Overview

Overlooking the River Lee, and close to the UCC campus, the Ellen Hutchins building has 3000 sq. metres of customised laboratories, pilot trial space, environmental control rooms, office space and two seminar rooms with the capacity to house 100 researchers. It has been built to the highest standards of contemporary sustainable design with many sustainable energy features such as solar panels, geothermal heat pumps and heat recovery systems.

The Ellen Hutchins building is a purpose designed building for conducting research, and building management is arranged around research needs and to encourage collaboration and the building has a number of specialised laboratory facilities.

Who was Ellen Hutchins?

On 21 Sept 2022 University College Cork’s Lee Road Building was renamed the Ellen Hutchins Building in honour of Ireland’s first female botanist Ellen Hutchins (1785-1815).

Between 1805 and 1813, in Ballylickey on the shores of Bantry Bay, a young woman was applying herself to the study of a particularly difficult branch of botany - the non-flowering plants - seaweeds, lichens, mosses and liverworts. She also produced a list of all the plants she could find in her neighbourhood, which amounted to over one thousand plants. This would be the first proper account of West Cork’s Flora.  

In those eight years, aged twenty to twenty seven, Ellen Hutchins discovered at least twenty species that were new to science or new to Ireland, and made a significant contribution to the understanding of non-flowering plants, especially seaweeds. She also produced hundreds of exquisitely detailed watercolour drawings of seaweeds.

Ellen’s achievements are all the more impressive when we consider that she suffered from periods of ill health throughout her life, and had extensive caring responsibilities at home. Ellen had returned to Bantry from school in Dublin to care for her ailing mother and a disabled brother.

Ellen herself died young, just before her thirtieth birthday. Her legacy includes 10 plants which have been named after her, such as the moss Ulota hutchinsiae (Hutchins’ Pincushion), in recognition of the importance of her botanical studies.

The Ellen Hutchins Building now also contains the Ellen Hutchins Reading Room which holds archival material and artefacts such as a number of pressed modern seaweed specimens, framed silhouettes representing Ellen Hutchins and Dawson Turner, a number of books, several letters and a single drawing by Ellen. These materials were kindly donated by the Ellen Hutchins Festival - a non-profit organisation based in Bantry - exists to share the story of Ellen Hutchins; to promote botany and botanical art; and to celebrate the biodiversity and beauty of Bantry Bay, West Cork, Ireland.