Charlotte Cortlandt Ellis
Charlotte Cortlandt Ellis | |
|---|---|
| Born | June 27, 1874 |
| Died | March 17, 1956 (aged 81) |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | plant collector |
Charlotte Cortlandt Ellis (June 27, 1874 – March 17, 1956) was an American amateur plant collector active in New Mexico.[1] She discovered several plant taxa and collected some 500 plant specimens.[2]
She was born to frontier family and had little education, but in 1892 she was able to enrol at the newly opened
Elmer Ottis Wooton, both then at the New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts at Las Cruces (now on the campus of New Mexico State University) near Mesilla. She maintained correspondence with Cockerell and other notable botanists for decades afterwards.[3]
Plant collecting
Ellis is known to have collected over 980 plant specimens of at least 345 species, at least a few of which were used to create the formal
Missouri Botanical Gardens. Because many of her collections were of very common plants, the majority of these voucher specimens have likely disappeared in the general collections -many millions of sheets by thousands of collectors, and have never been indexed for the database, thus some 80% of her are now 'lost' somewhere, but the specimens which are housed in New Mexican herbaria are indexed and accessible.[citation needed] Almost all, if not all, of her collections were made in the Sandia Mountains in the 1900s to 1910s.[3] As at February 2021 specimens collected by Ellis have been used to help enable 18 recent scientific publications.[4]
The
D. dentatum subsp. ellisiae)[6] and Astragalus praelongus var. ellisiae.[7] These plants were named in her honour.[3] She also collected the holotypes of Achillea laxiflora (a synonym of A. millefolium)[8] and Tium stenolobum (a synonym of Astragalus scopulorum).[9] She sent an Opuntia specimen she collected in 1910 in the mountains near Placitas to Joseph Nelson Rose.[10]
References
- JSTOR 1223016.
- ^ "Collector:(Ellis, Charlotte)". Global Plants.
- ^ a b c Eugene Jercinovic (21 February 2008). "Charlotte Ellis of the Sandia Mountains" (PDF). The New Mexico Botanist.
- ^ a b c "Charlotte Cortlandt Ellis". bionomia.net. Retrieved 2021-02-13.
- ^ "Primula ellisiae Pollard & Cockerell". National Museum of National History, Smithsonian Institution.
- ^ "Dodecatheon dentatum Hook. ssp. ellisiae". United States Department of Agriculture, National Resources Conservation Service.
- ^ "US National Herbarium specimen". Encyclopedia of Life.
- ^ Pollard, Charles Louis; Cockerell, Theodore Dru Alison (6 August 1902). "Four new plants from New Mexico". Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. 15: 177–179. Retrieved 20 August 2020.
- ^ "Holotype of Tium stenolobum Rydberg, P.A. 1929". Global Plants.
- ^ Joseph Nelson Rose. Rose, cacti, 1909 - 1917. Smithsonian Digital Volunteers: Transcription Center. p. 36.