[5] "Lady Dalhousie was eminently distinguished for a fund of the most varied knowledge, for a clear and powerful judgement, for acute observation, a kind heart, a brilliant wit."

Dalhousie was a keen botanist; she catalogued plants on herbarium sheets, fully identified and complete with collection dates, notes on habitats and some with watercolour pictures she had painted.

[1][8] Dalhousie presented a paper to the Society,[9] and donated her collection of Nova Scotian specimens as part of a herbarium in 1824.

[11] Records of correspondence with Kew botanist, Sir William Hooker, include large collections of plants from Simla and Penang in 1831.

[9] When her husband was appointed Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia, she travelled with him and their three sons to Canada on the frigate HMS Forth.

[14] Once established, Dalhousie and her friends, Anne Mary Perceval and Harriet Sheppard, started focusing on natural history and in particular cataloguing local botany.

[3] Plans for the garden were cut short as the family suffered severe financial losses when their agent went bankrupt.

[1] The family moved to a modest farmhouse in Sorel in 1826 and remained there until Lord Dalhousie was appointed Governor General and Commander-in-Chief of India in 1829.

[7] Three hundred plant specimens collected by the Dalhousie at Sorel between 1826 and 1828 are maintained in the herbarium (HAM) at Royal Botanical Gardens (Ontario).

[17] For her work in the classification of Indian botany, Robert Graham named a genus of Fabaceae, a flowering plant native to India, after her – Dalhousiea.