Margaret Gatty: A Life of Seaweed and Stories
Children’s author and expert in algae
And, “Do we meet once again?” said a zoophyte to a seaweed (a Corallina ) in whose company he had been thrown ashore,– “Do we meet once again? This is a real pleasure. What strange adventures we have gone through since the waves flung us on the sands together!”
Margaret Gatty, Parables from Nature, 1855
In the late Georgian and early Victorian eras, seaweed collecting was a popular pastime among those who had the means to escape the smoggy cities and travel to the coast to take the air. Women gathered these ‘flowers of the sea’, and dried and pressed them in albums as mementoes of their seaside visits. The albums held fading memories and mildewed wracks, and were eventually thrown away. But set apart from those dilettantes who dabbled were dedicated women who collected and studied seaweed in a scientific way, and whose work uncovered rare and unusual species that might have otherwise remained unknown to the lettered experts.
Margaret Scott was two years old when her mother died. Margaret’s father, Alexander Scott, close friend and chaplain of Lord Nelson, and veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, did not remarry. He did not send Margaret and her sister Horatia to school. Instead, they were raised by family and friends in a house of…
