Elizabeth Stack

Elizabeth (Eliza) Rachel Jean Stack (née Jones; 19 February 1829 – 2 December 1919) was a New Zealand settler, author and botanist.

In 1858 Stack was introduced by Mrs Wynyard to Dr Andrew Sinclair, a keen botanist, who offered to help her to identify items in her collection.

[1][2] Later that year, Stack describes a trip to the Pink and White Terraces where she was pleased to have ventured to the top of Te Tarata:"We were very proud of having achieved the rarely accomplished feat and seized the opportunity to gather specimens of mosses and ferns which have never been dry and never felt cold.

Some of the mosses were a foot high and we got three varieties of ferns which grew on the brink of the boiling pool, and procured healthy leaves which were dipping in the hot water.

Stack's journal describes many occasions hunting ferns and mosses for her collection, often with her brother Humphrey and his wife Emma.

After spending a year living in the empty orphanage in Addington, they moved first to Kaiapoi, before building a house on Armagh Street in Christchurch.