True Dirt

plant women

Gertrude Jekyll notwithstanding, most of the big names in plant history, plant collecting, and gardening are men's--Pliny the Elder, Carolus Linnaeus (the culprit who gave us Latin plant names), Sir Joseph Banks, Capability Brown, and Graham Stuart Thomas, to name a few. Arbiters of gardening taste such as Rosemary Verey and Martha Stewart are not to be discounted but there are a lot of women in the history of plant discovery and garden innovation that have not quite gotten their due. I think Miss Ellen Willmott is one of them. The intrepid California amateur botanist and writer Lester Rowntree is another.

Cercocarpus traskiae immediately brings to mind the wind-blown slopes and sheltered cañons of the Santa Barbara Channel Islands where Mrs. Trask went plant exploring--Lester Rowntree, in Hardy Californians (1936)

The hardy Californians Rowntree is referring to are plants; quite hardy herself, Lester traveled solo throughout the deserts and mountains of the west during the 1920s and 30s in her car (a Model A or T or something of that ilk), camping out and tramping through what any backpacker or desert rat knows is wild and often hostile terrain, taking notes and photographs. I can only imagine how Mrs. Trask, some decades earlier, got around Santa Catalina Island.

My first field guide to California wild flowers was written by a woman. Mary Elizabeth Parsons' "The Wild Flowers of California," was published in 1897, just four years after the hugely popular "How To Know the Wildflowers" by Mrs. William Starr Dana. From opposite coasts, the American public was being introduced to native botanicals by a couple of ambitious plant women.

Parsons and Dana were just emerging from an era when women did not publish, at least under their own (female) name. Think of the Georges--Eliot and Sand. Miss Willmott, of Eryngium fame, managed to publish what would be considered today a scholarly work and not many read it. Her illustrator, however, an artist by the name of Alfred Parsons is more well known. Graham Stuart Thomas reproduced a number of Parsons' watercolors from Miss Willmott's book in his "A Garden of Roses".

What we know of Miss Ellen Willmott falls into the "eccentric" category for the most part even though she obviously had a kind of talent. Here is how she is described in a short piece by Ilene Sternberg at theBrooklyn Botanic garden web site:

Miss Ellen Willmott, a great plantswoman of the same era, dwindled away a fortune largely owing to her gardening obsession. When she outgrew her 50 acres in Essex, she bought a French château and an Italian villa to plant up, at one point employing more than 80 gardeners. Imperious and autocratic, she would blow her stack over the presence of a single weed in the garden or the discovery that the bloom time of one of her plants had been imprecisely documented. Her descent into bankruptcy never interfered with her purchase of any rare plant she coveted....Once, detained for shoplifting, Willmott called upon her friend the Queen to intercede. The department store, after a yearlong hullabaloo, had to apologize for its "error." As her fortune faded, Willmott became increasingly paranoid, toting a revolver in her handbag, booby trapping her home against intruders, and having her daffodil display trip-wired so that air guns would blast anyone attempting to filch a few.

Well, who of us has not veered close to the cliff of bankruptcy in the throes of garden or plant obsession? As for the revolver, a bit extreme. But the air guns are pure poetry.

Miss Willmott did not spend all her money on herself however, and I won't let her get dumped in the dustbin of botanical oddpersons. She also supported plant hunting expeditions, in particular those of Ernest Wilson who made four famous trips to China and collected some 1500 species of plants that were then introduced to the "west". On Wilson's third trip to China, he found, high in the Tibetan Plateau near the source of the Min River, a brilliant blue-flowering plant--Ceratostigma. He sent some seeds back to Harvard, a sponsor of the expedition, and the director of Harvard's arboretum sent the seeds on to Miss Willmott; she propagated two plants in her garden at Warley Place, Essex. The species was subsequently classified by Kew Gardens in 1914 as Ceratostigma willmottianum. Miss Willmott also gave several specimens of the rare plant to her friend Gertrude Jekyll.

And what gardener would not.

(this unattributed photo is from the web)

Posted by briggs at March 23, 2006 1:43 PM