Eloise Butler and Her Wild Flower Garden

This seems a very ordinary story of a very ordinary woman who was constrained by her "station" and means to be one of the unremembered hundreds like her in America at that time, but she had her eye on something else that made the rest just the framework for a mind intent on the plant world. While she was still in college, she attended a summer institute at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts and became fascinated with algae.

Having discovered microscopes and algae, she set about finding and identifying all the algae on her botanizing rambles. What should she do with all this information? Early in the history of botany, anyone with interest and a willingness to read and learn could develop a reputation as an expert. However, after the Civil War, the field of botany began to be dominated by the academics who formed closed fraternal societies that refused to admit "amateurs" which included most women. Of 1,185 women identified as active in botany by the turn of the century, only 2% were affiliated with a college or university and only 15% had any botanical career at all. Those that did were elementary and high school teachers, lab assistants, illustrators, curators, librarians or horticulturists. This though many of them had done the work that was the basis of scholarly books by men. So Eloise did what she had to do, she provided her precious original work to men writing the books and getting the expert reputation. For many years she sent her algal specimens to the Reverend Francis Wolle who wrote the two volume Freshwater Algae of the United States. Several of the species she sent him were new to science and two he named for her Cosmarium eloiseanum and Staurastrum eloiseanum. Though this seems polite, it was truly her right to have named the new species as their discoverer, but conditions were such that women were only allowed to be collectors not namers even among the ranks of the "amateurs."

Eloise was always learning more. She went to every summer institute she could afford. She corresponded with the botanists she met there. She read widely and discussed botany any time she could. Through a connection with a friend's husband she had met in Cora's hometown of Malden, Massachusetts, she and Cora began supplying specimens of seaweeds to Frank Collins who was the foremost amateur authority on marine algae

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