Skip navigation

• BBG's Plant Collection
• New York Metropolitan Flora Project
• Horticultural Taxonomy
• Herbarium
• Library
• Research News
• Data Resources
• Science Department Staff

Home » Scientific Research » Brooklyn Botanic Garden Library » Special Collections

Elsie May Kittredge (1870–1954)

Elsie May Kittredge was an artist and amateur botanist whose eloquent photographic images are a sustained expression of her passion for the flora of the Northeast, particularly its wildflowers and ferns. The E.M. Kittredge Collection consists of glass plate negatives, the corresponding black-and-white contact prints, hand-colored contact prints, and the corresponding hand-colored lantern slides. There are approximately 675 sets of images in this collection. The E.M. Kittredge Collection dates from 1902 to 1920, with the bulk of the work created between 1910 and 1915. Most of the plants were collected in Spring Valley, Pearl River, and other parts of Rockland County, with some collected on Long Island and in New Jersey, Vermont, and New Hampshire. These specimens are now in the herbaria of Brooklyn Botanic Garden, New York Botanical Garden, and Harvard, among others.

Kittredge was born on May 14, 1870 in Dayton, Ohio. She moved with her family to New York City in 1879 and in 1904 to Spring Valley, where she found a rich supply of materials for plant collecting. Beginning in 1910, Kittredge began making hand-colored lantern slides for BBG, and the librarian reported that by the end of December 1916, there were 1,669 lantern slides in the collection.¹ In 1917, Kittredge was appointed assistant curator at New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) and was entrusted with the care and development of their lantern slide and negative collection because she had "long experience in making and coloring photographs and lantern slides."²

NYBG asked Kittredge to go to Woodstock, Vermont to collect specimens for Elizabeth Billings, a Woodstock resident and secretary of NYBG's Women's Auxiliary. She assumed responsibility for the Billings herbarium and collected widely in Vermont. Kittredge came to be regarded as an expert on Vermont's flora, particularly ferns. When she first went to Vermont in 1917, approximately 200 species of local flora had been collected and recorded; "by 1936, she had brought the list to nearly 1500 including many never before collected in Vermont."³ She discovered a new maidenhair fern on the Billings estate which she named in their honor: Adiantum pedatum forma billingsae Kittredge.⁴ She was the author of Ferns and Flowering Plants of Woodstock Vermont (1931) and Supplement to the Ferns and Flowering Plants of Woodstock Vermont (1936), and was associate editor of The Flora of Vermont (1937).

1. Brooklyn Botanic Garden Record 6, no. 2 (1917): 77.
2. Journal of the New York Botanical Garden 19, no. 217 (1918): 17.
3. Paul Martin Brown, "A Seed Many Years Dormant: The Discoveries of Elsie M. Kittredge, Botanist," Vermont Natural History (1976): 9.
4. American Fern Journal 19, no. 2 (1929): 56. This name is no longer used.