In May 1859 with her carefully tended Philadelphia garden in full bloom, the botanist Elizabeth Carrington Morris crouched down to examine the least remarkable flower there, a dandelion (Taraxacum officianale) she had been watching for days. She was not going to pull it out and toss it in her basket of weeds… yet. Instead, she was content watching its growth and behavior, just as she had for decades each spring. As she relayed to a fellow botanist, “I watch the opening and closing of this too common but curious plant with great interest and yet hire little boys to dig it up & destroy it wholesale!” 1
Elizabeth Morris’s conflicted feelings about dandelions, seeing them simultaneously as a fascinating subject worthy of study and a nuisance, reminded me of my own treatment of dandelions. On meandering neighborhood walks with my children when they were toddlers, these were also the flowers that immediately made things complicated. No, they could not pluck our neighbor’s beloved tulips; yes, they could take the dandelions. Even as I made these rules, I realized I was teaching my kids about the value of plants. I was drawing the line between flowers and weeds, between property and pests, between treasures and trash. No matter, though, we adored those fluffy bouquets clenched in sticky hands and then proudly displayed in jars of water on the dining room table.2
Morris’s knowledge of dandelions and other plants was far more sophisticated. Tutored by the leading naturalists of the era, including Thomas Nuttall, Thomas Say, and Charles-Alexandre LeSueur, Elizabeth Morris patched together one of the best scientific educations that was possible for young women in the United States during the early nineteenth century. Her extensive knowledge and curiosity about plants made her an asset for other botanists like William Darlington and Harvard’s Asa Gray, who welcomed her into their networks, asking her for specimens and help while returning the favor whenever they could.3
Morris knew that she would have a receptive audience for her findings as she crouched to monitor the much-maligned flowers several times a day. After all, she had discovered something other scientists had missed. The scape, or stem, of the flower grew above the height of adjacent grasses just as the bud was about to open but each night she witnessed the scape seem to disappear, as if lying down, “hidden among the grasses.” This would happen over and over for several days until the seeds were ripe and the dandelion transformed from its yellow crown into the mesmerizing white globe of parachutes. It was at that moment, Elizabeth described, when “it lets its beautiful feathery ball dig into the sunlight before the seeds are loosened & fly off.” 4
This behavior was not something any other botanist had described. Botanists certainly wrote about dandelions, particularly in books meant for beginners. They were ubiquitous enough that almost every reader would have encountered them and would have easy access to find and examine them or dissect their parts. They were, in other words, great to teach with. Books on medicinal herbs highlighted folk knowledge that dandelions could be useful for jaundice, as a blood purifier, or simply as a diuretic, something that medical researchers today are taking seriously as they research the ways dandelions help everything from liver, colon, and metabolic disorders to cardiovascular diseases. Nineteenth-century authors, like their modern-day foraging counterparts, also touted it as an economical addition to salads. It was so common, so basic, so ever present, though, that few botanists spent much time examining the plant’s characteristics beyond its structure or its tendency to disperse its seeds in the wind.5
The fact that Morris chose to focus on a weed that others took for granted speaks to where she could botanize. The mid-nineteenth century was a period of expeditions, official and otherwise, and male botanists with funding and ambition typically sought out less-trodden paths in search of unknown and exotic specimens to study and share. Constantine Samuel Rafinesque described how essential these expeditions were, but made it clear, too, that they were dangerous. In his 1836 book New Flora of North America, he warned readers:“Let the practical Botanist, who wishes like myself to be a pioneer of science, and too increase the knowledge of plants, be fully prepared to meet dangers of all sorts in the wild groves and mountains of America.” It would take a very strong-headed woman to set out alone on such a trip, facing not only the dangers of the trail but also the dangers of judgment. A nineteenth-century woman was almost never invited to join these expeditions, whether international or domestic, unless she was a scientist’s wife. As for Morris, an unmarried woman, she would have to make do with her garden and the forest within walking distance of her house.6
While these gendered spatial restrictions could feel suffocating, they also provided surprising opportunities. Elizabeth may have had limited access to the funding and opportunities that male botanists took for granted, but she ended up making a discovery arguably of more interest because of the ubiquity of dandelions. Other botanists with their eyes set on distant frontiers might overlook the behavior of common plants. There was little incentive to study dandelions, anyway. Though they certainly had value as herbal medicines, they were so prolific that their reproduction needed no aid. Dandelions were not a staple crop like wheat, corn, tobacco, or cotton that needed tending, perfecting, or protecting. Nor was this a rose, tulip, or orchid whose careful cultivation titillated specialists and commanded high prices at nurseries. They were weeds without much market value. Elizabeth knew all of this, and yet she studied them.
By rebelling against the received wisdom that common plants like dandelions were unworthy of study, Elizabeth Morris was herself a “pioneer of science.” Today, environmental scientists are investigating how dandelions are therapeutic not just for human bodies, as has long been understood, but also for the earth, finding how these undervalued and ever-present plants absorb a long list of pollutants from the soil and air, including lead, benzo(b)fluoranthene, and aflatoxins, among others. These scholars are bypassing the assumption that dandelions are simply a mar on lawns, worthy of death by herbicide, and instead reconceiving them as a beneficial presence.7
Plants categorized by some as weeds—unwanted, generally unvaluable, out of place—tend to be stubbornly vivacious. They reproduce widely and are hard to control. Certainly, as my young children ambled through the neighborhood with fistfuls of dandelions, I never discouraged them from taking one of the mesmerizing feathery seed balls, closing their eyes, making a wish, and blowing those little seeds everywhere. It is no wonder we had more to pick each year. Whether assisted by a child’s puff of air or a wind gust, dandelion seeds can travel as far as sixty miles before finding a worthy home in a grassy field or a sidewalk crack. They are not terribly picky.8
Like her subject, Elizabeth Morris was often overlooked and discounted. When she shared her findings with her longtime friend and correspondent, Harvard’s botany professor Asa Gray in 1843, she might have expected that he already knew about the dandelion’s scape lying prostrate before the seeds ripened. He did not. However, Gray’s gut reaction when he read this new-to-him information was to assume that Morris was incorrect. “You have made an inadvertent mistake about the Taraxacum; at least I suspect so, for I was not aware that the scape became prostrate, and again erect as the fruit ripens. Is this really the case; or have you not confounded this with the curious elongation of the stipe of the pappus…?” Morris had not used the wrong word though, and she roundly defended her findings in her lost reply, resulting in Gray’s responding with “I cry you mercy about the Dandelion; where you have me on the hip. I was ignorant of the fact you mentioned; and heartily ask your pardon for supposing you might have made a mistake.” She clearly made her point. 9
Elizabeth Morris continued to share her discoveries with other botanists until they took root in botanical textbooks. Asa Gray, following his apology, incorporated her discovery into his widely-used A Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States in 1848, albeit without giving her credit. Over a decade later, Edward Tatnall wrote a catalogue of plants that existed in one county of Delaware. In what was otherwise a dry list, Tatnall’s book stood out for the surprising botanical tidbits he shared in the footnotes. It was in one of these footnotes that he included the dandelion discovery by “Miss Morris of Germantown.” A book reviewer in the Gardener’s Monthly magazine focused primarily on these compelling gems, highlighting Morris’s discovery in particular: “We do not think this beautiful provision of nature for permitting the seed to blow readily away has been before noted by anyone.” 10
This was a rare moment of credit for Elizabeth Morris during a primarily anonymous career spent writing uncredited science articles and assisting fellow botanists behind the scenes. Elizabeth Morris is barely known today for the same reasons that so many historic women of science are unknown: everything from a general lack of credit and the undervaluing of so-called “women’s work” in the sciences, to her decision to use pseudonyms when writing popular science articles to save herself from gendered attacks. The fact that she studied humble plants like the dandelion is also part of this erasure. Her fate became tangled with the weediness of her subject, both its lack of exotic flair and marketable value. Both the scientist and her subject were marginalized.
This undervaluing led, over time, to the intentional and unintentional erasures of Elizabeth Morris in the years after her death. A powerful Germantown preservationist decided her home in Philadelphia was “historically insignificant,” despite protests from other community members, and the structure was demolished in 1915. Construction workers tore up and plowed under Elizabeth’s carefully tended botanical garden where she had planted exotic plants alongside her often-studied dandelions, ultimately replacing it all with grass seed for a new high school’s field. While most reminders of Elizabeth Morris disappeared with the house, the dandelions remain. Each spring they return, peeking up above the grass line, descendants, perhaps, of Elizabeth Morris’s subjects from centuries before. As the stapes rise with ripened seeds, the plants wait patiently for a good wind or a child’s puff of assistance to spread their seeds and start anew.
Acknowledgements
Rare is the conference panel that turns into a writing group that lasts years. I’m so grateful for the feedback and camaraderie that Adrienne Petty, Don Opitz, and Tina Gianquitto gave me. Annelise Heinz, Jennifer Tappan, and two anonymous reviewers also provided me helpful feedback on drafts.
- Elizabeth C. Morris to William Darlington, 15 May 1859, William Darlington Papers, New-York Historical Society.[↩]
- Zachary Falck, Weeds: An Environmental History of Metropolitan America (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010).[↩]
- Catherine McNeur, Mischievous Creatures: The Forgotten Sisters Who Transformed Early American Science (Basic Books, 2023), chapters 1, 2, 4.[↩]
- Elizabeth C. Morris to William Darlington, 15 May 1859.[↩]
- See, for instance: Almira Lincoln Phelps, Botany for Beginners (New York: 1844), 36, 41, 42, 95, 114, 117, 157; Thomas Nuttall, An Introduction to Systematic and Physiological Botany (Cambridge, MA: Hilliard and Brown, 1827), 21-23, 36, 162-3, 325-239; William Darlington, Florula Cestrica (West Chester: Siegfried, 1826), 82-3; Amos Eaton and John Wright, North American Botany (Troy, NY: E. Gates, 1840), 5-6, 25, 79, 290, 296, 549, 571, 582, 598, 608, 614, 619; Peter P. Good, The Family Flora and Materia Medica Botanica (New York, 1845); 252-4; Samuel Bulfinch Emmons, Every Man His Own Physician (Boston: G.P. Oakes, 1836), 21, 94, 113; Charles Lee, A Catalogue of the Medicinal Plants, Indigenous and Exotic (New York: J. & HG Langley, 1848), 35. For recent research on medical benefits, see: Mohaddese Mahboubi and Mona Mahboubi, “Hepatoprotection by Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) and Mechanisms,” Asian Pacific Journal of Tropical Biomedicine 10.1 (2020): 1-10; M. Sharma, P. Pal, F. Pottoo, et al. “Mechanistic Role of Methanolic Extract of Taraxacum officinale Roots as Cardioprotective Against Ischemia–Reperfusion Injury-Induced Myocardial Infarction in Rats.” Applied Biochemistry and Biotechnology 195 (2023): 3384–3405; Wei Chen, Huining Fan, Rui Liang, Rui Zhang, Jing Zhang, and Jinshui Zhu, “Taraxacum Officinale Extract Ameliorates Dextran Sodium sulphate‐induced Colitis by Regulating Fatty Acid Degradation and Microbial Dysbiosis,” Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine 23.12 (2019): 8161-8172; Malgorzata Kania-Dobrowolska and Justyna Baraniak “Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale L.) as a Source of Biologically Active Compounds Supporting the Therapy of Co-Existing Diseases in Metabolic Syndrome,” Foods 11.18 (2022): 2858.[↩]
- Robert Kohler, All Creatures (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 218-219; Prof. Rafinesque, New Flora of North America (Printed for the Author and Publisher, 1836).[↩]
- See, for instance: Alaaddin Vural, “Trace Element Accumulation Behavior, Ability, and Propensity of Taraxacum officinale F. H. Wigg (Dandelion),” Environmental Science and Pollution Research International 31.11 (2024): 16667-16684; Irena Boguś Mieczysława, Anna Katarzyna Wrońska, Agata Kaczmarek, Mikołaj Drozdowski, Zdzisław Laskowski, Anna Myczka, Aleksandra Cybulska, et al. “A Comprehensive Analysis of Chemical and Biological Pollutants (Natural and Anthropogenic Origin) of Soil and Dandelion (Taraxacum Officinale) Samples.” PLoS One 18. 1 (Jan 2023); Kingsley O. Odigie, Jennifer Rojero, Sharon A. Hibdon, and A. Russell Flegal, “Natural Lead Levels in Dandelions,” Environmental Science and Technology 53.2 (2019): 954-962.[↩]
- Marijke van der Veen, “The Materiality of Plants: Plant-People Entanglements,” World Archaeology 46.5 (2014): 799-812.[↩]
- Asa Gray to Elizabeth Carrington Morris, April 9, 1843, The Elizabeth Carrington Morris and Margaretta Hare Morris Papers, Library of Congress, Box 1, Folder 3; Asa Gray to Elizabeth Carrington Morris, June 16, 1843, The Elizabeth Carrington Morris and Margaretta Hare Morris Papers, Library of Congress, Box 1, Folder 3.[↩]
- Asa Gray, A Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States (J. Munroe, 1848), 250-251; Edward Tatnall, Catalogue of the Phænogamous and Filicoid Plants of Newcastle County, Delaware (Wilmington Institute, 1860); “Books, Catalogues, &c.,” Gardener’s Monthly 2.11 (1860): 343–344.[↩]
