Ireland’s first female botanist: Ellen Hutchins (1785–1815)

220 years ago, in the summer of 1805, on the shores of Bantry Bay, West Cork, Ireland, a young woman aged 20 was shown how to make seaweed specimens by a botanist from Trinity College Dublin. 

Historical re-enactor, Carrie O’Flynn, dressed as Ellen Hutchins might have been,

on the shore of Whiddy Island, Bantry Bay, during a seaweed event in the Ellen Hutchins Festival 2018. 

In the few days they had spent ‘botanising’ together, he had been very impressed by her botanical skills and knowledge. He asked her to help him identify the species of seaweeds present in the bay, by making and sending him specimens of anything that appeared to be ‘new to Ireland’ or ‘new to science’. 

The young woman was Ellen Hutchins of Ballylickey on Bantry Bay and the botanist was James Townsend Mackay, Botanic Gardener at Trinity.  He was on a tour of the south west of Ireland in search of material for a flora of Ireland, which he would publish much later, in 1836.  

Botanical Success

After James Mackay’s visit to Ballylickey in the summer of 1805, Ellen dedicated as much time as she could to the pursuit of botany, specifically the study of seaweeds (marine algae), freshwater algae, lichens, mosses and liverworts. She made a significant contribution to the understanding of these plants and found many species new to science or new to Ireland - 3 mosses, 5 lichens, 14 liverworts and about 15 seaweeds.

Celebrating Ellen

Ellen Hutchins (1785-1815) is now widely recognised as Ireland's first female botanist and her achievements are celebrated each August in the Ellen Hutchins Festival. There are a series of walks, talks and workshops on botany and botanical art in and near Bantry, during Heritage Week, this year - 16th to 24th August 2025. 

Within her specialist areas of botany, the study of non-flowering plants also known as cryptogams, Ellen was and still is well known and highly respected. Her specimens are held in collections in Dublin, London and New York and those in London (Natural History Museum) are still in use for ID purposes and research internationally.

Two specimens of seaweed from the Herbarium, Botany Department, Trinity College Dublin.

Before the first Festival in 2015 and the development of the Ellen Hutchins website, Ellen’s story was little known outside of the world of botany. Most Irish people, even in Bantry, would say that they had “never heard of her”. Her story is engaging, moving and well worth discovering. Many of Ellen’s letters to botanists and to two of her brothers have survived, meaning that much of her story can be told in her own words. 

Botany and health

Poor health played a major part in Ellen’s life, it led her into botany, and then botany helped her cope with it. Born in 1785, at Ballylickey, Ellen spent most of her life there. When a young girl, she was sent to a girls school between Donnybrook and Dublin and while there fell ill. A family friend, Dr Whitley Stokes, Professor of Physic (medicine) at Trinity College Dublin, was consulted and he suggested that she came to live with his family in Dublin, where she recovered. He encouraged her to take up botany, one of his interests, as a healthy activity, and we think that she studied his books and was tutored by him. 

On her return to Ballylickey, Ellen was carer for her mother who was ill and for a disabled brother, who had “lost the use of his limbs” in an accident falling on ice. Unfortunately, her bouts of poor health continued throughout her life. Botany provided a pastime and a counterbalance to her own illness and her caring responsibilities. 

It was through Dr Stokes that James Mackay met with Ellen at Ballylickey and botanised with her from there. Ellen clearly already knew her flowering plants very well. Mackay suggested that Ellen focused on seaweeds. Bantry Bay was (and still is) an excellent place to do this. Seaweeds were a neglected branch of botany at the time, and one that Mackay had been asked to study by the Professor of Botany at Trinity. Ellen was delighted to have found someone who shared her “passion for plants” and who had asked for her help. This gave a purpose to her botanizing and she spent any spare minute she had on the study of the seaweeds and other non-flowering plants.

Friendship through botany

Ellen clearly had great skill in identifying plants, and the curiosity and determination to work out which were known and which were new. She would go out up the mountains, in the family boat round the bay and to Whiddy Island, or just out in the garden and on the shoreline at Ballylickey, or to the woods at Glengarriff, collecting specimens of new discoveries she was making in seaweeds, mosses and liverworts and lichens, to bring home to press, identify, write notes on and send off to James Mackay. 

Mackay passed the specimens onto botanists making a study of each genus, including Dawson Turner of Great Yarmouth, England, and when Turner wrote to thank Ellen, a correspondence started between them that was to last for over seven years, until Ellen's death aged just twenty nine. Their letters, which show the development of a tremendously strong friendship, are held in the archives at Kew Gardens, London and Trinity College Cambridge. Transcriptions of all 120 of them are now available on the Ellen’s Letters page of the Ellen Hutchins website www.ellenhutchins.com where you will also find letters between Ellen and James Mackay and some letters that Ellen wrote to her brothers. 

Silhouette of woman writing in the style of the early 1800s; historical re-enactor Carrie O’Flynn, silhouette by Jenny Dempsey Design. There is no known portrait of Ellen. (Credit: **)

Botanical artist

In July 1808, Ellen’s discovery of the ‘fruit’ of one seaweed, Velvet Horn (then Fucus tomentosus, now Codium tomentosum) led her to make a small drawing of it to send to Dawson Turner. In her words: “but fearing that drying may alter its appearance I have attempted to draw it as it appear’d when recent”.

Soon she was drawing all the new and interesting seaweeds she had found, as the best way of showing others how they looked when growing. Dawson Turner was amazed at the quality and detail of her drawings and begged her to send him more. He had some engraved for use in his book on seaweeds, Historia Fucorum, and Lewis Dillwyn used some in his book, British Confervae. Hundreds of Ellen’s drawings of seaweeds are now held in the archives at Kew Gardens.

Fig 1.                  Fig 2.

Fig 1. Ellen’s drawing of Fucus tomentosus as used in Dawson Turner’s book Historia Fucorum. (Credit: Kew*)

Fig 2. Drawing by Ellen Hutchins

In Ellen’s time called Conferva setacea now called Halurus flosculosus (Credit: Kew*)

A large number of Ellen’s specimens of liverworts feature in another publication, British Jungermanniae, by a leading botanist of the day, William Jackson Hooker who later became the first director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in London. 

An untimely end

Care for her mother and her own ill health often prevented Ellen from getting out, and by early 1813, both hers and her mother's health were deteriorating. They moved to stay in an inn in Bandon where they could get better medical care than in Bantry. Ellen was treated by the doctor with mercury for a liver complaint, as was common practice at the time, but it probably contributed to her early death. In March 1814, her mother died and was buried in Bandon. 

Ellen, still very ill, moved to live with her brother Arthur and his wife Matilda at Ardnagashel, near Ballylickey. In her last letter to Dawson Turner, in November 1814, she wrote that “reduced to a skeleton, I frighten everybody”. She was bed bound and wrote that she could “not read or amuse my mind in any way” and her final sentence was “Send me a moss anything just to look at.” She died in February 1815, a month before her thirtieth birthday, and was buried in Garryvurcha churchyard in Bantry with no headstone. 

Recognition

In 1914, a botanist, Henry Letts, writing about Ellen contacted the Hutchins family (still at Ardnagashel) and in one letter wrote “It is a pity her name is not on some memorial stone at her grave, she well deserved that it should be.” Finally, in 2015, the bicentenary of Ellen’s death, this was achieved, when a special plaque to commemorate Ellen as a significant scientist was placed on the west wall of the Garryvurcha church in Bantry. The plaque says ‘coastal flora and fauna’ as Ellen also studied shells, finding at least two new to Ireland.

Plaque on Garryvurcha church, Bantry.

Leading botanists of the day, including James Mackay in Dublin, Lewis Dillwyn in Wales, Dawson Turner and William Jackson Hooker in England were keen to receive Ellen’s specimens and notes and were aware of the sizeable contribution she was making to the understanding of the non-flowering species. James Edward Smith, founder and president of the Linnean Society London asked (through Dawson Turner) if Ellen would please provide descriptions of the new things she found but she declined to do so. These botanists and others, including Robert Brown, named plants after her in recognition of her contribution to botany. Many of these plants have had their names changed over the years, but there are some still with hutchinsiae as the second part of their scientific names. 

Drawing by Ellen Hutchins 

In Ellen’s time called Hutchinsia fastigata now called Vertebrata lanosa (credit: Kew*)

Poetry too

Ellen often felt lonely, living remotely and with caring responsibilities tying her to home, and she gained a huge amount of satisfaction from the strong friendship that she gained with fellow botanist, Dawson Turner, through their seven year correspondence. As well as exchanging specimens of plants, and puzzling over those that were the hardest to identify, he sent her botanical journals and botany books, and beyond botany, recommended literary authors to her. Poetry and travel writing were two genres in which they shared an interest and they wrote to each other about the works of Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Tasso and Danté. 

It was James Mackay in Dublin who, at Ellen’s request, found, bought and sent to Ellen a copy of Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake, when it sold out almost immediately on publication in both Dublin and London. Ellen wrote to Dawson Turner that “Having little leisure during the day for reading I sat up the night after the book came & never perceived how the time glided away until daylight appeared”.

Bantry Bay and a love of landscape 

West Cork including the Bantry Bay area had been neglected by the botanical community, largely because it was remote, unknown, and travel to it and around it was difficult. It was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century, in Ellen Hutchins’ time, that botanists started to realise what a wonderful range of habitats the area has with a rich and diverse flora. This realisation came largely from the specimens sent by Ellen, as well as visits that a few of them made to the area after seeing material from Ellen.

View from Knockboy (An Cnoc Buí) the highest point in Cork - with Bantry Bay and Glengarriff Harbour in the background. 

Taken on a botany walk during the first Ellen Hutchins Festival in August 2015. 

Ellen had a great love of landscape as well as her passion for plants. Bantry Bay and its surrounding mountains are well worth a visit to see where she lived and to follow in her footsteps to explore the botany of the Bay. 

Madeline Hutchins

Ellen Hutchins Festival, researcher on Ellen and her great-great-grandniece

Sources

Trinity College Cambridge, Wren Library. Dawson Turner correspondence. 

Royal Botanic Gardens Kew – Library & Archives. Ellen Hutchins Correspondence.

The Herbarium, Botany Department, Trinity College Dublin: James Mackay Correspondence. 

Ellen’s letters to her brothers: Hutchins Family Collection.

Ellen Hutchins (1785-1815) Botanist and Artist – Archive of the Month: Church of Ireland, February 2016. Paper by John Lucey and Madeline Hutchins on the provenance and background of Alicia Hutchins’ memoir on Ellen, and including the memoir itself. (2016) The introductory piece is HERE. The full paper with the memoir (at the end of it) is HERE.

Further reading

Ellen Hutchins (1785-1815) Botanist of Bantry Bay, by Madeline Hutchins, published 2019 https://ellenhutchins.com/product/ellen-hutchins-book/

Ellen Hutchins website: https://ellenhutchins.com

Ellen’s Letters: https://ellenhutchins.com/ellens-letters/

Directory of Irish Biography: https://www.dib.ie/biography/hutchins-ellen-a4175



* Documents reproduced with the kind permission of the Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

** Silhouette of woman writing in the style of the early 1800s; historical re-enactor Carrie O’Flynn, silhouette by Jenny Dempsey Design, reproduced by kind permission of the Ellen Hutchins Festival

Cork