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Martha Maria Atwood (1811-24 January 1885) was a British botanist, bryologist and lichenologist.

Life

Handwriting sample of Martha Maria Atwood

She lived in Clifton, Bristol, and Bath, where she collected specimens of moss and lichens. These were included in nineteenth-century reference works. She also contributed to the journal Phytologist.

Miss Martha Maria Atwood (c. 1810-1885) and her three volume collection of British mosses were mentioned in BB 2006, and I described and illustrated them for the BNS Bulletin for March 2008. One of the volumes has the epitome, 'Tis but a moss/ And yet it speaks/ Its Master's handiwork'. Adolph Leipner underestimates her contribution when he mentioned her in our 1866 Proceedings: "altogether the [Bristol] district yielded about one hundred species, most of which he had discovered himself, and the remainder had been found by Miss Attwood [sic]". It is probably by this reference, or conversations with Leipner, that White came to mention her as a "prominent muscologist".

An interesting item in the history of Bristol Botany came to light in the course of the year. In the 1850' s and early 1860 's Miss Martha Maria Atwood (c. 1810-1880) was a very active field botanist in the Bristol area. She was especially interested in Cryptogams, notably bryophytes and lichens, and she contributed to Leighton's Lichen Flora of Great Britain. She also contributed to Swete ' s Flora Bristoliensis (1854) and vouched for many of the grasses, including Agropyron x obtusiusculum Lange (see the entry later in this article) . Unfortunately hardly any personal particulars are available about Miss Atwood. However a small photograph of her, sitting at her microscope, has been found in a book belonging to our member Miss M. Bowen. She had obtained the book from Miss I.M. Roper who in turn had obtained the photograph from a nephew of Miss Atwood. A note by Miss Roper indicates that Miss Atwood once lived at Clifton Vale, but on leaving Bristol she and her two sisters lived at Worcester where she died. Some shells and mosses collected by her are in the Worcester Museum.

Miss Atwood and her discovery of Sorbus bristoliensis, the Bristol Whitebeam. Both of these independent letter-writing botanical ladies with Welsh roots and Thirsk Botanical Exchange Club membership might have gathered their rare whitebeam species within a mile of their respective English homes.Also mentioned in Syme’s text on ‘Pyrus scandica’ is that he had seen material from Nightingale Valley, part of Leigh Woods, Bristol, in HC Watson’s herbarium. At this locality it is Sorbus bristoliensis, the Bristol Whitebeam.

One of the specimens in HC Watson’s herbarium that Syme saw was the one collected by Miss Martha Maria Atwood of Clifton, Bristol on 10 June 1852 (year by reference to her gathering of common whitebeam which is also in Watson’s herbarium, see his note at the side of the label) which she annotated ‘it struck the eye immediately as distinctive in appearance with the underside of the leaves not nearly so white’ (Plate 2).

Miss Atwood’s original specimen of what was later named as Sorbus bristoliensis, from Nightingale Valley, Leigh Woods, Bristol in 1852, annotated by her ‘it struck the eye immediately as distinctive in appearance with the underside of the leaves not nearly so white’. From the herbarium of Hewett C Watson at Kew.

Atwood died in Worcester, England in 1880.