In the 1850s in George Town, attention turned to the types of seaweed in the Tamar.

Early collectors included Susan (1810-1878) and John Fereday (1813-1871) and Sophia Sybella Goodwin (1835-1894).

Susan Fereday was a trained and accomplished artist. She painted in watercolour and produced portraits, landscapes and depictions of local flora.

She came to Van Diemen's Land in the Aden and settled at George Town in The Grove in 1846 with her family of six children when her husband, John Fereday, was appointed the rector of St Mary Magdalene's Anglican Church.

John Fereday was also interested in the natural world, particularly in algae and shells. He was a talented sketcher and an early pioneer of photography in Tasmania.

Susan Fereday painted many of the native species around her, including Correa speciosa and Eucalyptus viminalis while living at The Grove.

John Fereday had a boat and a dredge and when William Henry Harvey, professor of Botany at Trinity College, Dublin, visited George Town in 1855, the Feredays helped him collect thousands of specimens and explore the area.

Susan Fereday provided many preserved specimens and helped Harvey lay out and dry those he collected. He later named two specimens after Susan: Dacya feredayae and Nemastoma feredayae.

Susan Fereday exhibited watercolours of local native plants and algae at the Intercolonial Exhibition in Melbourne in 1866-67. The National Library of Australia and, in Tasmania, the Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts hold examples of her work.

Sybella Goodwin whose father was the infamous newspaper editor William Lushington Goodwin was another notable collector of algae. The Goodwins had moved to The Grove in George Town in 1852.

By this time the Feredays had moved to the new residence provided for the rector in Anne Street, George Town. The two families in all likelihood were part of the same social circle in the town.

Sybella Goodwin is thought to have collected at least 12 specimens for Ferdinand von Mueller, Victoria's government botanist with Rhodophyllis goodwiniae named after her by Swedish botanist Jacob Agardh.

After her father died, Sybella and her mother ran a school for young ladies at The Grove before moving to Sydney in 1874.

Many specimens collected by the Feredays and Sybella Goodwin became part of a collection established by Mueller who aimed to compile a flora of Australia, enlisting the help of many volunteers to collect samples.

These formed the base of what is now the National Herbarium of Victoria. Examples collected by Susan Fereday are also in the British Museum and at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.

Many of the collectors at this time were female and the project itself an early example of citizen science.