(27 October 1829 – 11 April 1923)
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Herbarium (NCU) curates 84 vascular plant specimens collected by Eric Craig. All are ferns or fern allies collected in New Zealand. Most specimens are undated, but the few with dates were collected between 1875 and 1930. Most specimens have labels two labels: Craig’s original label, “New Zealand Ferns Collected by Eric Craig” printed along the top, and occasionally with a collection number and taxon. An additional label in NCU Curator Alma Holland Beers’ handwriting contains the taxon, collection number, and “Bought from H. G. Fiedler, Oct. [October] 1930”. I have not found any record indicating if NCU directly purchased the specimens or if they were purchased then donated to the Herbarium.
Mr. Craig’s specimens can be found in many herbaria across North America.1
“Eric (or John Eric which was his proper name) was my Great Grandfather,” said Judy Dooling in a July, 2009 interview. “He was born in Ecclefechan in Dumfriesshire [Scotland] on October the 27th, 1829. His parents moved to Tewkesbury in England where he was educated. In 1850 he followed many men like him to the goldfields of Bendigo in Australia trying to find his fortune. He was there for quite some time and then heard about the gold finds at Thames in New Zealand so crossed the Tasman. To cut a long story short he paid a visit to the widow of a friend from the Bendigo goldfields and three years later married her.
He was a very well known businessman in Auckland (he had a window and sash company amongst other things) and was always an avid collector of Maori artifacts, shells, kauri gum Greenstone and botanical samples. He became known as “the fern man” because of his extensive knowledge of New Zealand’s ferns. He would often travel for days (and he had others doing the same) looking for new samples to mount for his own collection but also to sell from his Craig’s Curiosity Shop, which was on Princes Street in Auckland.
Victorian England had a voracious appetite for these ferns and I know that he had quite a keen business in sending them to customers over here who would write to him giving him a list of the ferns they were looking for and telling him how much they would pay for “the latest examples”.”2
“Eric Craig (1829?-1923)… was a fern mounter and curio dealer in Auckland, New Zealand. He had a shop near Auckland Museum in 1892-1893, from which he sold books of pressed ferns. He published two editions, in 1888 and 1892, of 100 cyanotype illustrations of 172 varieties of fern, following the layout and some of the typography originally employed by Herbert Boucher Dobbie in his New Zealand Ferns published in 1880. It is also apparent that he used some of Dobbie’s labeling but his specimens are different. Examples of Craig’s work exist in the National Library of New Zealand and in the National Museum & Gallery of Wales in Cardiff.” 3
SOURCES:
1. SERNEC Data Portal. 2024. http//:sernecportal.org/index.php. Accessed on June 25.
2. Anonymous. 2008. New Zealand Ferns: Eric Craig. http://www.fernbook.co.uk/eric-craig accessed on 25 June 2004.
3. Ware, Mike (1999) Cyanotype: The history, science and art of photographic printing in Prussian blue. The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum, London.