Learning to love the dandelions

Dandelion: The leaves are shiny and hairless, each margin cut into great jagged teeth, either upright or pointing somewhat backwards, and these teeth are themselves cut here and there into lesser teeth. This somewhat fanciful resemblance to the canine teeth of a lion gives the plant its most familiar name of dandelion, a corruption of the French dent de lion, an equivalent being its former Latin name dens leonis.

When it came to plants, Dame Ella Campbell was a champion of some of those least likely to find popular regard. Once there was a would-be producer of cut flowers who was plagued by dandelions competing with his tulips and daffodils. In desperation, he consulted the country’s leading horticultural expert. “I recommend that you learn to love dandelions,” said Ella.

Dame Ella Orr Campbell was raised in Dunedin. There, together with four siblings, she ranged the lush garden tended by her mother, a pharmacist with an interest in botany and a love of orchids. But Ella remembered her fascination with plants small, wild and uncultivated as having more likely begun during daybreak excursions with her father, a builder. In the morning chill, as her father collected the lamps left out to light his sites, Ella would forage in the nearby bush or crouch beside the verge, examining the tiniest weeds; making discoveries.

It was at her father’s wish that Ella spent a year studying to be a teacher, but this was never going to be enough for her. No sooner had she finished than she enrolled for a BA, and in 1934 she graduated with an MA in botany, on the life history and development of native water fern. She was briefly a botany lecturer at Victoria University, then headed back to Otago University where she taught over an eight-year period. It was while on her way from Otago to the Coromandel to study frogs that she paid a visit to Massey and was promptly offered a position.

Ella was appointed a lecturer at Massey Agricultural College in 1945, where she would at first teach plant morphology and anatomy as part of a developing subject: horticulture.

Bryophytes: Non-flowering plants that live in damp places and that reproduce by means of spores. Bryophytes can be divided into three classes: the Musci (mosses), Hepaticae (liverworts) and Anthocerotae (hornworts). They are generally small and low growing.

In 2003, 57 years after her arrival at Massey, Ella remembered such difficulties as there were with amusement: “They thought they had me on two counts, the agriculture people. A new subject, horticulture – and what was that supposed to be about and what use was it? And of course I was the only woman on the staff and was the only woman for many years.

“It’s true, yes, people sometimes thought I was the matron. But I wasn’t really around the place long enough to be mistaken for the matron. I was there for the lectures and the students, of course, but we would get out in the fields and to the bogs, you know?”

During her years as a lecturer at Massey, Ella’s horizons grew as her interests narrowed. From early wanderings in the residual bush of the Otago Peninsula she had been captured by bryophytes, mosses and liverworts in particular. This focus remained throughout her career and increasingly dominated her research, with just one exotic addition to her academic nursery: the orchids her mother had loved.

Bog: A nutrient-poor, peat-accumulating wetland in which peat mosses, ericaceous shrubs, and sedges play a prominent role. High water levels and low oxygen and nutrient levels mean decomposition of litter occurs only slowly.

Ella had a longstanding interest in peat bogs, those places where layer-on-layer of partly decomposed plant remains have accumulated in acid, waterlogged soils over thousands of years. She came to know the peat bogs of the Waikato intimately, travelled to many others around New Zealand, and was regularly consulted by regional councils on peatland management issues.

These days bogs are acknowledged as ecologically interesting and important, but for most of Ella’s time bogs were an unusual speciality.

“There’s a resurgence in interest now. But apart from Ella, there has been very little recent research,” says Jill Rapson, curator of the Massey herbarium named for Ella Campbell. “Why the resurgence? Well on the one hand some people want to use bogs to mine peat, while others see them as a way of capturing and sequestering carbon dioxide and fulfilling our obligations under the Kyoto protocol. Bogs are also useful for carbon dating.”

Dame Ella was an expert on the sedge-like, restiad bog plants which replace the Sphagnum found in northern hemisphere mires. It was Dame Ella who first noted, among her many other discoveries, the growing habits of wire rush, a restiad found only in some southern hemisphere bogs. “Their roots grow upwards!” says Jill, who, with student Tarnia Hodges, is researching the ability of such roots to scavenge the few nutrients coming into a bog via rainfall. “It’s the only bog plant that does that.”

Microtome: A sharp-bladed instrument used for sectioning of wax-embedded biological material for microscopic analysis.

Her beloved hornworts led Dame Ella to travel widely. In her early years at Massey she travelled to Cambridge University, to the University of Cincinnati and to the Douglas Lake Biological Station of the University of Michigan. As a world expert on liverworts and, later, an internationally accredited specimen orchid judge, she became familiar with most parts of Asia and Europe. At the 300th anniversary of the Berlin Botanical Gardens, she delivered her speech in German, as a member of the Goethe Institute. Wherever she went she kept notes on the people she met, notes she would file and pass on to travelling students and graduates.

Kindnesses like these sometimes surprised people. “She was a formidable and memorable teacher and would not suffer fools gladly,” said former colleague Professor David Fountain at her funeral. “I’m sure the students of the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s will remember her sharp wit and the even more razor sharp glance which accompanied any rebuke she gave – and she was not hesitant in giving these.”

Ella Campbell ‘retired’ from Massey in 1976 but continued her research, ensconced in the Ecology Building on the Palmerston North campus, for 20 more years. This was when she published the bulk of her 100 papers. Her list of publications, rather than being ‘as long as your arm’, was put at “two arms and a half” by University orator Robert Neale.

Fountain remembers her as a constant presence: “Her door open from early in the morning and she dissecting samples in her lab, or her room where microscopes and stains were side by side with open books, manuscripts in preparation or review. She worked quietly, independently – some thought secretively.”

To the distaste of some, she maintained a large collection of living mosses and liverworts. “The collection was tatty at first sight – housed in grey metal bookcases each specimen growing in the low light of shelving tucked under the eaves of an inner courtyard of the building. Long sleeves of plastic bags rattled in the wind for she had devised a bag-based means of providing the moistness required for these plants. They survived for years, decades, despite occasional threats of removal when important personages toured the building, for they were an eyesore.”

During this time Ella was admired by many but to others she appeared incessantly focused on her bryophytes and blinkered to many of the world’s problems. “She never to my knowledge possessed a TV and rarely listened to the radio,” says Fountain. “And she could argue tenaciously along sometimes outrageously un-PC lines on issues of social or political debate.”

She was famed for her skill in making up microscope slides (a now-vanished art) and she was a master of the microtome, a manual specimen slicer now replaced by the automated ultratome. Ella’s was a handsome gadget, rather like an instrument of torture in miniature whose tiny victims were specimens embedded in wax, to be sliced into fine ribbons and laid out for inspection on microscope slides.

She was envied for her international collection of books, acquired by all manner of means and guarded fiercely. Fountain remembers a book being ‘borrowed’ from the shelves of her office when she was away. “Her powers of observation, honed on those tiny plants, quickly revealed the gap in the shelves on her return and she was heard to utter the words: ‘He’s a blackguard!’.” The book was returned. The borrower, Dr Al Rowland, in turn achieved the reputation of the best microscopist on campus.

Ella Campbell received many honours, including the Massey Medal in 1992. She was made a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 1997. She never married, and valued her family and friendships. One young friend, Joanne Holdaway, pleased her greatly by writing a biography, augmented by conversations at her Palmerston North rest home where Joanne took a temporary job to be near her.

Much of Ella’s collection of slides, books, microscopy materials, dried plants and instruments is already at the University’s herbarium. The rest now sits in ceiling-high stacks of boxes in a storeroom at the Ecology Building, waiting for sorting and classification. It won’t be easy. Dame Ella could be cavalier about labelling. “Why did she need to bother labelling them at all?” says Jill Rapson. “She knew very well what they were.”

There’s also a massive, rare three-volume set of books on liverwort taxonomy, all in German. Inside, a note from the University Library, dated 1988, allows Ella Campbell long–term loan, “until the books are needed.” The Library never reclaimed the set, losing track of the loan, but Ella did, and returned them on packing up her office in 2001. Subsequently the books were donated to the herbarium, the library perhaps recognising that it may be some time before they will again have to meet the needs of an obsessive, German-literate, liverwort lover.

Professor Brian Springett, Vice-Chancellor Judith Kinnear, Dame Ella Campbell and Associate Professor Ed Minot. In the background are Dame Ella’s nephew, Gavin Adlam, and niece, Rosalie Adlam, flanked by Dr Alistair Robertson and Professor Russ Tillman.

The Dame Ella Campbell Herbarium

Although officially named in April 2003, the Dame Ella Campbell Herbarium has existed informally since 1945, when a collection was instituted by the then department of Agricultural Botany. Those agricultural beginnings are evidenced today in extensive collections of naturalised weeds and grasses, but the herbarium’s greatest strength – and the reason why it is one of 13 internationally recognised herbaria in New Zealand – is its collection of lower plants. (The herbarium was officially designated MPN 1977 under the curatorship of Dr Margot Forde.) Of the 30,000 specimens in the collection, half are lower plants, a most unusual bias according to the herbarium’s current curator, Dr Jill Rapson.

14,290 specimens of bryophytes were donated to Massey by Amy Hodgson in 1972. Donations and exchanges also explain the fact that some of the herbarium’s specimens predate it. The oldest collection, from 1889, is an award-winning folio of ferns compiled by Mr E Maxwell for the Melbourne Exhibition, the donation arranged by a former vice-chancellor, Dr JC Andrew. The flora of the volcanic plateau and the lower North Island is richly represented.

The herbarium lends out bryophytes to researchers worldwide. “In fact we frequently have to fight to get out specimens back again,” says Dr Rapson.

Within Massey, the collection is used by students and postgraduates for identifying specimens they have gathered in the field or when looking at how to go about putting together their own collections: pressing and drying plants, affixing them to cards, and cataloguing the species and location. Some of these collections are eventually donated to the herbarium. Making up a collection is a process that has changed little over the centuries, though the catalogues are now being transferred to computer databases, a mammoth task initiated by former curator Dr Heather Outred. The Dame Ella Campbell Herbarium is now extending its collection’s pollen databases and has begun collecting information about the DNA sequences of its specimens.

Fittingly, on the day MASSEY spoke to her, Dr Rapson had just returned from an annual gathering of Australasian bryologists, this year held in the Hunua Ranges . Over several days, 30 or 40 bryologists wandered the forest, finding specimens for identification. “You collect and then you stare down microscopes, and if you can’t figure out what you’ve got, you can just ask the world expert alongside you,” explains Dr Rapson.

As was fondly remembered at the Hunua gathering, the first of these events was held in the Pohangina Valley in 1969. The organiser? Ella Campbell.

"Because she was a single person, Ella had rather fixed ideas about some things. But I always felt that she had that Scottish sense of ‘if you are going to do it, do it properly!’ and this would have annoyed those who were on their own power trips.

“She used to coach the women’s hockey team and as she got older clearly had a great affection for Massey and its graduates and wanted the best for the place that she had worked at for so many years.

“I kept up a correspondence at Christmas time every year and she visited me once at Saskatoon when she was on a North American trip. On my few visits back to New Zealand, I always made a point of visiting her.

“You can see that I had a high regard for her. I don’t think many people at Massey in those earlier days realised that she had such a high reputation internationally for her scientific work. One thing that always impressed me was that she was one of the few international taxonomists who could write the official naming description in Latin – a testimony to her schooling in Dunedin.”

Graham Simpson completed his Master’s in Agricultural Science in 1956 with Ella Campbell’s help. For more about Graham, turn to page 37 .