{"id":6943,"date":"2025-11-30T10:17:21","date_gmt":"2025-11-30T10:17:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/?p=6943"},"modified":"2025-11-30T10:17:21","modified_gmt":"2025-11-30T10:17:21","slug":"botanists-in-the-family","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/2025\/11\/30\/botanists-in-the-family\/","title":{"rendered":"Botanists in the Family"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is difficult to know where to begin with this post, since several strands have got intertwined. I guess the prompt for this is, as with my last post<\/a>, the meeting at the Royal Society celebrating women from the past who, whether or not they would have identified themselves as scientists\/natural philosophers, certainly got involved with the scientific endeavour and made significant contributions. I did intend to write about Margaret Cavendish, but that will have to wait, as I\u2019ve disappeared down a genealogical rabbit hole. This was prompted by seeing the name Francis Boott on one of the slides, I think certifying some botanical specimen. Francis Boott<\/a> (1792-1863) was American by birth, a secretary to the Linnean Society, a physician in whose London house the first recorded use of an anaesthetic for a dental procedure was recorded \u2013 and (if I\u2019ve got my generations right), my great, great, great grandfather. His mother-in-law was Derby-based Lucy Hardcastle<\/a> (1771-1834), a botanist of some distinction and acquaintance of Erasmus Darwin (one of my heroes<\/a>, as a polymath) and, more particularly, his two illegitimate daughters. It is not for nothing that my grandmother\u2019s middle name was the otherwise bizarre choice of Hardcastle.<\/p>\n

Lucy Hardcastle befriended Francis Boott when he was on an extended stay in Britain and, after a family disagreement when he went back to the USA, he continued his interactions with her upon his permanent return to this country. In due course he married Lucy\u2019s daughter Mary and they moved to London. Through his introduction, Hardcastle started a correspondence with Sir James Edward Smith<\/a>, a leading botanist of the day and the founder of the Linnean Society. She did many delicate drawings of plants and in 1830 she published a book about Linnean classification. Whereas her acquaintance Erasmus Darwin wrote a long poem in rhyming couplets on the same theme entitled The Loves of the Plants<\/a> <\/em>(1789), when Hardcastle wrote her book she carefully avoided the use of the words male, female and sex, no doubt feeling such words were inappropriate for a woman (particularly one who ran a school for girls), although the sexual parts of the plants were clear in her illustrations. I learned all this and much more from a fairly recent pamphlet about her life, The Rediscovery of Lucy Hardcastle<\/a>,<\/em> written by Jonathan and Anne Powers, available through the Derby Museum.[1]<\/a> This museum holds a number of her drawings and letters. All this I have picked up in the last couple of weeks since the Royal Society event.<\/p>\n

\"Lucy<\/a><\/p>\n

Lucy Hardcastle, An Introduction to the Elements of the Linnaean System of Botany, for Young Persons (London: Thomas Richardson, 1830)., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons<\/em><\/p>\n

But then, in trying to work out quite how many generations I needed to go back to get to Lucy Hardcastle, I fell into another rabbit hole concerning another botanical relative, or perhaps more precisely, a well-known Victorian gardener: the Reverend Charles Wolley Dod (1826-1904), who was my great great grandfather and whose son Francis married Lucy Hardcastle\u2019s great granddaughter, Annette Mary Clarke. The genealogy is a nightmare to disentangle because, in the way of Victorian families which ran out of male heirs, surnames got changed along the route, and often the same first names were recycled. My reading is that the Rev Charles was born Charles Hurt, married Mary Wolley who then became Wolley Dod upon the death of the relevant male heirs. The Rev Charles then changed his name formally to Wolley Dod in 1868 and in 1877 acceded to the family estate in Cheshire. Up till then he had been a Master at Eton, but thereafter he could use the gardens around the Hall to experiment and breed new varieties. He interacted with the eminent gardener Gertrude Jekyll<\/a> who said of him:<\/p>\n

\u2018of all these friendly gardeners, the one whom I felt to be the most valuable was Rev C.\u00a0 Wolley Dod, scholar, botanist and great English gentleman; an enthusiast for plant life; an experienced gardener; and the kindest of instructors.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(quoted in Huntia<\/a>). He is depicted in one of the south nave aisle\u2019s stained glass windows of Liverpool Cathedral.<\/p>\n

Coming full circle to the Royal Society event, that same Huntia article says how Ellen Willmott<\/a>, would stay with the Wolley Dod\u2019s and use the Rev Charles as an advisor. Ellen Willmott (1858-1934) was one of the many women discussed at the Royal Society, covering her role in financing botanical explorations and the importance of the role she played in a widespread network of collectors. She was identified as a central node in such network analysis, with a huge circle of correspondents. She used her family money to employ over one hundred gardeners at her home as well as covering the costs of international teams seeking new plants. Wilmott was able to penetrate the scientific establishment, becoming one of the first women fellows of the Linnean Society.<\/p>\n

None of this has any bearing on why I was enthusiastic about science at school. I vaguely knew about the Rev Charles Wolley Dod, because we had a rose in our small garden referred to as the Wolley Dod rose, but he was never described to me as a biologist (after all, he wasn\u2019t one, although he carried out a lot of plant breeding). And, despite my ornithological inclinations<\/a> I was put off biology at school anyhow by a formidable teacher as much as by the then curriculum. But it is interesting to see these different strands come together, all prompted by attending an event celebrating 80 years since the election of the first women to the Royal Society \u2013 and thereafter making extensive use of the web to track down relationships.<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> For what it\u2019s worth, this pamphlet debunks the story in Desmond King Hele\u2019s life of Erasmus Darwin<\/a>, where he suggests \u2013 based on correspondence between Charles Darwin and Francis Galton \u2013 that Lucy Hardcastle (n\u00e9e Swift) was actually a third illegitimate daughter of Erasmus. Sadly, therefore, I must conclude I am no descendant of his!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is difficult to know where to begin with this post, since several strands have got intertwined. I guess the prompt for this is, as with my last post, the meeting at the Royal Society celebrating women from the past … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[1731,191,1730,1729],"class_list":["post-6943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-women-in-science","tag-ellen-wilmott","tag-erasmus-darwin","tag-francis-boott","tag-lucy-hardcastle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6943"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6943\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6946,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6943\/revisions\/6946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}