Shirley Gale Cross

Shirley Gale Cross (August 27, 1915, Oklahoma – July 14, 2008, East Sandwich, Massachusetts) was an American botanist, botanical illustrator, and conservationist.

Biography Shirley Gale grew up in Gloucester and Marblehead and graduated from Massachusetts State College (renamed in 1947 the University of Massachusetts Amherst). At Radcliffe College, she received her Ph.D. in 1939 with M. L. Fernald as her thesis supervisor.

In 1941, she married Chester "Chet" E. Cross (1913–1988), her classmate who received a Ph.D. in paleobotany from Harvard. The couple moved to the Spring Hill Historic District of Sandwich, Massachusetts, where they owned and cultivated three cranberry bogs to supply cranberries for the fresh fruit market. They continued growing cranberries until shortly before Chet Cross's death. 1947 book Ferns and Fern Allies of New Hampshire. Shirley Gale Cross drew the Rhynchospora illustrations

She and Chet had a long-abiding interest in alpine flowers, stimulated first on family climbs in New Hampshire’s White Mountains in the 1930s and continuing with a family celebration near the summit of Mount Washington in June 2005. In between, they viewed and photographed the alpine flora on the volcanic slopes of central Hokkaido, Japan; on a climb through the rhododendron forests to over 12,000 feet in the Langtang Valley north of Kathmandu, Nepal; on the precipitous Andean slopes of Bolivia and Peru; and in Switzerland’s picturesque Alps. Later, in 1997, Shirley journeyed to Namaqualand in western South Africa to see the desert bloom.

Upon her death, she was survived by three sons, six grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.