage Library were readily available, most of the online listings were finding aids for archival holdings. I found an intriguing reference to “50 letters of E. Cole” in the archives of the Harvard University Herbarium, and mentions of Emma Cole in the correspondence record of Charles Sprague Sargent at the Arnold Arboretum.

Again, a treasure trove. In 2008 I traveled to Cambridge to read and copy those letter. During the time she was compiling her data for Grand Rapids Flora, Emma corresponded extensively with Dr. Benjamin Lincoln Robinson, Director of the Gray Herbarium at Harvard, and his young assistant, Merritt Lyndon Fernald (who were in the midst of writing the 7^th edition of Gray’s Manual of Botany). The correspondence, which we have reproduced in the Great Lakes Botanist article, is one-sided, as only her letters survived. But from her repeated gratitude expressed for their assistance, it is clear that they provided interested and detailed advice on nomenclature and species identification.

The archive of correspondence with Charles Sprague Sargent, Director of the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard, was equally one-sided, consisting of copies only of his letters to her. She evidently had sent him numerous specimens from one of his many plant passions, the genus Crataegus (Rosaceae), and he made several visits to Grand Rapids to explore what she had found. He credited her help in describing twenty new species, and even named one Crataegus coleae, a recognition that has persisted despite the taxonomic debate surrounding this genus.

At this point in my research, after giving several public programs about Emma Cole and working with the Women’s History Council to nominate her to the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame (she was inducted in 2007), I was at a loss as to what to do next. I had come to the opinion that the most useful next step would be to visit some of her collecting areas in the 585 square miles covered in Grand Rapids Flora, find out what might still be growing there, and publish some kind of guide that could be used by contemporary plant enthusiasts. I went as far as determining the most likely spots that would still be accessible, and found myself hopelessly in over my head with the botanical work. I stored my Emma Cole boxes away in our attic, and thought that someday I might pick up that idea again.

Eight years later — I had a call from the president of the Women’s History Council. Students from Calvin College in Grand Rapids had tracked down an article I had written about Emma for the Council’s newsletter. They were involved in a project to — revisit the collecting areas outlined in Grand Rapids Flora, assess what was growing there now and publish their results! In January of 2016 I met with Dr. Garrett Crow and Dr. David Warners, visiting scholar and professor of botany, respectively, who were directing the student project (Dr. Warners also had been an Emma Cole scholar at the University of Michigan). The three of us have given public programs about Emma and the project, and Garrett published an article updating Emma’s nomenclature in the July 2017 issue of The Great Lakes Botanist. Learn more about the student project in this post by Drs. Crow and Warners.

Me? Someday I’m going to work out how this remarkable woman left an estate totaling nearly a half-million dollars in today’s money, a curiosity sparked over two long afternoons in Kent County Probate Court records, poring over her 60-page will. Some day.

“Caesar’s Head.” Lounsberry and Rowan. Southern wild flowers and trees. 1900. Contributed in BHL by NCSU Libraries /Archive.org.

When the flower seekers reached a great crevice in the rock called Caesar’s Head, their eyes no longer sought the ground, but rested and wandered over the panorama of far-stretching mountains and the fertile valley of the depth below. Could they have trodden over that broad surface, what discoveries might they have made; what secrets have gathered from Nature’s heart? (Lounsberry and Rowan, Southern wild flowers and trees.)

Artist Marian Ellis Rowan depicts herself with botanist Alice Lounsberry peering over a cliff face on Caesar’s Head, South Carolina, as they travel together to research their botanical guidebooks. (Look closely for the two figures on the ledge!) The pair’s collaboration produced A guide to the wild flowers (1899) and A guide to the trees (1900), both popular guides to North American flora; this image comes from their guide Southern wild flowers and trees, together with shrubs, vines and various forms of growth found through the mountains, the middle district and the low country of the South (1901).

Their three guides are illustrated with pen and ink illustrations as well as full color paintings. Intended to make botanical study accessible for a popular audience, they take an ecological approach by organizing species according to where they habitually grow, from aquatic environments to dry sandy soils. In the introduction to Guide to the wild flowers, American botanist and taxonist Nathaniel Lord Britton notes that botanical guides organized by ecosystem reflect a new and significant shift:

[This book will] aid in the appreciation of that new development of botanical study, the science of Plant Ecology. It will teach the novice how altitude, latitude, soil and environment affect the vegetation of certain areas; how certain plants are found growing together because of the nature of the soil and of their surroundings. If it also leads to the understanding of their gradual adaptation to changed conditions it will give a broader and more comprehensive view of plant morphology and lead away from the mistaken idea that plants must and should conform to our artificial definitions, and make clearer the laws of evolution. (Guide to the wild flowers, p. xv)

“Pitcher Plant, Sarracenia purpurea.” Lounsberry and Rowan. A guide to the wild flowers. 1899. Contributed in BHL by New York Botanical Garden, LuEsther T. Mertz Library.

“California poppy, Eschscholtzia Californica and caespitosa.”  Lounsberry and Rowan. A guide to the wild flowers. 1899. Contributed in BHL by New York Botanical Garden, LuEsther T. Mertz Library.

“Great Rhododendron, Rhododendron maximum.”  Lounsberry and Rowan. A guide to the wild flowers. 1899. Contributed in BHL by New York Botanical Garden, LuEsther T. Mertz Library.

Marian ‘Ellis’ Rowan (1848-1922), born in Melbourne, Australia, was a well-known popular artist in her time. Raised by a botanist father, she had access to his internationally famous garden at their home Derriweit Heights while she developed her skills in observational painting. Ferdinand von Mueller, the Victorian Government Botanist and a friend of Rowan’s father, also encouraged her interest in botanical painting and commissioned her illustrations in his publications.

Diagram of wood and bark cell layers. Lounsberry and Rowan. A guide to the trees. 1900. Contributed in BHL by University of Toronto Earth Science Library (Noranda).

“North American Papaw, Asimina triloba.” Lounsberry and Rowan. A guide to the trees. 1900. Contributed in BHL by University of Toronto Earth Science Library (Noranda).

“Balm of Gilead. Populus candicans.” Lounsberry and Rowan. A guide to the trees. 1900. Contributed in BHL by University of Toronto Earth Science Library (Noranda).

“Arbor-vitae. Thuja occidentalis.” Lounsberry and Rowan. A guide to the trees. 1900. Contributed in BHL by University of Toronto Earth Science Library (Noranda).

Rowan had many opportunities to travel throughout her life, and used them to paint diverse plants in the field. She moved to New Zealand at Pukearuhe on the North Island after her marriage in 1873. During her pregnancy, she moved back to her family home and dove into botanical painting in earnest. In the 1880s she travelled throughout Australia on her husband’s business trips, and also to India and England with her sister. During this time, she painted species for scientific classification, won prestigious exhibition awards, and established herself as a commercially successful artist (despite some controversy stirred by disgruntled male artists). She writes about her travels in her book, A flower-hunter in Queensland and New Zealand (1898). (Interested readers should expect that her descriptions of people of color reflect a white imperialist perspective.)

In 1895 Rowan left Australia for a trip to England and America, where she met Alice Lounsberry in New York in 1896 and extended her stay to take on their collaborative projects. Later in life she would travel to New Guinea, where despite her declining health, she produced over 300 paintings of Birds of Paradise, butterflies, flora, and fungi.

“Trumpets. Sarracenia Drummondi.” Lounsberry and Rowan. Southern wild flowers and trees. 1901. Contributed in BHL by NCSU Libraries.

“Loblolly Bay. Gordonia lacianthus.” Lounsberry and Rowan. Southern wild flowers and trees. 1901. Contributed in BHL by NCSU Libraries.

“Scarlet painted-cup. Castilleja coccinea.” Lounsberry and Rowan. Southern wild flowers and trees. 1901. Contributed in BHL by NCSU Libraries.

Biographical details on Alice Lounsberry (1873-1929) are more sparse. She was a New Yorker, and would have been about twenty-three when she proposed her vision of a collaborative project with Rowan, who by then was an internationally acclaimed painter. They spent at least two years traveling together in the U.S. to research their botanical guides.

Lounsberry shares some of that process in the preface to Southern Wildflowers and Trees,

To learn something of the history, the folk-lore and the uses of southern plants and to see rare ones growing in their natural surroundings, Mrs. Rowan and I travelled in many parts of the south, exercising always our best blandishments to get the people of the section to talk with us. Through the mountainous region we drove from cabin to cabin, and nowhere could we have met with greater kindness and hospitality. At the present time, however, there seems to be little country-lore concerning numbers of southern plants. In years to come, when they are better known, more tales of wonder will, no doubt, be woven about them. But for variety and beautiful, luxuriant growth the southern field is perhaps unrivalled. (Lounsberry and Rowan, Southern wild flowers and trees, pp. ix-x).

Lounsberry credits the Biltmore Herbarium in North Carolina as an essential resource.

“From the summit of Satula Mountain.” Lounsberry and Rowan. Southern wild flowers and trees. 1901. Contributed in BHL by NCSU Libraries.

Southern wild flowers and trees shares snapshots of the pair’s travels with a scattering of landscape paintings and descriptive vignettes. The above image (“From the summit of Satula Mountain”) pairs with the caption:

At the approach of twilight we stood on the top-most rock of Satula Mountain about which, as a great unbroken ring, row after row, arise the mountains; for so is this peak encircled by the great Appalachian system. To our view the most distant ones appeared as though blending with the sky, while those nearer became more clear until was reached the green verdure at our feet. Nor were these mountains simply an undulatory line. Ruggedly and individually formed, each peak had withal a look humane and friendly. Between the rocks were fresh flowers, and higher than all else a pine, stunted and forlorn, raised its ungainly branches. (Lounsberry and Rowan, Southern wild flowers and trees.)

On her own, Lounsberry wrote and published other books including:

The wild flower book for young people, 1906. New York, F. A. Stokes company. Digitized in BHL by Cornell University Library.

The garden book for young people, 1908. New York, F. A. Stokes company. Digitized in BHL by Smithsonian Libraries.

Gardens near the sea; the making and care of gardens on or near the coast with reference also to lawns and grounds and to trees and shrubbery, 1910. New York, Frederick A. Stokes company. Digitized in BHL by Cornell University Library.

References

“Alice Lounsberry.” Accessed: https://upclosed.com/people/alice-lounsberry/

“Ellis Rowan: Plant Hunter.” Wilson, Sally. Accessed: https://theplanthunter.com.au/culture/ellis-rowan-plant-hunter/

“The Flower Hunter Ellis Rowan.” National Library of Australia. Accessed: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/44384/20040920-0000/www.nla.gov.au/exhibitions/ellisrowan/home.html

“A group of flowers in a jar and a bird’s nest,” by Princess Elizabeth after Margaret Meen. Now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Public domain, retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.

As you may have seen in BHL’s blog yesterday, The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, has been partnering with the Oak Spring Garden Foundation to digitize works by women botanical artists held in Kew’s archives. One of these talented but largely unknown artists is Margaret Meen – whose botanicals graced the walls of royal palaces and scientific academies. In fact, though little remembered or written about today, Meen’s botanicals and her prowess as an instructor of fledgling artists left a lasting impression on British botanical illustration.

Margaret Meen was born sometime around 1751 in the English county of Suffolk, but lived most of her life in London in order to better sustain herself as a working artist and teacher.  Though it is not known where or how Meen developed her skill as an artist, her brother Henry was Prebend of Twyford and also taught at St. Paul’s, indicating that Margaret most likely came from a family of some wealth and standing and thus would have had access to an education in the arts.  Certainly Henry’s status in London allowed Margaret to come into contact with the upper echelon of British aristocracy, and Meen’s talent as an artist was soon recognized by the royals.

One of her most celebrated patrons, in fact, was Queen Charlotte—wife of George III—who wrote in her diary in 1789 that she “drew with Miss Mean [sic] from 10 till one,” and who most likely purchased a painting of flowers that now hangs at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Additionally, the queen’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth, was quite the budding artist herself, and her notable painting “Flower piece with bird’s nest” (1792) is modeled after Meen’s work purchased by the queen.  The princess even maintained a friendly correspondence with Meen as late as 1822.

Chrysanthemums and a fly. Reproduced with permission from the Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, digitized with support from the Oak Spring Garden Foundation.

Aside from being the occasional tutor to artistically-inclined members of the royal family, Meen was a member of and exhibited her work at the Royal Academy from 1775 to 1785 and also with the Associated Artist in 1810. She was also employed to document the many new plants being grown in the Royal Gardens at Kew in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, using William Aiton’s Hortus Kewensis to name the species she illustrated. At this time, the Gardens at Kew were unrivaled in Britain for their botanical collection.

Her work, though largely unheralded, has been highly praised on the occasions that it is critiqued with special notice of Meen’s prodigious output and effective illustrative techniques.  Also, usually mentioned with Meen’s name is her founding of the periodical Exotic Plants from the Royal Gardens at Kew (1790), which she dedicated to Queen Charlotte but which only lasted for two issues.

Watercolor of various flowers and bees. Reproduced with permission from the Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, digitized with support from the Oak Spring Garden Foundation.

Finally, Meen spent a large part of her later years as a drawing tutor for families with the means to provide their children with one and as an instructor for larger groups of students at a school in Notting Hill, London.  Among Meen’s pupils was the future Lady Northampton and Emma Smith, the future wife of Jane Austen’s nephew and biographer. Meen kept up her teaching until late in her life and as she never married or had children of her own, was especially determined to impart her artist lessons on to young minds in whom she saw latent talent.

Margaret Meen’s career as a botanical artist took her from the halls of Buckingham Palace to chambers of the Royal Academy and the schoolrooms of London. Over her long life she not only contributed to the furtherance of scientific knowledge through her botanical prints but also to the development of young artists from the most privileged to those who simply attended her classes in Notting Hill. Her artwork was appreciated by everyone from the Queen of England to its most revered scientists and its precocious young scholars. Though little remembered today, Margaret Meen’s art and legacy thus stands as an important part of late 18th and early 19th century British botanical history and deserves to be better celebrated today.

Watercolor of pansy and unknown flower. Reproduced with permission from the Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, digitized with support from the Oak Spring Garden Foundation.

This post was updated on 22 February 2021 to correct birth and death dates for Meen and a typo in quoted materials from Queen Charlotte’s diary.

References

Blunt, Wilfrid and William T. Stearn. The Art of Botanical Illustration. New York: Antique Collectors Club Press, 1993. Originally published in 1950.

Mabey, Richard. The Flowering of Kew. London, UK: Ebury Press, 1988.

McDonald, Kelly M. “Margaret Meen: A Life in Four Letters.” Academia.edu.

Royal Academy. “Anderson’s Notes on the 1775 Exhibits of James Lambert, William Laranson, P.J. Loutherbourg, William Martin, J. Mauris, Jeremiah Meyer, Margaret Meen and Mary Moser.”

Royal Collection Trust. “Description of ‘Flower piece with bird’s nest.’”