Meet the American Hunnewell Professor of Cryptogamic Botany

Clara Eaton Cummings (1855-1906) was born in Plymouth, New Hampshire. Professor Cummings began her studies at Wellesley College in 1876, one year after its opening. She showed so much talent and skill in the study of botany, particularly regarding her area of expertise — the identification of cryptogamic flora (plants that reproduce by spores) — that she was made a permanent member of staff in their museum, where she served as curator during the period 1879-86. She briefly left the college to study in Zurich before returning as an associate professor of cryptogamic botany, and then, in 1905, she was named the Hunnewell Professor of Botany with temporary charge of the department. To allow Cummings to pursue her work free of the burden of administrative duties, her title was changed, in 1906, to the Hunnewell Professor of Cryptogamic Botany, and this encouraged further development of her acclaimed work.

During her time in Zurich (1886-1887), she studied under Dr. Arnold Dodel at the University of Zurich where she undertook private work and prepared charts for a cryptogamic botany illustration. Professor Cummings made good use of her time in Europe by travelling to a number of botanical gardens; she made a careful study of the botanical gardens in Paris, Brussels, and Geneva, making special reference to the earlier history of botanical science through the work shown there of the great botanists Augustin Pyramus (or Pyrame) de Candolle, Lamarck, Georges Cuvier, and Augustin Saint-Hilaire. With the help of university professors in Zurich, Professor Cummings brought home a collection of Swiss seeds and for several years the Edelweiss, the Alpine poppy, and other Swiss plants grew in the botanical garden beside the farmhouse at Wellesley College. The year before she travelled abroad, Professor Cummings published a catalogue of North American mosses and hepaticae and initiated a system for the distribution of exsiccati known as “Decades of North American Lichens”, and a second edition under the name “Lichenes Boreali-Americani”, both of which which experts considered valuable contributions to the extensive study of this field.

In 1888, Professor Cummings published “The Lichens in the Flora of Middlesex County, Massachusetts”. She published two works in 1892: the first, published in National Geographic Magazine, discussed the cryptograms discovered during the C. Willard Hayes expedition to the Yukon district in Alaska; and the second, published in the Bulletin Torrey Botanical Club, reviewed the mosses and lichens collected by Miss Grace E. Cooley in Alaska and Nanaimo, B.C. Three years later, Professor Cummings was published in the American Journal for her work on the study of lichens of the Bauer collections in the Galapagos Islands. The following year, she published on the flora of the Blue Hills, Middlesex Fells, Stony Brook, and Beaver Brook Reservations of the Metropolitan Commission of Massachusetts. Just ten years after her first publication, Professor Cummings was reviewing the work of notable others in her field, such as Schneider's Textbook of Lichenology, published in the 1898 Botanical Gazette. By this time, Professor Cummings was considered "one of our best authorities on American Lichens” according to Professor L. W. Bailey of the Royal Society of Canada. Between 1901 and 1904, Cummings went on to publish five more works exploring species of lichens in Alaska and Labrador, for institutions such as the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. National Herbarium, and the Geographical Society of Philadelphia, amongst others. In 1904, Professor Cummings published a catalogue of 217 species of Alaskan lichens collected during the Harriman Expedition, which included 76 species new to Alaska and at least two species new to science. Subsequently, in February and March 1905, Cummings took a trip to Jamaica where she collected lichens.

She was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; a member of the Society of Plant Morphology and Physiology, and Vice President in 1904; and a member of the Mycological Society, the Torrey Botanical Club, the Boston Society of Natural History, and the Boston Mycological Club. In 1899, Professor Cummings gave an address before the Appalachian Mountain Club, in North Woodstock, on the flora of the region of the Franconia Mountains, wherein she expressed not only her passion for mountain climbing, but also her vision for the future of botany: one in which botany would be undertaken as the study of plants in relation to each other in their environment; thus, Cummings was clearly an early advocate of ecology and very much ahead of her time.

Professor Cummings died in 1906, in Concord, New Hampshire after suffering an illness for several months. After her death, her collection of Jamaican botanical specimens was sent to the New York Botanical Garden. In 1911, the Trustees of Wellesley College purchased Professor Cummings's personal herbarium of lichens and, in so doing they were able to build a collection with a geographically broader spectrum than those of many other, smaller American college herbaria.