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Ellen Hutchins: A Life Among Leaves
Ireland’s first female botanist is celebrated in a festival
On a limestone scree, delicate flowers peek out from between the rocks. The flowers are small and white, with four teardrop petals almost hidden by extravagant stamens, and below them sprays of leaves arch like tiny fern fronds. The plant’s scientific name is Hornungia petraea. When it was described by Linnaeus in 1753, it was called Lepidium petraeum and placed among the pepperworts. In 1812, Robert Brown examined the plant and moved it into a new genus, which he named Hutchinsia.
Ellen Hutchins was twenty-seven years old when the genus was named after her. She had been studying plants since she was nineteen, exploring the countryside around her home near Bantry in County Cork. In south-west Ireland, in a landscape where tines of Old Red Sandstone spear into the Atlantic Ocean, and ancient limestone runs into drowned valleys, the flora is rich and varied. When asked to list the plants around her home, Ellen recorded more than 1,000 species of flowers, ferns, mosses, and seaweed.
She was born on 17 March 1785, the youngest daughter of Elinor and Thomas Hutchins. The family lived in Ballylickey on the…
