My Mothers' Garden
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Sarah Churchill, 2021
The Duchess of Marlborough, was an English courtier who became one of the most influential women of the seventeenth century. Largely through her connection to Queen Anne, she helped her husband rise into government. Eventually she fought with the Queen over political differences and was dismissed from court, but still went on to be one of the richest women in Europe.
Lucy Cranwell, 2021
A New Zealand botanist, Lucy Cranwell was New Zealand’s first female curator at the Auckland Museum and the first woman to win Te Apārangi’s Hector Medal. Her fieldwork, alongside Lucy Moore, was the most extensive done to date by women in New Zealand. Cranwell became an expert in pollen analysis, opening a whole new field of New Zealand’s botanical past.
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Beatrix Potter, 2021
While most famous for her illustrated children’s books, Potter was first an accomplished scientist particularly interested in mycology. She conducted her own research and proposed a new theory on the reproduction and germination of spores. Because of strict rules excluding women from scientific research, her work was never taken seriously in her lifetime, but her research and botanical drawings have gone on to be widely regarded.
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Lady Mary Elizabeth Bennet, 2021
A water colour artist and keen gardener, Bennet collected and cultivated every sort of Viola Tricolor or ‘Heartease’, creating the Pansy in 1812. In 1813 the flower was popularised by a well-known florist, Mr Lee, making it a public favourite. Because of Bennet’s work, there were 400 named varieties of the pansy by 1833, despite its predecessor being regarded as little more than a weed.
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Valentina Tereshkova, 2021
Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman to enter space in 1963, two years after the first person. It would be another 20 years until a second woman went to space. While there are no physical reasons why women are less suited to space, they make up only just over 10% of all space travellers. No women have ever been to the moon.
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Catherine Wilson, 2021
The serial killer Catherine Wilson was the last woman to be publicly hanged in England in 1862. Wilson worked as a nurse, befriending her elderly patients with the goal of being written into their wills, before poisoning them. Despite being only convicted of one murder, she was suspected of seven.