Eliza Amy Hodgson ( Campbell, 10 October 1888 – 7 January 1983) was a New Zealand botanist who specialised in .
Early life
Hodgson was born in
Havelock North and attended Pukahu Primary School and Napier Girls' High School.
She went by her middle name Amy.
At school she excelled in languages, leading to her ability to write accurate Latin descriptions of plants.
Hodgson was self-educated in botany as her father refused to allow her to attend university.
However, in secondary school, she was encouraged and taught in botany by her headmistress,
Bessie Spencer, who would teach her students microscopy and take them to the monthly meetings of the Hawkes Bay Philosophical Society. After leaving school, she gained further botanical education through the Rev. Alexander Whyte.
Botany work
In the 1920s, Hodgson often collected specimens in the Hawke's Bay region and collabrated with other botanists, such as
Harry Carse and Henry Blencowe Matthews. This led to her connection with George Osborne King Sainsbury, for whom she collected and with whom she regularly corresponded until his death.
As Sainsbury had elected to work on the mosses of New Zealand, Hodgson focussed on liverworts, as well as the regional Flora of Hawke's Bay.
She also collected and collaborated with Kenneth Willway Allison.
Between 1931 and 1936 she issued three
, one of them together with Sainsbury and Allison.
[Triebel, D. & Scholz, P. 2001–2024 IndExs – Index of Exsiccatae. – Botanische Staatssammlung München: http://indexs.botanischestaatssammlung.de. – München, Germany.] Following advice from Sainsbury in 1928, Hodgson purchased her first microscope. This led to her novel observations of gemmae in
Tortula abruptinervis, which was the subject of her first scientific paper, published at the age of 42.
Hodgson went on to publish more than 30 papers thereafter, her final at age 84.
In the course of her career she described two new families of liverworts (
Acrobolbaceae; still retained, and Phyllothalliaceae; now included in
Pallaviciniaceae), nine new genera, and published many new species and systematic changes to those existing.
The liverwort genus
Neohodgsonia was named for her,
as were the species
Cephalobus hodgsoniae (now placed in
Andrewsianthus),
Jungermannia hodgsoniae (now in
Solenostoma),
Lejeunea hodgsoniana, and
Lepidolaena hodgsoniae (now in
Lepidogyna).
Her herbarium was donated to Massey University in 1972.
Recognition
She was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London and in 1961 was accorded the same honour by the Royal Society of New Zealand.
Hodgson was also an honorary member of the British Bryological Society.
Hodgson was awarded an honorary doctorate by Massey University in 1976.
In 2017, Hodges was selected as one of the Royal Society Te Apārangi's "150 women in 150 words", celebrating the contributions of women to knowledge in New Zealand.
