Mischievous Creatures: The Forgotten Sisters Who Transformed Early American Science

When I was very small, my mother often called me “Little Miss Mischief.” It meant I had once again done something wrong, but not terribly wrong, and maybe a little bit cute. I was happy with the title. Elizabeth and Margaretta Morris, the sisters of the title of Catherine McNeur’s book, were not so fortunate. Their mischief was seen as serious; they were challenging the exclusive male 19th century science establishment as they sought opportunity and recognition for their work.

Not travelers, the two women conducted their efforts in botany (Elizabeth) and entomology (Margaretta) in the neighborhood of their Germantown, Pennsylvania home. Neither married, but the family wealth (some, alas, gained from the slave trade) allowed them comfortable single lives together. Their social status enabled them to connect with other scientists in this era when the distinction between professionals and amateurs was blurry.

Collecting plants and insects was central to both their fields of study. Elizabeth, for instance, sent many plant specimens to Asa Gray, the first professor of botany at Harvard, and received some from him in return. Though other scientists collected from the far corners of the earth, the Morrises did their work near home, often along nearby Wissahickon Creek.

Elizabeth resisted publicity for herself. She wrote at least 77 articles about her studies, all anonymous, using initials or such names as “A Friend to Farmers.” Margaretta was different. She studied insects that damaged crops in her neighborhood. In 1836 the Hessian fly, Cecidomyia destructor, was attacking wheat throughout the region. Through close observation, she determined that the current understanding of where on the wheat the flies laid their eggs was faulty. In the spirit of helpfulness she allowed her paper describing her discovery to be read aloud by a male cousin at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. McNeur’s description of the resulting uproar shows clearly the challenges faced by women scientists.

Margaretta did not back down. Her efforts to gain acceptance led in 1850 to her membership in the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She and the astronomer Maria Mitchell were elected at the same meeting, the first two women members. Margaretta did not attend.

Mischievous Creatures shows in impressive detail how personal contacts, correspondence, and hard work allowed these two women to participate in the development of science in America in the generation after the Revolution. The reader wanders along the creek with Elizabeth and Margaretta as they collect specimens and learns with admiration how they spread their discoveries across the country.

Review by Priscilla Grundy in the Leaflet, Volume 11 Issue 2, February 2024.

Reviews, Women botanists

Brave the Wild River

Today raft trips through the Grand Canyon are common. Several companies offer choices of a few or many days. One specifies that the client must be at least nine years old. These trips differ greatly from the one Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter took in 1938. One difference is the Hoover Dam. Before the dam, the Colorado River challenged travelers with extreme rapids, rapids now slowed and sometimes covered by the water that rose behind the dam.

Brave the Wild River by Melissa Sevigny recounts how these two women, both affiliated with the University of Michigan botany department, overcame multiple challenges in addition to the river, to map and collect plants in the canyon before many of them were submerged.

Clover, an instructor at the university, was a generation older than Jotter, a graduate student. The trip was Clover’s passion. Opposition came from a chorus of voices proclaiming that the Grand Canyon was “no place for a woman.” She overcame reluctance in the Michigan botany department to approve the project and hesitation by Norman Nevills to guide the trip. He hoped to set up a business floating adventurers through the canyon but was reluctant to take women.

Sevigny takes the reader through the hair-raising trip in boats designed by Nevills, a national media frenzy accompanying the travelers, and Clover’s frustration that no one seemed interested in the plant collecting. She had to harass Nevills to make stops so the women could collect, and the media mostly failed to mention plants as the purpose of the trip.

Sevigny includes the history of the countryside the group passed, as well as biographies of those involved. The book is full of lovely details, like the women’s selection of brown overalls to wear, because Clover thought jeans too masculine. Or the gyrations required to maintain modesty while bathing in the river. (Four men accompanied the women in three boats. The women did the cooking.)

By the end the reader is amazed that any of the collected plants made it back to Michigan and a few to the Smithsonian. Those plants and the carefully detailed descriptions Clovis and Jotter wrote became useful botanic history as scholars have tried to create a picture of flora in the canyon before the dam.

Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy and published in the Leaflet, November 2023, Volume 10, Issue 11.

The Weeds

It’s hard to imagine a more botanical novel than Katy Simpson-Smith’s The Weeds, which takes its narrative structure from Richard Deakin’s 1855 book Flora of the Colosseum of Rome, or, Illustrations and Descriptions of Four Hundred and Twenty Plants Growing Spontaneously upon the Ruins of the Colosseum of Rome. The primary characters are two intentionally unnamed women, one in 2018 and the other in 1854, and the occasional refrain of a ghost, the unsettled spirit of Richard Deakin hovering over the Colosseum.

The contemporary woman is a graduate student from Mississippi, gathering plant observations for her thesis advisor. She is a keen observer of plants and people, and we soon learn she has recently lost her mother (who also had a strong connection with plants). As she works on the Rome Colosseum project, she develops an idea for a thesis exploring climate change through the plant life in Jackson’s Mississippi Coliseum. The 19th century woman has transgressed the norms of society: she is eager to avoid an arranged marriage and takes up petty thievery to make herself unmarriageable. The “you” addressed in her narrative is her lover, a woman. She works as Deakin’s indentured assistant, observing and describing the plants.

Both women consider the wild plants in context (how are they used by humans and animals, how they fit in an ecosystem, how climate affects them). For this, both are rebuked. The thesis advisor is dismissive, telling his student she has “an anecdotal mind,” whereas true scientists (men) are rational, and do not allow sentiment to intrude. Her role is to record and learn, his role is to interpret and author. The fictional Deakin tells his assistant that science is knowledge freed from emotion, and she wonders “how many days or centuries it will take for him to be proven wrong.” Whenever either woman mentions mystical, medical, or agricultural associations of the plants, they are told these things are irrelevant. But the 19th century woman believes “there is a bias against time here, and I must fault science for its disregard of history. Does it think knowledge is not accumulated but sudden?”

By turns furious, hilarious, and botanically erudite, this deeply feminist novel shines a light on the relative invisibility of women’s contributions to botany in particular and science in general. The women characters are never named because that has so often been the case in real life. Nothing in the historical record suggests a resemblance between the fictional Richard Deakin and the real one, but there are undoubtedly many instances of women overlooked and omitted as co-authors and researchers, whose contributions to the pool of knowledge remain unrecognized. Their absence from the record is a ghost that should haunt us.

The book includes a dozen exquisite graphite drawings by Kathy Schermer-Gramm, depicting selected plants of the character’s proposed Flora Colisea Mississippiana. If you want to explore Deakin’s book, a digitized copy is linked here and in the catalog record.

Reviewed by Rebecca Alexander, published in the Leaflet for Scholars, Volume 10, Issue 10, October 2023.

Flora’s Fieldworkers: Women and Botany in Nineteenth-Century Canada

In the nineteenth century, Canadian women got their hands dirty in lots of botanical projects. Flora’s Fieldworkers, edited by Ann Shteir, fills some gaps in the history of these women’s work. The book grew out of a 2017 workshop, “Women, Men, and Plants in nineteenth-century Canada,” at York University in Toronto.

Some women in this volume collected plants. A few sent plant samples to William Jackson Hooker at Kew Gardens in England for his Flora Boreali–Americana and to other plant seekers. Several women established or participated in organizations promoting or educating about botany and horticulture. Others produced botanic or floral art – paintings, albums, quilts. Nearly all gardened.

Flora’s Fieldworkers describes these endeavors, often placing them in a context of pushing the boundaries of the roles socially prescribed for women. Gardening and floral art were women’s work. Everything else in botany required women skillfully to insert themselves into the male-dominated establishment.

Christian Ramsay (1786-1839), the Countess of Dalhousie, amassed great quantities of plant specimens in Canada (and India and Scotland). Some are still preserved in several herbaria. She sent samples to Hooker, which he used. Like almost all the women in this volume, Lady Dalhousie taught herself botany, and she became expert. Her collecting opportunities came as she followed her husband’s diplomatic career. In her case, as in others, the author reminds us that England’s empire-building hovered in the background.

Catherine Parr Traill (1802-1899) was the most famous woman in this collection, though much of her fame grew from her work as a children’s author and natural historian. Plants played a large role in such works as her The Backwoods of Canada, along with the birds and small animals. She combined careful and accurate plant descriptions with the context of her own sense of connection. If she could not find a new plant described in her small botanical library, she happily invented her own name for it.

Traill began collecting plants soon after her arrival in Canada from England in 1832, continuing for seven decades and writing detailed descriptions of each. With the help of her niece, Agnes Fitzgibbon, Traill published two volumes (both using standard nomenclature), Canadian Wild Flowers (in the Miller Library’s Tall Shelves) and Studies of Plant Life in Canada , in the rare book collection. Both titles are digitized and available online.

Ramsay, Fitzgibbon, and Traill join numerous others in this enlightening volume on early women botanists up north.

Reviewed by Priscilla Grundy in Leaflet for Scholars, Volume 10, Issue 7, July 2023

Julia: A Biography of Julia W. Henshaw

“Julia” is a graphic biography of Julia Henshaw (1869-1937), who published the first book on the wild flowers of the Canadian Rockies in 1906. This was a relatively small aspect of her colorful life and author/illustrator Michael Kluckner chose her later role as an ambulance driver in World War I for his book’s cover.

Henshaw had a passion for the mountains, seeded on a visit to Switzerland from her native England as a young woman. She met both Mary Schäffer Warren and Mary Vaux Walcott on a visit to the Rockies for her journalism work in 1898. Kluckner concludes this visit helped focus her interest in the native plants. It is certain she learned much about the flora from the two American women, as well as the techniques of photography which were used to illustrated her book, “Mountain Wild Flowers of Canada” published in 1906 (the Miller Library has the American edition, which is the same except for the title).

Biographers disagree on the possibility of plagiarism in Henshaw’s book. Letters from Warren much later in life expressed bitterness that her protégé published a year earlier than her own book on the wild flowers. Nonetheless, the two women stayed in contact, as both were founding members of the Alpine Club of Canada, and participated together in some of that organization’s functions. One can only hope that their love of plants helped to mellow their professional rivalry.

The author is very skilled at drawing facial expressions that bring out the emotions of his subject and her companions. The tension between Henshaw and Warren is far stronger as portrayed in this media than in the words I have read in other biographies. Other tactics used by Kluckner include interspersing newspaper clips and occasional photographs from the period. He even put himself in the action, seeking answers from the ghost of Henshaw when more conventional research materials failed.

In one of these exchanges between author and subject, the ghost of Henshaw explains, “It works like this – you rest in peace until someone begins to fiddle with your legacy. That wakes you up and you get a chance to respond. The problem is, some biographers don’t listen.”

Excerpted in part from Brian Thompson’s articles in the Winter 2022 and Summer 2023 issues of the Arboretum Bulletin

Wild Flowers of the Undercliff, Isle of Wight

book jacket The Miller Library receives many donations of books each year, and sometimes we open a box and a particular book enchants us. A recent example is a small volume entitled Wild Flowers of the Undercliff, Isle of Wight, published in London in 1881. It is a field guide to a small area of the southern coast of the Isle of Wight, England. The region is prone to landslides and possesses a unique microclimate, as it is protected beneath an escarpment, facing south. The authors, Charlotte O’Brien and C. Parkinson, hoped the book would enable temporary residents of the Undercliff to acquaint themselves with the various plants blooming throughout the year. “As a rule, they are very timid, these ‘wildings of Nature,’ and recede before the advances of man and his bricks and mortar,” and this book seeks to help “seekers after one of the purest of earthly pleasures” [wildflowers] find them.

As a librarian, I have absorbed a concern for ‘bibliographic control,’ the attention to details that help people find the information they need. I was troubled by the lack of a first name for the co-author, and curious about the note in the preface in which the two authors thank “Miss Parkinson” for her colored drawings [8 plates] that illustrate the book. Our copy of the book was inscribed by M. Parkinson, with a dedication to “Miss Prince.” Who were these nameless Parkinsons, I wondered, wanting to give bibliographic credit where it was due.

I asked assistance from a friend who is a gardener and genealogist in England, and she found a reference to an article by David E. Allen (affiliated with the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland), “C. Parkinson, A mystery Wight Botanist identified,” which was published in the 2009 proceedings of the Isle of Wight Natural History & Archaeological Society. We could not obtain a copy, and that made both of us even more eager to solve the mystery.

The initials F.G.S. after Parkinson’s name on the book’s title page might stand for ‘Fellow of the Geological Society,’ and that led to a discovery of an obituary for a “Cyril Parkinson” in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London Vol 26 (1920): “Cyril Parkinson was born at Hesgreave [Hexgreave] Park, near Southwell (Nottinghamshire), and died in London on August 20th, 1919, at the age of 65. During five years’ residence in the Isle of Wight (1875-¬80) he made a collection of fossils, which was acquired by the British Museum (Natural History). He became a Fellow of our Society in 1880. He was a member of the Worcester Naturalists’ Club, and an occasional contributor to ‘Borrow’s [Berrow’s] Worcester Journal’ on natural history subjects. He also contributed articles to various periodicals on natural history, geology, and botany, and brought out a handbook of the Isle of Wight Marine Algae in collaboration with Mrs. O’Brien, of Ventnor.”

book jacket Now that I had birth and death dates and a first name, I used genealogy resources like Ancestry.com and found that Cyril had a sister Marian who lived with him for a time, and she was undoubtedly the illustrator whose signature is in our copy. Census records indicate that she was a woman of “private means,” and this squares with the family’s history as landed gentry with their own coat of arms. At the time of the book’s publication, the 1881 census lists Cyril as a tile manufacturer living with his unmarried sister Marian in Bournemouth, not terribly distant from the Isle of Wight. Their parents were John and Catherine Parkinson of Southwell, Nottinghamshire.

A review of Wild Flowers of the Undercliff appeared in the October 11, 1901 edition of The British Architect and it makes special note of the illustrations: “There are eleven different species of the orchid tribe growing in the Undercliff, and this guide helps one to find these ‘wildings of Nature.’ The beautiful coloured drawings were executed by Miss Parkinson.”

It is very satisfying to list the full names of the co-author and illustrator in the bibliographic record for this book. I would love to discover whether Marian Parkinson illustrated any other botany books, but that is still a mystery.

Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life

book jacket Part biography, part garden photo essay, and part ventriloquist’s act, Marta McDowell’s Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life (Timber Press, 2013) provides a window into Potter’s world. If you have read her children’s books, you will have a lasting impression of the charming adventures of rabbits, hedgehogs, kittens, and ducks but you may not think of Beatrix Potter as a botanical illustrator. I was surprised to discover that the highly accomplished sketch of foxglove and periwinkle on page 27 was made when she was only ten. The best feature of this book is the gathering together of selected drawings and watercolors of plants, fungi, and landscapes. Potter’s natural history illustrations (particularly of mushrooms) are featured in Ambleside’s Armitt museum.

Potter was also a certifiable plant addict, and was not averse to gathering cuttings and seeds in gardens not her own. Royalties from her publications enabled her to acquire property and land, so she ended up with several gardens in England’s Lake District. The weakest part of the book is McDowell’s attempt to channel Beatrix (as she takes the liberty of calling her) by paraphrasing from her journals and letters to feature aspects of the gardens through the seasons. The accompanying photos are glorious (I am captivated by Hill Top garden’s green-painted wrought-iron gate rimed with frost), but it would have been better simply to quote Potter directly.