Flora Wambaugh Patterson and a herbarium that was equipment

Closed doors and a late start

Flora Wambaugh Patterson took charge of the fungus herbarium of the United States Department of Agriculture in 1896 and did not let go of it for twenty-seven years. She had arrived by an unpromising route: a civil service examination in 1895, an appointment as Assistant Pathologist in the Section of Vegetable Pathology, and a starting age of 48. Amy Y. Rossman’s account, published on 1 April 2002 and revised in 2012, places her birth in 1847 in Columbus, Ohio, where her father was a Methodist minister, and records that she was interested in fungi as a girl.

The day-precise dates that circulate in catalogues — 15 September 1847 and 5 February 1928 — rest on less than they appear to. The North Carolina Botanical Garden’s herbarium note prints them in its heading but footnotes them to English Wikipedia, and Wikidata holds two competing statements side by side: the bare year, referenced to five authority and taxonomic databases, and the full date, referenced once, to a Find a Grave memorial. The primary source carries neither day: Rossman gives only the year and the city, and says that after retiring Patterson lived with her son in New York City and died there at 80.

Her degrees were an A.B. from Antioch College in 1865, taken at eighteen, and a master’s whose provenance the sources dispute: Rossman gives Wesleyan College, Cincinnati, in 1883; English Wikipedia gives Ohio Wesleyan Female College at 42. Both cannot be right, and there is no basis for quietly picking one. Neither account gives her a doctorate or a chair.

She returned to study out of necessity. Captain Edwin Patterson was left helpless by a steamboat explosion a few years after their marriage, and for ten years, until he died, she cared for him and their two sons with no state safety net behind her. She then took up biology at the State University of Iowa, where her brother was a professor, and in 1893 moved east, placed the boys in a preparatory school and set about continuing her own work at Yale. The memoir by Vera K. Charles that Rossman quotes is plain about what happened: she went there “only to find the doors closed against her, women not being eligible at that time”. She registered at Radcliffe College instead, took botany courses for three years, and worked as an assistant in the Gray Herbarium at Harvard University — one of the foremost botanical repositories of the day, and the place where she learned mycology, plant pathology and the care of a fungal collection.

Asking scientists for their specimens

She did not inherit a forgotten drawer. Beverly T. Galloway hired her and Franklin Sumner Earle to help with the herbarium precisely because, in Rossman’s wording, he recognised the importance of the burgeoning USDA fungal collections — which already held 19,000 reference specimens. Earle lasted a year before leaving for Alabama and then the newly established New York Botanical Garden. Patterson stayed. The title Mycologist in Charge of Mycological and Pathological Collections came later, once the Bureau of Plant Industry had been formally established with Galloway as its Chief, and she held it until she retired in 1923 at 75.

Rossman’s article gives three figures for the collection’s growth and they do not reconcile. In one place the reference specimens rise “from 19,000 to 115,000”; in another she is credited with “the addition of over 90,000 specimens”; in a third the collections increase during her tenure to “more than 114,000”. The gaps are small but real, and a single round number would be tidier than the evidence warrants. The length of service wobbles too: John Stevenson, who directed the collections from 1927 to 1960, wrote that she had “for 28 years devoted herself unceasingly to the upbuilding of the collections”, one more year than Rossman’s own count.

Her method was correspondence, purchase and persistence. Patterson wrote to scientists all over the world for specimens to buy or exchange, above all exsiccati: assembled, identified sets of reference material sold to institutions, and a livelihood for several early American mycologists, J. B. Ellis, H. W. Ravenel and A. B. Seymour among them. She also leaned on field pathologists. Thanking H. B. Humphrey on 1 February 1922 for rusts collected in the western states, she added that it would be extremely gratifying if all the Bureau’s pathologists were as thoughtful about depositing material with her. In a period without copiers or fax machines, when literature was hard to obtain, the working tool of identification was an accurately named specimen rather than a paper.

With her staff she also built the card files: an extensive host index covering both the collections and every published record of fungi on plants, and a file of all described fungi with their synonyms. Those cards were maintained until computerised databases arrived in the early 1980s.

What the port inspectors actually did

From 1906, when a formal plant inspection programme was set up, Patterson and three employees were charged with detecting and identifying fungal diseases in imported commodities. Among their interceptions was potato wart disease, Synchytrium endobioticum, identified for the first time on potatoes for import into the United States; it remains the subject of considerable quarantine activity.

In January 1910 a consignment of 2,000 Japanese flowering cherry trees, a present from the Mayor of Tokyo, reached Washington carrying numerous fungi and insects. Patterson, the nematologist Nathan Cobb and the entomologist J. G. Sanders took the politically unwelcome position that the trees should be destroyed. Her letter on the consignment records crown gall “present on 45% of the trees” and, beside it, the girdling of five trees that “apparently has resulted from the attack of a Pestalozzia sp.”, with the admission that the time available did not allow her to decide whether the fungus was indigenous. The lot was burned in a bonfire on the Mall. That specimen — Pestalotia, as the genus is now spelled — is still in the U.S. National Fungus Collections and still unidentified to species; a century on, the genus and its segregates remain very hard to name.

Two claims need care, because the shorthand is tempting. She did not discover chestnut blight. Cryphonectria parasitica (= Endothia parasitica) was found on the chestnuts (Castanea) of the Bronx Zoological Park in New York in 1904 and specimens were sent to her for identification; Rossman writes that she “played a role in the identification” of the fungus, and that is the whole of the claim. By 1907 the disease had spread up the Hudson to Poughkeepsie, New York, and south to Trenton, New Jersey. Nor did she bring about the Plant Quarantine Act of 1912: the source says the cherry-tree incident, the potato wart threat and the introduction of chestnut blight together “led to the passing” of it.

In 1914, apparently to save money, the four mycologists of the Division of Mycology and Mycological Collections — three of them women — were threatened with transfer to an organisation where they would no longer inspect incoming plant germplasm. Patterson wrote back on 9 November that every fungal disease brought to public attention had first been noticed by the inspectors, directly or through correspondence, and listed four: English potato scab, silver scurf, chestnut blight and citrus canker. She herself identified about 800 specimens in the U.S. National Fungus Collections — specimens, not species — and from inspection material described what Rossman calls “a number of new species and one new genus”: Loculistroma bambusae, the cause of witches’ broom of bamboo. How many species she named is not a figure the source supplies.

The claims this life will not carry

Rossman’s title is “The First Woman Mycologist at the USDA”, and the qualifier carries the weight. The same article opens by naming Effie Southworth as the first woman plant pathologist hired by the USDA in the late nineteenth century, who joined in 1887 soon after finishing at Bryn Mawr College. English Wikipedia’s lead transfers that distinction to Patterson. The primary source contradicts it outright, and the sentence should not be repeated.

Nor did she build the collection by herself. Rossman credits what is now the world’s largest fungal reference collection to “Patterson and her successors”, and the U.S. National Fungus Collections at Beltsville as they stand today are the work of the century since her retirement rather than of one tenure.

A separate caution attaches to the two popular bulletins she wrote with Vera K. Charles, “Mushrooms and Other Common Fungi” (1915) and “Some Common Edible and Poisonous Mushrooms” (1917). Rossman records that they described and illustrated common fleshy fungi, discussed which were edible or poisonous, and printed recipes, mushroom catsup included. That is exactly why it needs saying plainly: they are documents more than a century old, their taxonomy long superseded, and nothing in them tells anyone what may be eaten now.

What can still be checked is the simplest thing, and the thing she kept asking for in her letters: the trace a specimen leaves. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Herbarium (NCU), curated by the North Carolina Botanical Garden, holds exactly one fungus she gathered herself — Cyphella cupressi, collected on 22 October 1906 and labelled “from region of James River near Norfolk, Va.”, accessioned as NCU-F-0031286. Her material sits in BPI and in dozens of other herbaria besides. The habit she pressed for in 1922 — deposit it, label it, leave a trail — is still what separates a record from a recollection, and it is worth asking of one’s own field notes which of them anyone could go back and examine.