Charlotte Cortlandt Ellis (June 27, 1874 – March 17, 1956) was an American amateur plant collector active in New Mexico.
[2] She was born to frontier family and had little education, but in 1892 she was able to enrol at the newly opened University of New Mexico at Albuquerque in the 'preparatory department', which was to ensure students were educated equivalent to a high school degree, and in the next school year she was to be promoted to the 'normal department'.
In May 1893, however, after only 8+1⁄2 months her father took her out of college to help the family start a new ranch in a remote location in the Sandia Mountains.
These include those at the local University of New Mexico (2 sheets) and the New Mexico State University (75) herbaria, but also the United States National Herbarium and the herbaria of the New York Botanical Gardens and the Missouri Botanical Gardens.
Because many of her collections were of very common plants, the majority of these voucher specimens have likely disappeared in the general collections -many millions of sheets by thousands of collectors, and have never been indexed for the database, thus some 80% of her are now 'lost' somewhere, but the specimens which are housed in New Mexican herbaria are indexed and accessible.