Lucy Beatrice Moore & Lucy May Cranwell Smith

Lucy Beatrice Moore & Lucy May Cranwell Smith

Sergeant Fearnley of the Te Kuiti police was our contact and we travelled some way under his escort on the back platform of a railway carriage, looking as disreputable as any pair of prisoners but eagerly learning from him about local plants. From Mangapehi we two went eastwards, riding on a horse-drawn trolley that ran on wooden rails, to the Ellis & Burnand mill and in to untouched parts of that marvellous podocarp forest ...

Lucy Moore recalls the 1928 journey she and Lucy Cranwell took to Mangapehi in the King Country, in search of the root Dactylanthus taylorii. Lucy Moore, ‘Lucy Cranwell Lecture’, Auckland Botanical Society Newsletter 41, 2 (1986)

Lucy Moore and Lucy Cranwell were pioneers in the modern era of New Zealand botany, making significant contributions to botany, palynology and the emerging field of ecology. The study of living flora – as compared to herbaria specimens – was still a relatively new approach in the 1920s and 30s and the two keen fieldworkers, with their rucksacks and bedrolls, coloured headscarves and boys’ shorts, attracted much attention on their many excursions.

After both attending Epsom Girls’ Grammar School, Cranwell and Moore became friends at Auckland University College, where they completed masters degrees in botany in 1928.

The next year, ‘the two Lucies’, as their friend and mentor Leonard Cockayne called them, were jointly awarded a scholarship to investigate the alpine plants of Te Moehau, on the Coromandel Peninsula. Later research trips to the Hen and Chickens and Poor Knights Islands resulted in one of the first studies of an intertidal community in New Zealand.

In 1929, Cranwell became the Auckland Museum’s botanist, setting up exhibitions and contributing around 4000 plant specimens to the museum’s herbarium. She wrote botany pieces for the Auckland Star, took the public on ‘botany trots’, established a Native Wildflower Circle and gave radio talks about field trips. Professional opportunities for women in science were rare in the early 20th century, and Moore, now known as ‘the mother of New Zealand botany’, took a low-paid job as demonstrator in the zoology department at Auckland University College.

In 1935, the two Lucys attended botanical conferences in London and Amsterdam and visited Linnaeus’s home in Uppsala. It was in Sweden that Cranwell was introduced to pollen analysis, leading to her life-long focus on palynology.

The Second World War defined some of their research: Moore surveyed local algae, seeking an alternative (from Japanese) source of agar for medical research; Cranwell produced a survival booklet, Food Is Where You Find It (1943), to familiarise the United States armed services with the wild foods of the Pacific.

Moore became botanical assistant at the newly-formed DSIR Botany Division in 1938, where she initially worked on lower plants and weeds. She went on to write pamphlets on seaweeds, produce volume one of Flora of New Zealand (1961), co-write volume two (1970) and, with the botanical artist Nancy M Adams, produce Plants of the New Zealand Coast (1963). In 1978, her Oxford Book of New Zealand Plants was published.

Marrying an American serviceman moved Cranwell’s career to the United States, where she eventually became a research associate in palynology at the University of Arizona. Moore retired from the DSIR in 1971, but remained an active scientist until 1980.   

By Rebecca Priestley

Medals and awards

Lucy Cranwell: FRSNZ 1944, Hector Medal 1954, FLS 1989

Lucy Moore: FLS 1945, MBE 1959, FRSNZ 1947, Hutton Medal 1965, Marsden Medal 1974

Further reading

Lucy Moore biography – Dictionary of New Zealand Biography website

Lucy Cranwell biography – Royal Society of New Zealand website

Five articles by Lucy Moore, published in Tuatara between 1967 and 1973, have been digitised and are available online:

Articles by Lucy Moore – New Zealand Electronic Text Centre website

Kirstie Ross, ‘The “Two Lucys”: The collaborative work of Lucy Moore and Lucy Cranwell, 1928-1938’, New Zealand Science Review 58, 4 (2001)

‘Lucy Moore 1906-1987’, Charlotte Macdonald et al, The Book of New Zealand Women, Wellington, Bridget Williams Books, 1991

Permission of the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga O Aotearoa, must be obtained before any reuse of this image

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