Mary Elizabeth Banning

Mary Elizabeth Banning, Maryland's first mycologist, devoted her life to scientific exploration and documentation. Her work as a school teacher and natural historian was remarkable, specifically in the study of mycology - the branch of botany dealing with fungi.

Banning was born in 1822 to Robert Banning and Mary Macky on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The Bannings were a prominent family in Maryland with ancestry tracing back to 1650.

Banning was motivated from an early age to investigate the workings and beauty of the natural world, which led her to specialize in mycology. She collected mushrooms and other fungi throughout Maryland, put together a scientific library, set up a private herbarium, and kept an illustrated record of all she found. Between 1868 and 1888, Banning created a remarkable and significant book of watercolor illustrations of mushrooms, including some species new to science, faithfully documenting the details of their physical appearance through drawings and text. She discovered 23 new species of mushrooms just on Tilghman Island in Talbot County, Maryland. These findings were published in mycologist Charles H. Peck’s “Annual Report of the New York State Botanist” (1871). Peck was one of her only supporters for her continual work in the study of mycology.

Her devotion to science is even more astounding, considering the obstacles placed before her. She was essentially a practicing scientist without the support of a major institution. Her private letters reveal her frustration in being excluded by the nineteenth-century scientific establishment, which was not eager to accept a woman into its fold. As she worked, Banning incurred increasing financial problems caring for invalid relatives and, near the end of her life, was living in near poverty.

Banning's scientific achievements remained largely unrecognized in her lifetime. After nearly one hundred years of obscurity, John H. Haines, a curator at the New York State Museum, rediscovered her book of watercolor illustrations in 1981 and made it known to the public. Banning’s work and beautiful drawings were celebrated in an exhibit organized by the Museum, titled "Each a Glory Bright: Mary Banning's Mushrooms."

The 1996 exhibit, “Where the Wild Things Are: The Nature of Maryland,” by the Maryland Center for History and Culture (formerly the Maryland Historical Society), and the 2018 exhibit, “The Women of Talbot County,” presented by the Talbot Historical Society, also celebrated and brought attention to her life and research. These exhibits showed a new generation of both the scientific and artistic value of Banning's work.

Banning died, unmarried, at age 81 in 1903. There is now a bright, orange-red fungus, which bears the name Hypomyces banningii, in her honor.

"My first idea of drawing and painting the Fungi of Maryland had for its object educational training in a mission school...I confess to a smile at my choice of a subject, feeling that for once I had stepped from the sublime to the ridiculous. Yet I feel satisfied with my undertaking, believing that the study of Natural Science in any of its departments has a refining influence--that when used in its truest highest sense it is the Divinely appointed means of teaching faith as well as cultivating minds." - Mary Elizabeth Banning

Biography courtesy of the Maryland Commission for Women, 1994; updated 2023.