Obituary: Lucy Cranwell Smith

By Ewen Cameron
(Curator of Botany, Auckland Museum)

In the herbarium of the Auckland Museum there are about 3600 plant specimens collected by a woman who left New Zealand more than 50 years ago to become internationally renowned in her science.

She never entirely left. During 56 years in the United States until her death this month, Dr Lucy Cranwell Smith remained close to the city of her youth.

She was patron of the Auckland Botanical Society, which she had founded in 1937, and also of the Waitakere Ranges Protection Society. When the Anawhata hut on Auckland's West Coast burned down two years ago, she felt it. She had helped build it in the 1920s on a coastline she loved.

Lucy Cranwell, as she was during her 15 years as the Auckland Museum botanist, remained close and generous to the museum, the University of Auckland and New Zealand family and friends for a lifetime.

She grew up in Henderson on her parents' orchard, now a part of Cranwell Park, attended Epsom Girls Grammar School and Auckland University where she was a keen hockey player and strong swimmer.

Graduating in botany in 1929 she joined the Auckland Institute and Museum which opened its new building in the Domain that year. She set up the natural history galleries, cared for the herbarium and became an assiduous collector. Besides public information work in the museum she spoke on radio, prepared native flower shows, gave popular talks and wrote regular newspaper columns.

She and a close friend, Dr Lucy Moore, made field trips to remote parts of New Zealand, collecting plant specimens and publishing their results. Over the years the "two Lucys" gathered material from the Poor Knights Islands, Hen and Chickens Islands, the summit of Te Moehau, Mt Hikurangi, and the summit of Maungapohatu in the Urewera country.

In 1943 Lucy Cranwell married a United States Army Major, S. Watson Smith, an archaeologist, and moved with him to America the following year.

There she continued her internationally recognised work as an expert on fossil pollen and spores.

Their son, Benjamin, was born in 1947.

After working at Harvard University Dr Cranwell Smith became a research affiliate at the University of Arizona, in Tucson, where she lived from 1954. There she earned international recognition for work mainly on Antarctic plant microfossils, including southern beech.

Her lifelong research on fossil pollen had begun in 1935 when she was invited to study at Stockholm with Lennart von Post, founder of pollen analysis.

Their joint, highly influential paper in 1936 on vegetation history with climate interpretations, was a new approach to the fossil pollen of the Southern Hemisphere. It was the turning point of her career.

Besides many scientific papers, she wrote two books. The Botany of Auckland came out in 1981, a revised and expanded edition of a book she first published with Professor Arnold Wall in 1936.

Food is Where You Find It was written for Second World War airmen and others cast away on remote Pacific Islands.

It proved a "best seller" for the museum, being issued to American and British troops as far north as Burma.

Lucy Cranwell Smith is remembered affectionately for her strong and warm personality, love of New Zealand and the outdoors, as an energetic and extremely competent botanist who was ever ready to share her knowledge.

Both living and fossil plants have been named in her honour.

She received a string of scientific awards. In 1937 there was the Loder Cup, on behalf of the Auckland Museum, for conservation and protection of native flora.

She was elected a Fellow of the Linnaean Society (London) in recognition of botanical research carried out in New Zealand and Sweden and for her efforts to stimulate interest in botany.

In 1944 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and in 1954 the society awarded her the Hector Medal for research on New Zealand pollens, the first woman to receive it.

She became an honorary member of the American Association of Stratigraphic Palynologists in 1989 in recognition of the pioneering research which contributed to understanding of Southern Hemisphere pollen and the evolution and pollen ecology of the plants of Gondwana.

She has left a wonderful legacy.