UCC honours Ireland's first female botanist

University College Cork announces that its Environmental Research Institute’s building on the Lee Road is to be named after Ellen Hutchins – ‘The Botanist of Bantry Bay’.

Hutchins – recognised as Ireland’s first female botanist – discovered a number of plants, inspired a novel, and has species named in her honour.

Artefacts and documents go on display in dedicated Ellen Hutchins Reading Room.

University College Cork (UCC) will today announced it has renamed the Environmental Research Institute (ERI) building on the Lee Road in honour of the pioneering botanist and Cork woman Ellen Hutchins.

Widely recognised as Ireland’s first female botanist, Ellen Hutchins overcame a series of challenges in her personal life to identify several previously unknown species of plants, in and around her native Bantry Bay.

Between 1805 and 1813, in Ballylickey on the shores of Bantry Bay, Ellen Hutchins applied herself to the study of a particularly difficult branch of botany - the non-flowering plants - seaweeds, lichens, mosses and liverworts. She also produced a list of all the plants she could find in her neighbourhood, which amounted to over one thousand plants. This would be the first proper account of West Cork’s Flora. 

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