Shirley Gale Cross (August 27, 1915, Oklahoma – July 14, 2008, East Sandwich, Massachusetts) was an American botanist, botanical illustrator, and conservationist.
[1] Born Shirley Gale in 1915, she ... received her doctorate in systematic botany from Radcliffe, now Harvard University, at a time when women were separated from men in class by use of a curtain, according to her daughter-in-law, Susan Cross.
[3]In 1941, she married Chester "Chet" E. Cross (1913–1988), her classmate who received a Ph.D. in paleobotany from Harvard.
In between, they viewed and photographed the alpine flora on the volcanic slopes of central Hokkaido, Japan; on a climb through the rhododendron forests to over 12,000 feet in the Langtang Valley north of Kathmandu, Nepal; on the precipitous Andean slopes of Bolivia and Peru; and in Switzerland’s picturesque Alps.
Later, in 1997, Shirley journeyed to Namaqualand in western South Africa to see the desert bloom.