Details - Jane Boit Patten field notes - Biodiversity Heritage Library

Jane Boit Patten field notes

Title

Jane Boit Patten field notes

Related Titles

Series: Biodiversity Heritage Library Field Notes Project

External Resources

Collection guide: Jane Boit Patten field notes, 1899-1938, bulk 1899-1900. Harvard University Botany Libraries

By

Patten, Jane Boit, 1869-1964 , author

Type

Collection

Material

Archival material

Publication info

Notes

The Patten collection consists of two small field notebooks and three loose-leaf notebooks with holes for brads (two were tied with blue silk ribbon which was removed and retained). The field notebooks are formatted in columns with the following headings: number, date, place, formation (e.g. meadow, woods, on wall), soil etc., altitude, height, (Latin) name, and remarks. The loose-leaf notebooks contain identifications and descriptions for plants collected in Greece, arranged by family.

Jane Boit Patten was born on June 8, 1869 in Providence, Rhode Island to Joseph Hurlburt Patten and Elizabeth Greene Boit. She attended Smith College and later studied botany at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden, Germany. From 1899-1900 Patten made collections in several European countries, including Switzerland, Italy, and Hungary. While traveling in Greece in 1900 she met anthropologist and Smith classmate, Harriet Boyd Hawes, who was undertaking excavations on the island of Crete. Hawes invited Patten to join the excavation and to study and document the flora of Crete. Patten returned to the United States the following year; her work was continued by Blanche Emily Wheeler (later Blanche Wheeler Williams). Patten spent the next several years teaching botany and biology, first at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1901 to 1906, and then at Simmons College from 1906 to 1917. She died on December 6, 1964. Her herbarium was given to the Gray Herbarium in 1938.