Violetta White Delafield (1875–1949) was an American botanist well-known for her horticultural pursuits at Montgomery Place, the ancestral estate of the Delafield and Livingston families of the Hudson Valley. Delafield was also an accomplished mycologist, the author of important papers on a group of fungi known as gasteromycetes. Her watercolor illustrations of mushrooms and contributions of fungal specimens to the herbaria of The New York Botanical Garden and New York State Museum retain significant scientific value to this day. This talk will explore her career as one of the early female workers in the field of mycology, especially in the context of her association with mycologists of The New York Botanical Garden.
About the Speaker
David Rose is an archivist, writer, and amateur mycologist. He is past president and current program chair of the Connecticut-Westchester Mycological Association (COMA) and contributing editor to the journal Fungi.
His archival career began at the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of NYBG, and he has been consulting archivist to the New York State Museum and the North American Mycological Association. His writings on mycology have focused on the literary and the historical: mushrooms in cinema, science fiction, ethnopoetics, and popular culture; the history of amateur mycology in the United States; and biographical portraits of musical composer John Cage, Johns Hopkins surgeon Howard Atwood Kelly, and molecular biologist Max Delbruck.
Location In the LuEsther T. Mertz Library