Mary Elizabeth Banning

Mary Elizabeth Banning (1822–1903) carried out mycological work in the state of Maryland in the second half of the nineteenth century, outside any institution. She had no university position, no salary and no access to the comparative collections her correspondents could use. She published nonetheless: her paper "Maryland Fungi" appeared in Botanical Gazette in 1881, in two parts.

Her life's main work, however, was not an article. It was a manuscript on the fungi of Maryland with more than a hundred watercolours of her own — species documentation made by the method that, before colour photography, was the only way of recording what a herbarium loses. A dried fungus loses its colour, the shape of its cap and its texture — a painting made from a fresh fruiting body keeps all three.

It is worth comparing her situation with other profiles in this section. Elsie Wakefield headed mycology at Kew — Curtis Gates Lloyd funded his own network for exchanging specimens. Banning worked without any such base, at a time when a woman could not belong to most learned societies, and her material entered circulation only when somebody inside an institution chose to accept it.

Her work survived because institutional collections eventually took it in. That is a recurring mechanism in the history of natural science: work done outside institutions endures when it reaches a collection with a legal successor. Without that, what remains is a box of watercolours nobody knows about.

A drawing of a fungus then had a status it no longer has. Before colour photography spread, illustration was the only carrier of the characters lost in drying — the colour of the gills, the translucency of the cap, the way the flesh changes colour when cut. A painter documenting a fungus was not decorating a description — she was making the only available record of part of its diagnostic characters.

The same logic returns today with photographed observations. A picture of a fresh fruiting body holds information a herbarium specimen does not, and the specimen holds what the picture does not — DNA fit for sequencing. Banning and a modern observer with a phone are, in proportion, doing the same thing.

175 plates and two different measures of output

The New York State Museum preserves The Fungi of Maryland manuscript with 175 colour plates. That is a larger and more precise collection than “more than a hundred watercolours”: each plate can potentially be connected with a description, specimen and correspondence with Charles Peck. Maroske and May’s historical-taxonomic study nevertheless separates collecting material new to science from formal authorship of names. Banning described five species in her own right; other taxa based on her collections could be named or published by Peck.

The figures do not conflict—they count different work. The 175 plates describe an archive, five names describe formal taxonomic authorship, and another number might count specimens supplied to a collaborator. Whenever the profile says “discovered,” it should specify whether that means collected, recognised, illustrated or validly published a name. The museum record and peer-reviewed reassessment make that distinction possible without diminishing Banning’s fieldwork or inventing a heroic total.