Background
She was the youngest daughter of the botanist Thomas Andrew Knight.
She was the youngest daughter of the botanist Thomas Andrew Knight.
In July 1834 a portrait of Lady Rouse-Boughton, painted by Henry Collen, engraved by John Cochran, was published in the Court Magazine. Charlotte Rouse Boughton was buried in the village church at Rous Lench in Worcestershire. Her eldest son, Charles Henry Rouse-Boughton, inherited his father"s baronetcy in 1856.
Her second son, Andrew Johnes Rouse Boughton, inherited one of her father"s estates, Downton Castle in Shropshire, and adopted the surname Knight.
In 1817, aged just 16, Charlotte Knight was presented with the Silver Medal of the Horticultural Society of London (now the Royal Horticultural Society) in recognition of the quality of the Waterloo cherry. Her father had written in 1816 that the new variety "sprang from a seed of the Ambrée of Du Hamel, and the pollen of the May-Duke".
lieutenant was named after the Battle of Waterloo, having first fruited at Elton Hall a few days after Napoleon"s defeat in 1815. Ripening early, in late June to early July, it can serve as a pollinator to later varieties.
The writer and gardener Christopher Stocks notes in his 2008 book Forgotten Fruits that Charlotte Knight "deserves posthumous recognition" given how rare it was for women to generate new cultivars: "of all the hundreds of varieties of fruits and vegetables in this book, Waterloo is the only one not to have been created by a man".