Mary Anne Stebbing
English botanist, botanical and scientific illustrator (1845-1927)
Mary Anne Stebbing FLS (née Saunders; 11 September 1845 – 21 January 1927) was a botanist and botanical illustrator. She was among the first women to be admitted to the Linnean Society.
Personal life
Stebbing was the daughter of botanist and entomologist William Wilson Saunders. Growing up she was involved in gathering, identifying and sketching botanicals for her father, as well as caring for the garden. Her husband, zoologist Thomas Roscoe Rede Stebbing described her family as a “very nest of naturalists” in his autobiography. She met her husband through the Holmesdale Natural History Club which had been set up by her father. They married in 1867 and as a wedding gift Mary presented him with a volume of orchids she had drawn herself with the note “to my dear husband”. Following their marriage they moved to Torquay, Cornwall, before moving to Tunbridge Wells in 1877. On their golden anniversary they spent a portion of the day drawing together. T.R.R. Stebbing died in July 1926, and Mary Anne died on 21 January 1927 in Tunbridge Wells.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mary Anne Stebbing” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.