Emma Cole, devoted her life to studying nature.  She was a 19th-century botanist and teacher who studied botany, mathematics, zoology and physics at Cornell University.

    She taught at Central High School for 26 years.  After she retired, she went to Europe to visit the famous arboretums and gardens.  Later, she traveled to California to study the flora and collect specimens.  For six summers in the 1890's, she boarded with a farmer near a good collecting area.  She frequently drove a horse an buggy to nearby collecting areas in her many secret gardens.

    This information is recorded in the book she authored in 1901, Grand Rapids Flora, and donated her collection of botanical specimens to the Kent Scientific Institute which was the forerunner of the Grand Rapids Public Museum.  In her will she left a considerable sum to perpetuate the interest in flowers in Grand Rapids.  It provided that once a year a sermon or lecture be on flowers the second Sunday in June at either Park Congregational Church, St. Mark's Episcopal or Fountain Street Baptist Church.

    She was posthumously inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in 2007.