Elizabeth Hurnshaw’s life started out just as unusual as her own death — being the seventh child born to her family, there occurred a similar happening just a few decades prior; her own mother had also been born the seventh child. Lady Elizabeth came into the world in the year 1651, inheriting both the knowledge and skills (for her future studies) from her wet-nurse, an apparent well known celtic healer. Elizabeth was taught how to use plants medicinally; not the stereo-typical studies that a blossoming young girl would willfully surrender to, yet this scenario echoes the perfect childhood for a future botanist like herself. Then came along Sir Christopher Hurnshaw, who as a child himself was different than his peers. He refused to become a hunter, and ate only fruits and vegetables -which horrified his father. Not exactly an unusual response from a fifteenth century Papa. Hurnshaw the elder had wanted his son to fish, to hunt, and to fulfill the typical masculine roles that he himself had to endure as a young man.
Years later Christopher continued to defy his father’s demands, and went to Oxford to study science and botany. Thus the young man would find himself exactly where he needed to be; alongside others with whom he could relate to. Christopher soon encountered the young Lady Elizabeth during one of his many research treks to Wessex , where he would collect rare botanical species by the bundles.
There she was, frail and focused, sitting on the Cornish moor collecting wildflowers. The two were inseparable. We might postulate here, that Elizabeth and Christopher were born for one another. But the Hursaw’s did not approve of such a dame as she —they proclaimed that Liz simply didn’t have the rotund child-bearing hips. She was thin, and ghostlike. A celtic beauty, although they deemed her to be insubstantial, “as though she might vanish into the mist any minute.”
The eccentrics wed shortly after meeting, and the couple stayed together despite the indifferences on both sides of the family. Christopher and Elizabeth refused to eat meat, drink spirits, and were said to have never had one argument -amongst themselves, nor with anyone else outside of the marriage. Their in-laws were considerably appalled, disgusted, and found the two to be leading an unnatural lifestyle. Lady Elizabeth and Sir Christopher Hurnshaw continued to ignore these accusations —they knew the life they wanted to live was plentiful, and continued to conduct their research together. These young lovers swept over the lands like a warm, quiet wind rushing through the delicate willow trees; they archived their findings over the years, and often met their goal of categorizing each and every known plant species in 15th century England.
The two were said to have gone “junketing off across the seas just to pick up and preserve a few odd daisies and boil them up for tea.” They built heated glasshouses for their “new aquisitions”, filling the grounds of their estate so that they may propagate, and cultivate —especially being that famine “was the great fear of that epoch; Christopher and Elizabeth felt that the answer lay in the ground around them and the vegetation which nature had provided.”
Just as the time came when Christopher and Elizabeth decided they would have at least one child, an unexpected tragedy befell them both. Christopher, the love of the Lady Botanist's life, would be killed from a riding accident -his devoted steed had gotten caught on a snare, and the young man was was thrown to his death. Elizabeth was bed ridden from grief. Crushed. Demobilized. Not only had our heroine lost the only one she truly loved, she was now without a research partner. Life and all of its efforts had little meaning left. One spring morning, Elizabeth noticed the first snowdrops outside her window and decided that she had to pick flowers for Christopher’s grave. This would be the first time she had left her room since his death.
Yet as more time would pass, Elizabeth was reluctantly convinced to move in with her brother-in-law, Edward. Although he quickly found her to be a woman that had unhealthy desires, with just as much behemoth as Papa Hurnshaw had proclaimed. Liz was eventually knocked up by this inherited disaster of man, yet one day she’d gotten word of his true feelings for her -she was no better than “ a barren witch, playing with spells and calling it science.” —so Elizabeth made her escape, with child. And, her maid, Martha, came along as well. Martha had revealed to her that the bastard had “got drunk one night and shouted out that if that black witch Elizabeth thought the baby she was carrying was ever going to inherit Hurnshaw she could think again —his son was going to get the lot, not some brat that played with flowers.” Elizabeth would raise her son alongside Martha for some time. They would curiously set sail, and travel across the seas to further all their botanical research. Lady Hurnshaw and her son were eventually discovered shipwrecked, years later, only to be rescued by a sea captain in Africa.
Yet shortly after this incident the two disappeared, and this time never to be rescued —the great Hurnshaw black sheep were forever encapsulated in the works they left behind. Three hundred years later, an antiquarian artist named Una Woodruff would discover these unusual documents, diaries, and drawings, in the dilapidated library of the Hurnshaw House. Yet even omitting these eccentricities, this enchanting compendium is essential for botanists to add to their collection. Published in 1981.