Elizabeth Warren was a botanist, marine algologist, and author born in Truro.
In eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain, the practice of botany bridged various approaches to nature. At once, botany could be an aesthetic, utilitarian, moral, or intellectual approach to flora. From the mid 1700s to the early 1800s, during the European Enlightenment, science learning was part of general and polite culture. Women were specifically cultivated as consumers of this scientific knowledge, particularly with regards to botany (Shteir 2). However, by 1830, botany, alongside other approaches to natural history, was cultivated as a ‘modern’ and professionalised sub-discipline of science (Shteir 5).
Particularly problematic was the position of women as creators and consumers of botanical knowledge. The move towards professionalisation was a gendered one; away from knowledge for so-called ‘amusement’, produced by ladies in the setting of the home, towards more a ‘serious’ male occupation separated from the domestic sphere. Elizabeth Warren’s life spanned these changes, with her career in botany flourishing right at the very moment that this professionalisation began in earnest.
Early Life
Born in 1786, in Truro, Warren grew up in Flushing. Her father was connected with mining and her mother’s family were prosperous farmers. Her circle included the local gentry and members of parliament, as well as maritime and naval families. Falmouth at this time was a busy naval port and Flushing was the most westerly station of the Post Office Packet Service which linked the British Empire with Britain by sea.
Warren described being drawn to plants from a young age, crawling in the banks to pluck a ‘primeval favourite’ of hers. (Royal Botanic Gardens Kew 1837). Her father died when she was 11 and she moved to live with an uncle, a curate in Kent, in 1806, when she was 20. She remained there until his death in 1823, when she returned to Flushing, aged 37. Warren was provided for in her uncle's will and she did not appear to need to work or marry through her life. She lived with her mother until her death in 1831 then lived alone with a maid well into her 60s.
Although she collected mosses whilst in Kent, it appears that her botanical work began in earnest when she returned to Cornwall, where she came well established in the 1830s. Indeed, she remained drawn to the particularities of Cornish flora for most of her life, and especially to its seaweeds. Unlike Linnaean botany more broadly, which based its categorisation on the reproductive organs of plants, seaweed was a popular area of interest for women, considered an appropriate area of study for women due to its lack of sexual parts. Warren herself portrayed her fieldwork as a gentle activity in which she was appropriately accompanied.
Hortus Siccus
By 1833, she was well-known and well-respected enough in Cornwall to have been put in charge of compiling a Hortus Siccus (dried garden) of the plants of Cornwall for the Royal Cornwall Horticultural Society. She would go on to contribute 341 specimens to the project: 73% of the total plants in this collection (English and English 126).
At the end of 1834, she initiated a correspondence with William Hooker (1785-1865), then the Regius Professor of Botany at the University of Glasgow. Hooker would go on to become the first official director of Kew Gardens in 1841. He kept up a large number of correspondences; his work at Kew in many ways depended on his own networks of correspondents and collectors. Warren not only corresponded with Hooker, but sent him specimens from Cornwall and across the British Empire. Her access to exotic species of plants was facilitated by her family connections to the Navy and her proximity to the Falmouth Packet Service which ferried posts across the British imperial world. Her connections in India were such that she offered Hooker, ‘all you can wish may possibly be procured from that country’ (Royal Botanic Gardens Kew 1839).
Warren’s correspondence with Hooker continued for roughly 25 years and she was responsible for sending many specimens to Kew via Hooker. She was credited in the preface to Hooker’s 1841 Manual of the British Algae as one of 19 plant specimen collectors to whom he was indebted. Indeed, other similar botanical surveys relied on collectors feeding back to the coordinator and eventual author on the work, such as Frederick Hamilton Davey’s 1909 Flora of Cornwall and William Henry Harvey’s 1871 Phycologia Britannica. Here the finished surveys, often contributed to by women and so-called ‘amateurs’ were essentially collaborative works.
Hooker also assisted Warren, helping her to publish a botanical chart of seaweeds in 1836, intended as an educational tool for schoolrooms. It was not successful and was Warren’s only foray into published authorship.
Networks
Warren cultivated networks of correspondents, botanical collectors, and supporters, within and outside Cornwall. These networks, as well as her use of her local connections with those in the Navy, were central to her collecting work and to her authority within botanical networks. She mobilised local botanists to collect specimens for the Hortus Siccus project and for William Hooker. Indeed, as Simon Naylor has noted, though monetary prizes were offered for specimens donated for the Hortus Siccus, the real reward was to be identified, by Warren and therefore by the RCHS as an excellent local botanist; that is, a good collector and identifier, a good preparer and labeller, and reliable correspondent (Naylor 90).
It appears Warren’s recommendation was a boon to many careers. She corresponded with both Emily Stackhouse and Isabella Gifford and sometimes relayed requests to Hooker on their behalf. In 1836, Warren took note of William Lobb, then a gardener for Charles Lemon (an MP and landowner), for his display of mosses at an RCPS Exhibition and his work gathering specimens in order to obtain RCHS prizes, and recommended him in a letter to William Hooker. Specifically, she noted that ‘he would make a good collector in any country’. Lobb would go on to become a plant collector for the Veitch Nurseries in Exeter, the largest 19th century group of family-run plant nurseries in Europe. He supplied William Hooker at Kew with specimens and was responsible for introducing the monkey-puzzle tree and the giant sequoia to commercial growers in Britain.
The Hortus Siccus project was not well received in the decades after its completion. Hewett Cottrell Watson, for instance, was insistent that botanists follow his recording techniques and geographical schema, using his Topographical Botany to highlight local botanists who failed to do so; Warren being one of these (Naylor 91). As Simon Naylor has noted in his article on Warren, this was a clash of different systems of authority in botany. Warren’s botanical ‘authority was founded in the network she had built and so it was imperative that she constantly demonstrate the reliability, trustworthiness and probity of her collectors’ (Naylor 92).
By contrast, towards the end of her career, there was a move to argue that botanical work should rest on method rather than reputation; it mattered how botanical information was collected and recorded, not who had done the work (Naylor 93). Along with a re-evaluation of the place and quality of local and regional studies within an increasingly ‘national’ botany, this shift was also gendered. It favoured ‘new’ types of scientific, professional, and masculined forms of botanical knowledge. Warren’s lack of formal education and her inability to circulate herself and her work in professional contexts across the country all made her work too local, that is to say, too amateur, for recognition in this changing context.
Death
In 1850, the German botanist Robert Caspary named a marine algae he discovered at Falmouth in Warren’s honour: the Schizosiphon warreniae (now called Rivularia biasolettiana). Among the discoveries Warren herself made was the existence of Kallymenia dubyi in Cornwall, a seaweed which was not then known in Britain.
Warren died at her sister’s residence in Kea, Truro, in 1864, aged 78. On her death she was commemorated by her friends and correspondents, including Isabella Gifford and Emily Stackhouse. Her life and accomplishments were also noted in Frederick Hamilton Davey’s 1909 text The Flora of Cornwall. On the death of Isabella Gifford in 1891, a memorial noted Warren as part of a genealogy of well-respected female phycologists spanning the nineteenth century.
Bibliography
English, C. and English, G. (2020) Elizabeth Andrew Warren 1786-1864. Algologist and Botanist of Flushing. Flushing: Self-published. [Accessible here].
Hunt, S. (2005) 'Free, Bold, Joyous': The Love of Seaweed in Margaret Gatty and Other Mid-Victorian Writers'. Environment and History, 11:1 (February), pp. 5-34
Naylor, S. (2007) 'Provincial Authorities and Botanical Provinces: Elizabeth Warren's "Hortus Siccus of the Indigenous Plants of Cornwall"'. Garden History 35, pp. 84-95
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (1837). Archives: Directors' Correspondence. 'Letter from Elizabeth Andrew Warren to William Hooker', Sep 26th 1837. DC9 f.330.
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (1839). Archives: Directors' Correspondence. 'Letter from Elizabeth Andrew Warren to William Hooker', 23rd Feb 1839. DC9 f.163.
Shteir, A.B. (1996) Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora's Daughters and Botany In England, 1760-1860. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press