Ella Orr Campbell

Dame Ella Orr Campbell (28 October 1910 – 24 July 2003) was a New Zealand botanist. An expert on bryophytes, she published 130 Campbell attributed her interest in botany to walks that she had taken with her father as a child;

After graduating Otago Girls' High School, Campbell took a two-year course at Dunedin Teachers' Training College. At the same time, she enrolled at the University of Otago. She received her Diploma in Teaching in 1930. In 1931, she entered the department of botany at the University of Otago to study under John Ernest Holloway. Her thesis, "The embryo and stelar development of Histiopteris incisa", was published in Transactions of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1936.

Career Upon graduation, Campbell taught at Waitaki Girls' High School in Oamaru for a year and then became an assistant botany lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington. In 1936 she returned to the University of Otago, now working alongside Holloway. She remained until 1944, when Holloway retired.

In March 1945 Campbell became the first woman faculty member of Massey Agricultural College (now Massey University). She lectured on plant morphology and anatomy and led research field trips to Himatangi Beach, Kapiti Island, and Tongariro National Park. She also conducted research into the unique flora of peat bogs. She also wrote internationally acclaimed papers on the "mycorrhizal associations of New Zealand's achlorophyllous mycotrophic terrestrial orchids, Gastrodia cunninghamii, G. aff. sesamoides, G. minor, Molloybas cryptanthus and Danhatchia australis". She continued to research and publish as an honorary research associate for more than two decades, retiring in 2000 at age 90. On April 4, 2003, the herbarium that she had cultivated and helped expand at Massey was renamed the Dame Ella Campbell Herbarium at a ceremony which she attended. In 2017, Campbell was selected as one of the Royal Society Te Apārangi's "150 women in 150 words", celebrating the contributions of women to knowledge in New Zealand.

Works She co-authored with fellow Massey academic John Stuart Yeates the textbook Agricultural Botany (first published in 1954; second edition in 1960).

Personal Campbell never married, nor had children. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1980 and underwent a mastectomy. In June 2001 she left her home in Palmerston North for a retirement home, where she died on 24 July 2003, aged 92. Her ashes are interred with those of her family at Andersons Bay Cemetery, Dunedin.