Elizabeth Billings

Her friend Elsie Kittridge, said Elizabeth Billings “had great energy and will power to accomplish what she desired to do.” Those accomplishments included cultivating various gardens, experimenting in farming, managing the family estate, and cataloging hundreds of plants.

It isn’t surprising that the daughter of a conservationist became interested in the natural world. The fifth of seven children born to Fredrick Billings and Julia Parmly Billings, Elizabeth was intensely interested in the plant kingdom from a young age. She spent hours exploring the family’s property in Woodstock, Vermont in search of plants, a hobby her family called “botanizing”. At twelve years old, her family purchased her a botanical kit to continue collecting desirable specimens. She was given the nickname “Lily” because she loved flowers so much.

Elizabeth Billings remained an “amateur” botanist, but likely used every resource open to a woman during that time including attaining as much formal education as was available to her. In her early twenties, she enrolled in botany courses at Barnard College. She gained direct experience as a member of many different environmental groups including the Vermont Botanical and Bird Club, the American Forestry Association, and the Hartland Nature Club and studied a collection of grasses at the New York Botanical Gardens.

Like her father, Elizabeth managed forestry projects throughout the family’s estate. This resulted in planting 3,200 trees over 20 acres on Mount Peg. However, her true passion was gardening. Beginning in her teens, Elizabeth cultivated several gardens, each with its own niche. She cultivated a lily pond, a waterfall garden, and a mushroom garden. The Fernery was her crown jewel. Consisting mostly of native ferns, it also included ferns she collected from Japan, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The Fernery contained several oak trees, and had a pool surrounded by a limestone wall. These choices were not only aesthetic, but practical. The oak trees provided shade and limestone nourished calcareous ferns. This vast collection of ferns were living representatives of her studies. Each fern had a bronze tag inscribed with a species name. When Elizabeth died, her four-page obituary appeared in the American Fern Journal.

Her lifelong work “botanizing” resulted in the Billings-Kittredge Herbarium. While at the New York Botanical Gardens, Elizabeth met its curator, Elsie May Kittredge, whom she subsequently recruited to help her collect and catalog the plants in and around Woodstock, Vermont. Over the course of thirty years, the two women collected 1127 specimens and made 932 photographs. When Kittredge discovered a new species of fern on Mount Tom, she named it in honor of her friend: Miss Billings Fern.

Elizabeth Billings also managed the family businesses. Following her mother’s death in 1914, she and her sister Mary took control of the mansion and abutting forest. Three years later, the sisters also bought their father’s farm from their brother, Richard. In 1932, they notably purchased the Woodstock Fairgrounds which their father had unsuccessfully tried to attain decades earlier. The Great Depression took its toll on the farm, and in 1936 they made the difficult decision to sell the property’s dairy cows. The family continued to generate revenue from harvesting timber and haying the pastures.

Her garden’s languished when Elizabeth Billings died in 1944 following a short illness. The plants she had meticulously pruned became overgrown, her fountain became covered in slime, and the paint on the garden benches peeled off. Almost prophetically, she died shortly before an outbreak of Dutch elm disease devastated forests throughout the northeast. However, Billings’ dream was pulled from oblivion when a new generation assumed control of the property. In the 1960s, the Rockefellers (whom Elizabeth’s niece Mary French married into) hired Swiss-born gardener Zenon Shrieber to restore the Fernery. The National Park Service continues to care for and preserve Elizabeth Billings’ living legacy. The Billings-Kittredge Herbarium (including its Miss Billings Fern) is also now preserved in the collection of Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park.