Charlotte Knight (horticulturalist)

Charlotte Knight
1834 engraving from the Court Magazine
Resting place	village church at Rous Lench in Worcestershire
Citizenship	British
Fields	Horticulture
Known for	Bred the Waterloo cherry
Spouse	William Rouse-Boughton
Children	3 sons and 5 daughters

Charlotte Knight (c. 1801-1843), known after her marriage as Charlotte, Lady Rouse-Boughton, was an English horticulturalist who bred the Waterloo cherry.

She was the youngest daughter and heiress of the botanist Thomas Andrew Knight, a member of a wealthy iron-founding dynasty founded by his grandfather Richard Knight of the Bringewood Ironworks in Shropshire. Her father was the heir of his brother the art connoisseur Payne Knight (d.1824), MP, who rebuilt Downton Castle in Shropshire.

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, himself a noted botanist, 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". It was named after the Battle of Waterloo, which had taken place two years before in 1815, as it had fruited first at Elton Hall in Herefordshire a few days after Napoleon's defeat at that battle. It ripens early, in late June to early July, and can serve as a pollinator to later varieties.

The writer and gardener Christopher Stocks notes in his book Forgotten Fruits (2008) 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".

In 1824 she married Sir William Edward Rouse-Boughton, 2nd and 10th Baronet (1788-1856), a Member of Parliament for Evesham in Worcestershire, by whom she had 3 sons and 5 daughters, including: