Charlotte Cortlandt Ellis

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]

Charlotte Cortlandt Ellis
Born(1874-06-27)June 27, 1874
Joliet, Illinois
DiedMarch 17, 1956(1956-03-17) (aged 81)
NationalityAmerican
Known forplant collector

She was born to frontier family and had little education, but in 1892 she was able to enrol at the newly opened University of New Mexico at Albuquerque in the 'preparatory department', which was to ensure students were educated equivalent to a high school degree, and in the next school year she was to be promoted to the 'normal department'. She made her first plant collection here. In May of 1893, however, after only eight and half months her father took her out of college to help the family start a new ranch in a remote location in the Sandia Mountains. In the late 1890's she made contact with Theodore Dru Alison Cockerell and 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 515 plant specimens of at least 345 species, at least a few of which were used to create the formal scientific description and name of that particular taxon of plant. She did not maintain a numbering system and her specimens are spread out over at least five herbaria, and are thus not maintained in a separate collection. These include those at the local University of New Mexico (2 sheets) and the New Mexico State University (75) herbaria, but also the United States National Herbarium and the herbaria of the New York Botanical Gardens and the 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. Almost all, if not all, of her collections were made in the Sandia Mountains in the 1900s to 1910s.[3]

The holotype specimens she discovered and collected include Primula ellisiae (a synonym of P. rusbyi),[4] Dodecatheon ellisiae (now D. dentatum subsp. ellisiae)[5] and Astragalus praelongus var. ellisiae.[6] These plants were named in her honour.[3] She also collected the holotypes of Achillea laxiflora (a synonym of A. millefolium)[7] and Tium stenolobum (a synonym of Astragalus scopulorum).[8] She sent an Opuntia specimen she collected in 1910 in the mountains near Placitas to Joseph Nelson Rose.[9]

References
  1. Rudolph, Emanuel David (1990-05-01). "Women Who Studied Plants in the Pre-Twentieth Century United States and Canada". Taxon. 39 (2): 151–205. doi:10.2307/1223016. JSTOR 1223016.
  2. "Collector:(Ellis, Charlotte)". Global Plants.
  3. Eugene Jercinovic (21 February 2008). "Charlotte Ellis of the Sandia Mountains" (PDF). The New Mexico Botanist.
  4. "Primula ellisiae Pollard & Cockerell". National Museum of National History, Smithsonian Institution.
  5. "Dodecatheon dentatum Hook. ssp. ellisiae". United States Department of Agriculture, National Resources Conservation Service.
  6. "US National Herbarium specimen". Encyclopedia of Life.
  7. 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.
  8. "Holotype of Tium stenolobum Rydberg, P.A. 1929". Global Plants.
  9. Joseph Nelson Rose. Rose, cacti, 1909 - 1917. Smithsonian Digital Volunteers: Transcription Center. p. 36.


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