The Timaru student who took harakeke into the laboratory
c1885-1927
Botanist
Mycologist
Pioneering scientific researcher
Harakeke grew in the coastal wetlands around Timaru long before Bella Dytes Macintosh Cross began examining plants that could survive salt, wind and waterlogged ground.
Bella was born in Timaru and educated at Timaru Girls’ High School before studying botany at Canterbury College. She completed a BA in 1908 and an MA with first-class honours in botany in 1909. Her master’s research investigated the structure and growth forms of salt-tolerant plants near Christchurch and Timaru. She combined field observation with microscopic study, helping establish a new area of botanical research in New Zealand.
With the support of a National Research Scholarship, Bella turned her attention to Phormium, the plants commonly called New Zealand flax. Her substantial study examined the plant’s structure, variation and possible economic uses. A 197-page manuscript remains in the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa library, while an outline of the work was published through the New Zealand Institute.
Royal Society Te Apārangi describes Bella as New Zealand’s first woman Doctor of Science. Historical sources disagree over whether the degree was recorded in 1917 or 1919, so the distinction is stronger than the precise year currently attached to it.
Her life also carried her beyond New Zealand. Bella married biologist Lancelot Shadwell Jennings in 1915. He was killed during the First World War the following year, and she later prepared his scientific notes for publication. She subsequently married pathologist Peter MacCallum and continued scientific study in Britain. After taking a bacteriology course at Cambridge, she worked on fungi associated with dark staining in newly harvested timber and was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society in 1921.
Bella died in 1927, still a comparatively young woman. Her research career was brief, but it linked South Canterbury’s coastal plants with university science, industrial questions and an emerging understanding of fungi.
Her story also needs cultural care. Harakeke was not simply a possible colonial commodity. It is a taonga with long-established Māori names, uses, cultivation practices and knowledge. Bella’s work belongs within the history of Western botanical science. It should not be described as discovering the value of a plant already deeply understood and used by Māori.
Read the WuHoo story: Salt, Spores and Science: Bella MacCallum in the Thick of Flax
Sources
Royal Society Te Apārangi: Bella MacCullum
Supports her MA research, National Research Scholarship, Doctor of Science distinction, bacteriology and fungal research, and election to the Linnean Society.
A. D. Thomson, “Some Pioneer Women Graduates in Botany from Canterbury University College”
Supports her Timaru birth and education, degrees, research, sporting and student roles, marriages and surviving Phormium manuscript. It also identifies the conflicting Doctor of Science dates.
National Library of New Zealand: Bella Dytes Macintosh McCallum
Confirms the alternative surnames Cross, Jennings and McCallum, her Timaru origin and the archival papers relating to her.
Corrections and consultation required