Charlotte Knight (horticulturalist)

Charlotte Rouse Boughton: 1834 engraving from the Court Magazine

Charlotte Knight (c. 1801-1843), known after her marriage as Charlotte, Lady Rouse-Boughton, was a British horticulturalist who bred the Waterloo cherry.[1] She was the youngest daughter of the botanist Thomas Andrew Knight.

In 1824 she married Sir William Edward Rouse Boughton, independent M.P. for the venal borough of Evesham, with whom she had 3 sons and 5 daughters.[2] In July 1834 a portrait of Lady Rouse-Boughton, painted by Henry Collen, engraved by John Cochran, was published in the Court Magazine.[3] A copy is in the National Portrait Gallery,[4] which also has two photographs of her daughter Catherine.[5] Charlotte Rouse Boughton was buried in the village church at Rous Lench in Worcestershire.[1] Her eldest son, Charles Henry Rouse-Boughton, inherited his father's baronetcy in 1856. Her second son, Andrew Johnes Rouse Boughton, inherited one of her father's estates, Downton Castle in Shropshire, and adopted the surname Knight.[6]

In 1817, aged just 16, Charlotte Knight was presented with the Silver Medal of the Horticultural Society of London (now the Royal Horticultural Society) in recognition of the quality of the Waterloo cherry. Her father had written in 1816 that the new variety "sprang from a seed of the Ambrée of Du Hamel, and the pollen of the May-Duke".[7] It was named after the Battle of Waterloo, having first fruited at Elton Hall a few days after Napoleon's defeat in 1815.[8] Ripening early, in late June to early July, it can serve as a pollinator to later varieties.[9]

The writer and gardener Christopher Stocks notes in his 2008 book Forgotten Fruits that Charlotte Knight "deserves posthumous recognition" given how rare it was for women to generate new cultivars: "of all the hundreds of varieties of fruits and vegetables in this book, Waterloo is the only one not to have been created by a man".[1]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Stocks, Christopher. Forgotten Fruits. ISBN 978-1-90-521180-7.
  2. ↑ History of Parliament online
  3. ↑ "Genealogical memoir of Lady Boughton" in Court Magazine (December 1834) pp. 221-222 with illustration
  4. ↑ Catalogue entry (National Portrait Gallery)
  5. ↑ Listing (National Portrait Gallery)
  6. ↑ Michael Clarke, Nicholas Penny, eds, The Arrogant Connoisseur: Richard Payne Knight, 1751-1824 (Manchester University Press, 1982) p. 18 Google Books
  7. ↑ Thomas Andrew Knight, "Some account of three new cherries, the Elton, Black Eagle, and Waterloo" in Transactions of the Horticultural Society of London vol. 2 (1812-1817) pp. 208-211
  8. ↑ See "Cherry Timeline" and "Cherry Varieties" in Cherry Ripe: a taste of Kent
  9. ↑ Nigel Colborn, "My Cherry Amour" in Daily Mail (3 May 2010)

See also

External links