Emma Gertrude Cummings (December 2, 1856[1] – October 12, 1940[2]) was an American horticulturalist and ornithologist.[3]
Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and lived mainly in the town of Brookline.[3] She was educated at Boston Art School.[4]
Cummings was an active participant in Brookline civic life. In 1897 she contributed a chapter on botany to the town's publication Brookline: The History of a Favored Town.[4] The following April she published an account of the people and flora of the Bahamas, "A Spring Visit to Nassau" in Popular Science Monthly.[5]
Cummings was the first woman to hold a town office in Brookline, when she was elected a member of the town's tree planting committee, from 1902-1939.[6] Cummings was elected an Associate of the American Ornithologists' Union in 1903.[7] Also in 1903, she gave a lecture to the Massachusetts Horticultural Society about trees in the Southern United States.[8] In 1904 her ornithological pocket guide Baby Pathfinder to the Birds, co-authored with Harriet E. Richards, was described in The Auk as "a convenient and helpful vade mecum",[9] praised in the Journal of Education as a valuable guide that "no beginner or would-be beginner should be without",[10] and cited by the Boston Herald as evidence of Cummings' exemplary status as a "twentieth century woman."[11] She was a member of the tree planting committee from 1902 to 1939, and in 1938 published a book on the committee's history and notable trees of the town.[3][12] Her book Brookline's Trees was praised by The Boston Globe,[13] and the Boston Herald noted that it was "much used by teachers and in schools."[11] Cummings was also a member of the Brookline Historical Society and gave talks to the membership on her travels, such as to Hawaii in 1923, and she was on the science sub-committee of the Brookline Education Society.[14][15]
Cummings lived with her sister Mabel Cummings, and died in October 1940 in Westfield, Massachusetts.[3][16]