Irish Examiner View: Ellen Hutchins Festival to remember Ireland's first botanist

Carrie O’Flynn, historical re-enactor, in costume of the early 1800s, on Whiddy Island, at the Ellen Hutchins Festival two years ago

Ellen Hutchins, Ireland’s first female botanist, will be remembered next week as the annual Ellen Hutchins Festival gets underway online from Saturday.

The significant contribution made to the world of botany by this singular 18th-century woman might have been lost to us had it not been for Michael Mitchell, professor of botany at NUI Galway, and Ellen’s great-great-grand niece Madeline.

Madeline Hutchins, great-great-grand niece to Ellen, helped preserve her work.

In 1999, the National Botanical Gardens with Prof  Mitchell published a list of some 1,200 plants, mostly seaweeds, lichens, mosses and liverworts, that Ellen Hutchins gathered in the habitats near her home in Bantry Bay. She discovered many plants “new to science” that now bear her name.

In recent years, Madeline uncovered several of her letters stashed in two plastic bags which might have been thrown out. Our history is sometimes contained in the most precarious of places. 

This story, though, was rescued and next week’s festival celebrates a woman who, in her 30 short years, impressed her male contemporaries with “her extraordinary talents and no less extraordinary industry”.