Annie Montague Alexander (1867-1950), intrepid explorer, amateur naturalist, skilled markswoman, philanthropist, farmer, and founder and patron of two natural history museums at the University of California, Berkeley, a pioneer who helped shape the world of science in California. Alexander's father founded a Hawaiian sugar empire, and his great wealth afforded his adventurous daughter the opportunity to pursue her many interests. She was a complex, intelligent, woman who. despite her frail appearance, was determined to achieve something with her life. Along with Louise Kellogg, her partner of forty years, Alexander collected thousands of animal, plant, and fossil specimens throughout western North America. Their collections serve as an invaluable record of the flora and fauna that were beginning to disappear as the West succumbed to spiraling population growth, urbanization, and agricultural development. Today at least seventeen taxa are named for Alexander, and several others honor Kellogg, who continued to make field trips after Alexander's death. Alexander's dealings with scientists and her encouragement and funding of women to do field research earned her much admiration, even from those with whom she clashed. Her legacy endures in the fields of zoology and paleontology and also in the lives of women who seek to follow their own star to the fullest degree possible. (Excerpted from a description of the book On Her Own Terms: Annie Montague Alexander and the Rise of Science in the American West by Barbara R. Stein, published 2001 by the University of California Press). Annie's father deserves much of the credit for the arc of her life because he (and she) was not limited by gender expectations, and believed that her curiosity should be encouraged and developed to the fullest extent possible. In addition to sharing adventures on mountains and in deserts, he taught her about finance and business. In 1901 she began auditing classes in paleontology at the University of California in Berkeley, and was soon accompanying and financing paleontological expeditions. Even into her seventies she proved to be one of the most resilient and resourceful members of any outing she participated in. In 1904 she was in Africa where at Victoria Falls her father was crushed and killed by a landslide in front of her. She was responsible for creating the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at Berkeley, a scientific institution which would become a national leader in vertebrate biology. She subsequently created a Museum of Paleontology to match the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, and personally organized and led several expeditions to stock its store rooms. It was in her seventies that her focus turned to botany. She and her life partner Louise Kellogg collected thousands of specimens for the university herbarium at Berkeley. Earlier in her life reading and other close work gave her massive migraines, and it was recommended that some of the muscles to her eyeballs be cut, a procedure which was carried out with little effect, and it was this limitation that prevented her from graduating from college. Nevertheless she became one of the most consequential figures in the history of paleontology and evolutionary biology. A stroke and a long coma finally ended the life of a woman who was truly a major contributor in her field. Rebecca Merritt Smith Leonard Austin (1832-1919), a self-taught botanist who greatly impressed John Gill Lemon. She was born in Cumberland County, Kentucky, one of eight children, and grew up there with limited opportunities to pursue her interests in the natural sciences. When she was five her family moved to Missouri. Her mother and two sisters soon died. By age sixteen she was teaching in rural schools to earn money for tuition. Rebecca eventually attended school in Magnolia, Illinois, and at the Granville Academy in Granville, Illinois. In June, 1852, she married Dr. Alva Leonard of Magnolia, and they moved to Peoria, Illinois, where she learned some medicine from her husband. They had two children, one of whom died young. Her daughter was born just after the death of her husband, and she lost her savings in the Panic of 1857. She moved to Tennessee to teach, but was threatened and left because of her abolitionist sentiments, and then moved to Minneola, Kansas, where Rebecca taught school before marrying a farmer, James Thomas Austin, in 1862. He served briefly in the Civil War, and then in the aftermath of the Gold Rush the family moved to the mining area of Black Hawk Creek in Plumas County, California, where she cooked and washed clothes for miners and helped those who were sick, and had two more children. In spite of the demands of working to support her family and looking after three children, Rebecca began to pay attention to the natural world. Her new passion for collecting plants led her to study in detail a plant that had been discovered thirty years earlier but never given the attention it deserved, and she and her pioneering fieldwork were eventually credited by Asa Gray with having made the principal observations on one of the West's odder plants, Darlingtonia californica, the pitcher plant. She studied the chemistry and feeding methods of, and insects captured by, this carnivorous plant, and sold collected specimens to botanists and collectors. She carried on a regular correspondence with botanist John Gill Lemmon and others. In 1872 she met Lemmon, who applauded her work as a naturalist, and she became part of a wider network of botanical correspondents that included William Marriott Canby, Asa Gray, Frank Morton Jones, Mary Treat, and Charles Darwin. Collecting and selling plants became a major source of income for Rebecca and her family. In 1875 the Austins moved to Butterfly Valley, and in 1883, they moved again to Modoc County, California, where she became the first specimen collector. Her daughter Josephine joined her in studying, collecting and selling specimens from California and Oregon. Along with Mary E. Pulsifer Ames, they are credited with providing the foundation to our knowledge of the vegetation of northeastern California. Her specimens are included in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution and the California Academy of Sciences. She died in Chico, California. Note: The ending 'ae' or 'iae' after the name Austin indicates that the person in question is a woman. There were over twenty plants that had her name on them, of which nine are still current. Kathleen Mary Drew-Baker (1901-1957), British botanist and phycologist. She was born in Leigh, Lancashire, and attended Bishop Wordsworth’s School, Salisbury, and won a scholarship to study botany at the University of Manchester, from which she graduated in 1922 with a first class honors degree, then receiving an MSc in 1923. spent most of her academic life at the cryptogamic botany department of the University of Manchester, serving as a lecturer in Botany and Researcher from 1922 to 1957. In 1925-1926 she worked at the University of California, Berkeley, travelling also to Hawaii to collect botanical samples. After returning to Manchester, she married Professor Henry Wright-Baker of the Manchester College of Science and Technology in 1928. Between 1924 and 1947 Drew-Baker published 47 academic papers mainly concerned with red algae. She was the author of A Revision of the Genera Chantransia, Rhodochorton, and Acrohaetium (1928). She was best known, especially in Japan where she never travelled, for her research on the edible seaweed Porphyra laciniata (nori), which led to a breakthrough for commercial cultivation. In honor of her contributions to the Japanese aquaculture and role in rescuing the commercial production of nori, she was named 'Mother of the Sea' in Japan, and since 1953 an annual "Drew festival" is celebrated in the city of Uto, Kumamoto in Japan, where a shrine to her was also erected. She was one of the founders of the British Phycological Society and served as its first president. During her 33 years of research she collected more than 2,700 species which were donated to the British Museum. She died at the early age of 55. Mary Elizabeth Barkworth (1941- ), American agrostologist with the Intermountain Herbarium at Utah State University and professor emerita at Utah State University in Logan, Utah. She was born in Marlborough, England. She is the author of a number of papers on grasses, was lead editor of the Manual of Grasses for North America, published by Utah State, and contributor to the grass section of Flora of North America. Wikipedia outlines her career this way: "Barkworth has a B.Sc. from the University of British Columbia, and went on to teach school in British Columbia after graduation. She has an M.Ed. and a Ph.D. in 1975 from Western Washington University where she worked on variation in Brodiaea. Following her Ph.D. she worked with Agriculture Canada until moving to Utah State University in 1979, where she also served as the director of the Intermountain Herbarium. Barkworth is known for her work on grasses, particularly members of the Stipeae and Triticeae, and she has worked to digitize collections at OpenHerbarium.org, which includes collections from Pakistan and Somaliland. In 2013 Barkworth established a collaboration with the Daggett County Jail whereby inmates helped catalogue specimens through a collaboration between the herbarium and the jail." She retired in 2012. Mary A. Beal (1878-1964). The following is quoted from Wikipedia: “…pioneering botanist who spent most of her life in Daggett, California, living at the ranch of local judge Dix Van Dyke. Though an amateur botanist, she was praised by Willis Linn Jepson for her excellent botanical specimens, and many of these were kept by the University and Jepson Herbaria to this day. She wrote a regular botany column for the Desert Magazine from 1939-1953. Back-issues of this publication are available online today through Desert Magazine. Some of her papers are held at the Mojave Desert Heritage and Cultural Association and some of her paintings of Mojave Desert flowers are held at the Mojave River Valley Museum in Barstow, California. Other papers and plant specimens are held at the archives of the University and Jepson Herbaria at the University of California, Berkeley.” Another website reports that she had come west for her asthma on the advice of her doctor, lived in a rustic cabin and went about by burro collecting native plant specimens. She was unmarried and between 1939 and 1953, she contributed 56 plant profiles to Desert Magazine. She was a passionate, dedicated, self-taught plant collector who loved the West and the wildflowers she sought. Janice Carson Beatley (1919-1987), member of the Nevada Native Plant Society, botanist and ecologist who did extensive work in the Mojave Desert, and author in 1965 of Ecology of the Nevada Test Site and in 1973 of Checklist of Vascular Plants of the Nevada Test Site and Central-Southern Nevada. The following is quoted from an article by Ronald Stuckey in the May 1990 issue of Taxon, the journal of the International Association for Plant Taxonomy: "Janice Carson Beatley, native Ohio botanist of the United States, will be remembered for her contributions toward the understanding of the wintergreen herbaceous flora of the deciduous forest region, the primeval forests of the unglaciated plateau in southeastern Ohio, and the ecological relationships of the vascular-plant flora of the Atomic Test Site in south-central Nevada. Throughout her professional life, Dr. Beatley was an outspoken advocate for ecological and environmental concerns while employed in seven different academic and research institutions and through active memberships in seven societies, whose mission is to save habitats and environments of natural areas. In her last academic appointment as a professor of biological sciences at the University of Cincinnati (1973-1987), Dr. Beatley taught courses in plant ecology and field botany and continued her research on the flora of the Nevada Test Site. In that capacity she fulfilled a long dream of returning to Ohio and teaching in the same department where Dr. E. Lucy Braun, the eminent plant ecologist, taught for 34 years and maintained her lifetime affiliation. Miss Beatley was educated in the Columbus public school system, graduating from North High School (1935). All other college degrees were from The Ohio State University: B.A. (cum laude, 1940) with a major in zoology; M.S. (1948) and Ph.D. (1953), both in botany with research in plant ecology. While a graduate student, she assisted in the general botany program and held appointments as an assistant, assistant instructor, and instructor, in addition to a pre-doctoral university scholarship (1953), a postdoctoral Mary S. Muelhaupt Scholarship (1957-1958), and instructorships in general botany (1955-1956). Other professional positions included science teacher, McArthur High School in Ohio (1943-1945), instructor in botany, University of Tennessee (spring-summer 1952; summers 1953-1955) and later acting assistant professor (summers 1957, 1959-1960); assistant professor, East Carolina College, Greenville (1954-1955); acting assistant professor, North Carolina State University, Raleigh (1956-1957); research associate, New Mexico Highlands University (1959); assistant (1960-1967) and associate (1967-1973) research ecologist, Laboratory of Nuclear Medicine and Radiation Biology, University of California, Los Angeles, and the Nevada Test Site at Mercury, Nevada; associate professor (1973-1977) and professor (1977-1987) of biological sciences, University of Cincinnati; and research associate in the Herbarium of The Ohio State University (1983-1987). Janice Beatley's research efforts were ambitious, being stimulated and directed by Professor John N. Wolfe, under whom she complete both degrees. Her master's thesis "The Wintergreen Herbaceous Angiosperms of Ohio" (1948) was published in the Ohio Journal of Science (56: 349-377, 1956), and her doctoral dissertation, "The Primary Forests of Vinton and Jackson Counties, Ohio" (1953) was prepared as a Bulletin of the Ohio Biological Survey. Miss Beatley's study of the wintergreen herbaceous flora is believed to be the first comprehensive study of its kind for any geographical area of North America. Initially, more than 1000 species of plants from various habitats in central and southern Ohio were studied over a 3-year period in their winter condition in the field and in the greenhouse. She provided an ecological classification, descriptions of the plants, and a taxonomic key for 287 species, about 16% of Ohio's herbaceous flowering plant species. Miss Beatley's study of the forests of Vinton and Jackson counties was conducted to recognize and describe the major primeval or primary forests which occurred there immediately prior to European settlement. She also correlated these forest communities and their distribution patterns with factors of their physical environment. During 40 years previous, a major program in the then Department of Botany and Plant Pathology at The Ohio State University, was aimed at mapping the natural vegetation types of Ohio. This long-range study was fostered and guided by Drs. Edgar N. Transeau and Homer C. Sampson. Janice's study was an important contribution to that effort, because it was conducted in one of the most heavily forested regions remaining in Ohio. It also was located on the unglaciated Allegheny Plateau near the peripheries of the Illinoian and Wisconsinan glacial boundaries and near former valley and tributaries of the ancient preglacial Teays River. This two-county region had for 20 years previous been recognized as one of unusual botanical interest, because of the extensive numbers of species known to be in Liberty Township, Jackson County, based on the field collections of Floyd Bartley and Leslie L. Pontius. It was believed that here occurred the greatest number of vascular-plant species of any comparable size in the state, and upon completion of the study, 1100 species (about half of Ohio's vascular-plant species) were recorded from the 42-square-mile area of Liberty Township. Miss Beatley's comprehensive study was based on field work of approximately 140 days during three years (1950-1953) driving over 20,000 miles in the two-county area of 837 square miles. Published by The Ohio Biological Survey, and long since out-of-print because of its thoroughness and usefulness. Dr. Beatley dedicated the Bulletin to Drs. Transeau and Sampson, "whose understanding of the landscape and its problems are the foundations upon which rest this and future studies of Ohio Vegetation." Dr. Beatley's career research was conducted at the Nevada Atomic Test Site in south-central Nevada, where, for 13 years (1960-1973), she studied the region's ecological-floristic relationships. At least 36 published papers and 11 abstracts are cited in her bibliography. Among the major topics published are: annotated check-lists of the vascular plants, geographical distribution, effects of radioactive and non-radioactive dust, status of introduced species, survival of winter annuals, relationships of plants to precipitation, discovery of new species, endangered and threatened species. Her most comprehensive study resulted in a 316-page book, Vascular Plants of the Nevada Test Site and Central-southern Nevada: Ecological and Geographic Distributions (1976), published by the National Technical Information Service, Springfield, Virginia. The entire region studied, containing some 25 mountain ranges, lies within the Basin and Range Province, between the Colorado Plateau to the east, the Sierra-Cascade Province to the west, and the Death Valley region to the south. The region essentially was unknown biologically at the outset of Dr. Beatley's study. The major plant associations are described on the basis of floristic composition and in relation to physiographic, geologic, edaphic, and climatic features. Emphasis is on the drainage basins of the Nevada Test Site, where Dr. Beatley studied the vegetation, flora, and physical environments for more than a decade. Janice Beatley had definite opinions about certain ecological concepts and processes. For example, she did not believe in the concept of competition, as revealed in a letter of 15 January 1978, to Charles C. King, Director of the Ohio Biological Survey: "... the existence of 'competition' has rarely been proved under field conditions; . . . the theories relating to it are just that-theories-and are based on laboratory studies almost exclusively." To support her own viewpoint having "lived on the desert for 13 years," she cited her study of the "Effects of rainfall and temperature on the distribution and behavior of Larrea tridentata (creosote-bush) in the Mojave Desert of Nevada" (Ecology 55: 260, 1974) where populations of tall, large diameter plants were correlated with higher rainfall and lower temperatures; whereas, plants in populations with low or reduced densities "were more difficult to explain." "In view of the low percentage of germinable seed produced probably in most years by these [low density] populations,. . . [it] seem[s] most likely to be the result of failure of the reproductive process through time to maintain the populations at high densities. There is no evidence to suggest that "competition' with other shrub species plays any significant role in main­taining these low densities of Larrea." The anonymous author of a short notice about Janice Beatley's life (Bull. Ecol. Soc. Amer. 69(2): 114. 1988) evaluated her 13 years of botanical research at the Nevada Atomic Test Site as follows: "Janice's long-term measurements and observations of germination and growth of desert plants led to an improved understanding of the importance of winter rainfall in setting the stage for events during the ensuing growing season. She showed that, contrary to prevailing views, survival and germination of annuals varied from year to year depending on soil moisture and temperatures in the critical months following germination. These insights have proven important in subsequent interpretations of variation in above-ground net production by plants in the northern Mohave Desert." With Dr. James L. Reveal of the University of Maryland, Dr. Beatley published names and descriptions of new species of vascular plants discovered on the Nevada Test Site. Dr. Reveal also published new taxa from her specimens. Three species commemorate her name: Astragalus beatleyae Barneby, Eriogonum beatleyae Reveal, and Phacelia beatleyae Reveal and Constance. Dr. Beatley's other research interests included a publication on "The sunflowers (Helianthus) in Tennessee" (J. Tenn. Acad. Sci. 38: 135-154, 1963), and on the "Distribution of buckeyes (Aesculus) in Ohio" (Castanea 44: 150-163, 1979). The latter study, begun while a graduate student in the early 1950s, was followed with extensive field studies in 1958 and completed in 1976-1978. The buckeyes were one of her favorite botanical endeavors, and Dr. Clara G. Weishaupt, her good friend and then curator of The Ohio State University Herbarium, was a frequent companion on these "buckeye" field trips of the 1950s. Another field botanical friend was Mr. Floyd Bartley who accompanied her while on field work in Jackson and Vinton counties. Dr. Beatley was member of a number of professional scientific organizations, including the Ecological Society of America, American Society of Plant Taxonomists, the Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee academies of science, California Botanical Society, Association of Southeastern Biologists, Southern Appalachian Botanical Club, and the Northern Nevada Native Plant Society." Caroline Priscilla Bingham (née Lord) (Mrs. Richard Fitch Bingham) (1831-1932), American botanist who was one of the earliest American women to publish scientific papers on botany. She was born in Pennsylvania, moved to Ohio with her family when she was five and married her husband Richard Bingham there. In 1873 they moved to Montecito, California where she became an enthusiastic student of botany. She was an influential collector of botanical specimens and an obituary in the New Bedford, Massachusetts, Standard-Times claimed that she discovered "30 new specimens of flora and a new genus, as well," although only one taxon bears her name at the present time. She was a member of the Santa Barbara Natural History Society and held the position of Secretary. She was also a member of the publication committee for the Bulletin of the Santa Barbara Society and published an article in that journal in March 1887. Her husband died in 1895 and she moved back east. Wikipedia says: “As well as publishing papers on her botany work Bingham collaborated with botanists such as Alpheus Hervey, William Gilson Farlow and Jacob Georg Agardh. Bingham assisted their work by providing specimens, lists of plants she collected, notes on special habitat, seasons of growth and frequency of appearance. Bingham also corresponded with Joseph Dalton Hooker at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew on botanical matters. When she died in 1932 at 101, she was said to be the oldest woman in New Bedford. Ida May Twitchell Blochman (1854-1931), born in Bangor, Maine, and lived in Iowa from 1857-1880, graduating from the State College at Ames in 1878. In 1880 she came to La Graciosa, California (an old community now within the city limits of Orcutt, south of Santa Maria), and became a schoolteacher. She married Lazar Blochman (1856-1946) in 1888, and they had one child. Ida maintained a lifelong interest in botany and collected plants in the Santa Maria Valley of the Santa Barbara region, mainly in the 1890s. Alice Eastwood used her ranch as a collection base, and it has been noted that there were several collections made by Alice on her ranch. Ida published a number of papers on the subject of California plants and gathered a herbarium of 600 plants from northern Santa Barbara County. In 1893 she sent a large collection of plants to the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago which were later deposited at Northwestern University, and corresponded with Eastwood and Edward Lee Greene. In 1896 she collected on Santa Catalina Island. After the Blochmans discovered oil on their Santa Maria property, they retired from professional life and moved to Berkeley in 1909 where Ida served eight years on the Berkeley Board of Education and 19 years as president of the Berkeley Charity Commission. In Berkeley, Lazar Blochman became a Spiritualist in the Berkeley bohemian culture. After Ida's death, he attended seances to communicate with her. Several endemics bear her name, most of which are central coast plants. Senecio blochmanae, Delphinium parryi subsp. blochmaniae and Erigeron blochmaniae were all named for her by Green, and Dudleya blochmaniae by Eastwood. Mary Leolin Bowerman (1909-2005), American botanist, co-author of The Flowering Plants and Ferns of Mount Diablo, California: Their Distribution and Association into Plant Communities, and the co-founder of Save Mount Diablo. She was born in Toronto, educated in England,  and moved with her parents to Pasadena when she was a teenager. From 1928 to 1954 she lived in Berkeley, where she had moved with her parents,  and where she enrolled at UC Berkeley. She was one of seven students, all women, who received their AB degrees in 1930, and she eventually earned a doctorate in botany in 1936. They later moved to Lafayette, California in 1954, to the same house where Miss Bowerman died. One of her professors in graduate school and her doctoral advisor was Willis Lynn Jepson and she was his last surviving student. Her doctoral thesis was on the flora of Mt. Diablo, and little did she know yhen that Mt. Diablo would be prove to be her life’s focus. In 2005, the same year she died, the Mt. Diablo buckwheat, Eriogonum truncatum, which she had been in 1936 the last person to knowingly see, was rediscovered. She co-founded the activist group Save Mount Diablo in 1971 which preserved tens of thousands of acres, and served on its Board of Directors until her death. She was honored with the manzanita species name Arctostaphylos bowermaniae by James B. Roof, director of the East Bay Regional Park District's Botanic Garden. She received many awards for her Mt. Diablo preservation efforts and was the subject of interviews, news articles, and editorials including in photographer Galen Rowell’s book Bay Area Wild, 1997. She died at the age of 97. Mary Elizabeth Bowker (Mrs. Frederick William Barber) (1818-1899, an pioneering British-born amateur scientist who without formal education made a name for herself in botany, ornithology and entomology, and was also an accomplished poet and artist who illustrated many of the papers she wrote for Royal Entomological Society in London, the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, and the Linnean Society of London. She was born in South Newton, Wiltshire, the ninth of eleven children, and her father was a well-off sheep farmer who moved his family to the Cape Colony of South Africa in 1820. Her father established a school for his children and those of his workers, and no doubt influenced his daughter with his affinity for the natural environment. Her life was changed forever by the 1838 publication of the book The genera of South African plants written by William Henry Harvey. Wikipedia says “She was fascinated by the chapters on the structure of plants and the Linnean classification system, and responded to the author's request for specimens so that he could begin documenting the flora of the Cape. Her ongoing correspondence with Harvey took place during a time when it was not generally accepted for women to engage in scientific discussion; indeed, in the beginning she did not disclose the fact that she was a woman. She enjoyed unprecedented freedom in this respect, partly because she was released from the relatively constraining Victorian culture of her home country, but also because of her father's encouragement and the generally relaxed pre-Victorian ideals he carried from an era when women enjoyed a freer voice. She became one of Harvey's main suppliers of plants from South Africa and also assisted him in the naming and classification of numerous species. Over a nearly 30-year correspondence, she sent Harvey approximately 1,000 species with notes on each one. She and her younger brother, naturalist James Henry Bowker, sent many previously unknown species of plants to the herbarium at Trinity College Dublin, and the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew.” She also developed a passion for entomology and made many significant contributions in that field. She met and corresponded with Charles Darwin and had a significant influence on his work. In addition she assisted her older brother, Thomas Holden Bowker, in his work amassing the first collection of Stone Age implements in South Africa. Frances Agnes  Bowman (1873-1931), school teacher; born in Shanghai, China, 22 Aug. 1873, died in San Francisco, Calif., 16 Apr. 1931. Came to San Francisco when one year old and was educated there; graduated with a BA from Stanford University in 1896 where she majored in botany; her interest in botany, and in a beautiful garden, continued through many years while she taught school in San Francisco; at one time she assisted Alice Eastwood in the herbarium, donating her services. Both she and her mother, Mary C. Bowman, were charter members of the California Botanical Club and both brought many specimens to the Academy.” (Biographical Notes on Persons In Whose Honor Alice Eastwood Named Native Plants (Ella Dales Cantelow and Herbert Clair Cantelow, Leaflets of Western Botany, 1957). Nina Floy (Perry) Bracelin (Mrs. Harry P. Bracelin) (1890-1973), American botanist and illustrator who worked as assistant to Alice Eastwood at the herbarium of the California Academy of Sciences. She was born in Star Lake, Minnesota, and was schooled by private tutors before entering the University of California at Berkeley. Her mother encouraged her to study medicine but she became interested in botany. Later, while working as an assistant researcher in the university's herbarium she made the acquaintance of Mexican-American plant collector Ynes Mexia, and Bracelin set to work on her vast but disorganised herbarium. From 1928 she labelled specimens and sent them to experts for identification, developing a large network of correspondents. She married Harry P. Bracelin and became known to her friends and family as Bracie. She is sometimes referred to as Nina Floy Burfield because that was her mother’s name before she married Edwin Perry, and her mother subsequently went back to using Burfield and insisted that her daughter also use that last name. I have found no evidence however that she did. After helping Ynes Mexia with organizing, documenting and labelling some 145,000 specimens that she had collected, she became a full-time employee, but because of downsizing and lack of funds in the wake of the depression she was let go in the mid-thirties. Mexia died in 1938 but she left a small bequest to the California Academy of Sciences to employ Bracie as a research assistant to its Curator of botany Alice Eastwood. She later worked at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Western Laboratory in Albany, California, producing botanical illustrations. In 1948 she was selected by the Academy as a lifetime member in recognition of her contributions. She was also honored with several plant names. She died in Berkeley in 1973 after a long illness. Mary Katherine (Curran) Brandegee (nee Mary Katherine Layne) (1844-1920), noted American botanist known for her studies of California flora. She was born in western Tennessee the daughter of a farmer. She moved with her family to California at the age of five during the Gold Rush. When she was nine, they settled in Folsom. In 1866 she married Hugh Curran and stayed married to him until he died of alcoholism in 1874. A year later she moved to San Francisco to attend medical school at the University of California, and while there became interested in medicinal plants and botany. She got an M.D. in 1878 but chose to pursue botany rather than practice medicine. She joined the California Academy of Sciences, collected plants and worked in the herbarium alongside Albert Kellogg. When he retired in 1883 she became botanical curator, a position she held until 1893. In 1889 she married civil engineer and plant collector Townsend Stith Brandegee. For their honeymoon, the couple walked from San Diego to San Francisco collecting plants. She took up writing and editing to establish the Bulletin of the California Academy of Sciences, which gave West Coast botanists the opportunity to publish their new species quickly rather than having them be transported to Asa Gray at Harvard. She also founded and contributed to the botanical journal Zoe. In 1891 she brought Alice Eastwood to the Academy as co-curator of the herbarium, and when she resigned two years later, Eastwood continued as sole curator. She moved with her husband to San Diego the following year, built a herbarium, and established San Diego’s first botanical garden, continuing to collect plants across California, Arizona and Mexico. In 1906 following the great earthquake, they moved back and donated over 76,000 specimens to UC Berkeley. Mary K. Brandegee died in 1920 at the age of 75. Charis Cobane Bratt (1932-2023), a California lichenologist. She was born in Lake Placid, New York, and was captain of the high school ski team which competed against other local high schools. She graduated from Lake Placid high school in 1950 as salutatorian of her class and matriculated with a scholarship to Syracuse University but had to drop out of college because smoking was allowed in class which triggered asthma attacks. She then found work in New York City at the YWCA and later came to work at Syracuse NY on the American Airlines reservation desk. She was married in 1954 to Peter Bratt and supported him while he earned a PhD in physics and she had five children. In 1960 her husband accepted a job with a Santa Barbara subsidiary of Hughes Aircraft and they moved to Goleta. She saw at first hand the miserable living conditions for some families in Goleta and helped form the Goleta Valley Housing Committee which was able to obtain a HUD secured loan to build Villa La Esperanza, one of the first low-cost housing developments in this area. Later, this led to another development called Casa de Los Carneros built in the 2000s. From 1971 to 1979 she was a Santa Barbara County Planning Commissioner where she advocated for better zoning regulations, good design plans, water conservation, and bikeways. She joined the Audubon Society and participated in many Christmas bird counts, hosting the telephone site which alerted members to rare bird sightings in Santa Barbara County. This led to her work on much larger birds as a volunteer with the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, participating in the condor recovery program. She sat on many different mountain ridges, locating, counting, and identifying the remaining condors which were nearing extinction. One day while doing this she noticed a lichen growing on a rock and decided to find out more about it. This led to her attending Santa Barbara City College studying natural history, botany, and geology. She learned how to collect, identify, and curate lichen specimens. The learning experience was enhanced by visits with international experts whom she took on field trips throughout California. She became a volunteer research assistant and was assigned laboratory space at the museum and with these credentials, joined excursions and professional meetings with other lichenologists throughout California, Oregon, Montana, British Columbia, Arizona, Ecuador and Spain. Her special area of research was the Channel Islands where she visited all eight, becoming a member of the very exclusive “All Eight Club” (only about 40 members worldwide). She was a founding member of the California Lichen Society in 1994. She donated her entire lichen collection (with herbarium cabinets) to the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden in 1998, providing a trove of some 40,000 specimens for use by future scientists. She continued to work for the garden for the next ten years, teaching others and conducting training workshops for US Forest Service Rangers, officially retiring in 2008. She had seven new species named for her, but by 2016 Parkinson’s and other health problems began to severely curtail her activities, and she passed away in 2023. Elizabeth Gertrude Knight Britton (Mrs. Nathaniel Lord Britton) (1858-1934), American botanist, bryologist, and educator, co-founder of the predecessor to the American Bryological and Lichenological Society, and involved in the creation of the New York Botanical Garden. She was born in New York City and spent much of her childhood in the vicinity of Matanzas, Cuba where her family had a furniture factory and a sugar plantation, following which she attended a private school in New York and Normal College (later Hunter College) graduating in 1875. After graduation she joined the staff of Normal College. She joined the Torrey Botanical Club in 1879. By 1883 she was beginning to specialize in bryology. She married Nathaniel Lord Britton in 1885, an assistant in geology at Columbia, resigned at Normal College, and took charge of moss collections at Columbia. From 1886 to 1888 she was editor of the Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club, and in 1889 published the first of an eleven-part series of papers titled "Contributions to American Bryology.” After the establishment of the New York Botanical Garden she was named Honorary Curator of the Mosses in 1912, a post which she held until her death. She collected botanical specimens in the Great Dismal Swamp, the Adirondack Mountains and the mountains of North Carolina, the islands of the Caribbean and West Indies including Bermuda and the Bahamas. She co-founded in 1898 the Sullivant Moss Society which later became the American Bryological and Lichenological Society, and served as its president from 1916 to 1919. She was not confined to mosses and published "A Revision of the North American Species of Ophioglossum," and collected the type specimens of Dryopteris brittonae and Ponthieva brittonae. In 1893 Britton was the only woman among the 25 scientists nominated for charter membership in the Botanical Society of America. In 1902 she was elected to the Board of Managers of the Wildflower Preservation Society of America. Other members of the board included Liberty Hyde Bailey, William Trelease, Charles Frederick Millspaugh, and Alice Eastwood, while its president was Frederick Vernon Coville. She published a total of 346 papers, of which 170 were on mosses. The moss genus Bryobrittonia was named in her honor as well as a number of plants. She died in the Bronx following an apoplectic stroke and was survived by four months by her husband. Susanna Patterson Bixby Bryant (Mrs. Ernest Albert Bryant) (1880-1946), a rancher, horticulturist and botanical collector, Her father, John Bixby, came to California at the age of 21, married Susanna Patterson Hathaway in 1873 and settled in Wilmington where his son Fred was born in 1875. His daughter Susanna was born in Long Beach in 1880. Her father died at the age of 39 after a sudden attack of appendicitis. Susanna spent her early years on her family’s Rancho Los Alamitos, and once while sick her father led her pony into the bedroom to visit her. After her father’s death in 1887 the family moved to Berkeley. She was educated at Miss Hersey's School in Boston, travelled extensively in Europe and elsewhere, and then returned to California where she met and in 1904 married Dr. Ernest Albert Bryant, personal physician to railroad tycoon Henry Huntington (who was in the early stages of creating his own museum and botanic garden in San Marino). Her mother died in 1906 and Susanna found herself co-proprietor with her brother Fred of their childhood ranch plus another, Rancho Santa Ana. She was very interested in ranch management and planted citrus fruits, walnuts, pears, and pomegranates. She learned about and was impressed by Theodore Payne’s all-native landscape in Exposition Park and began a correspondence with him, which led to her plan to create a botanical garden of native plants on her ranch. In 1927 she started planting a 165-acre section of the ranch following a design by landscape architect Ernest Braunton and a plant list compiled by John Thomas Howell. Conservation of native California flora was her number one concern and she included a herbarium, botanical library, and services for students and scholars. The garden relocated to Claremont in 1951 as the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden and today as the California Botanical Garden houses more than 70,000 plants of some 2,000 species. Ella Dales Miles Cantelow (1875-1964), co-author in 1957 of "Biographical Notes on Persons in Whose Honor Alice Eastwood Named Native Plants" in Leaflets of Western Botany. She was a researcher, an amateur collector. and a long time member of the California Botanical Club. She was born in San Francisco, 12 Sept 1875. Long an enthusiastic collector of native plants, she was made a life member of the California Academy of Sciences in 1942 in appreciation of the plants she collected in Arizona, Nevada, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, and Colorado, and gave to the herbarium. She donated her private herbarium to the Academy in 1947. She was also a member of the Cooper Ornithological Society. She was born in San Francisco and died in Berkeley. Annetta Mary Carter (1907-1991). The following is mostly extracted from an article about her by Barbara Ertter.  She was born in Sierra Madre, California (which coincidentally is my town). After the death of her mother, Carter's father spent the summers working in the San Gabriel Mountains as a fire guard, giving Carter the freedom to explore her surroundings and develop an appreciation for nature. Her interest in botany was encouraged and supported by her botany teacher at Pasadena High School/Pasadena Junior College. She entered the University of California at Berkeley in 1928, and graduated with an AB degree in botany in 1930, then entered a master’s program under W.A. Setchell. The received her MA degree in 1932 but the depression frustrated her plans. She continued to work in the university herbarium and eventually was involved in all day-to-day activities of the herbarium. She retired in 1968 as principal herbarium botanist and continued as a research associate for the remainder of her life. She collected plants all over California with such field associates as Helen Sharsmith, Ethel Crum and Edward Lee. In 1947, Annie Alexander, who founded and endowed both the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and the Museum of Paleontology on the Berkeley campus, invited her on a three-month expedition to Baja, and at the age of 40 she made a vow to return every year, a vow she nearly kept. After Alexander’s death in 1950, her lifelong travelling companion Louise Kellogg continued to make these trips to Baja. Other field companions included Roxanna Ferris and Reid Moran. Starting in 1971 Carter also led several natural history tours to Baja under the auspices of the California Academy of Sciences. Plagued in Baja by injuries such as cracked ribs and a broken arm and car breakdowns, she nevertheless made over 5,000 collections and said goodbye to the old panel truck she had inherited from her father which succumbed to a sandstorm. She became an authority on the history, biogeography, ethnobotany and economic botany of the Sierra de la Giganta region of Baja, and she worked with Robert Thorne to compile a list of additions to Ira Wiggins’ Flora of Baja California. She had a long commitment to the California Botanical Society and was secretary of the editorial board of Madrono. She was also a member of the Society for Women Geographers, and made three trips to the Yucatan Peninsula and trips to Europe in 1954, 1969 and 1972. She was a longstanding member of the Sociedad Botanica de Mexico and faithfully attended its congresses, also belonged to the San Diego Society of Natural History, the California Native Plant Society, the American Society of Plant Taxonomy, and the American Bryological and Lichenological Society. Around the age of 80 she visited China, but after that her health began to decline and she eventually died at an age just shy of 84 of multiple myeloma. Her many qualities and achievements were such as to insure great fame and recognition, and it is a pity that she is not better known in the wider world. Grace Emily Cooley (1857-1916), American botanist, author of Impressions of Alaska: with a List of Plants Collected in Alaska and Nanaimo, B.C. (1892). Along with James M. Macoun of the Canadian Geological Survey (1902) she made important early collections of vascular plants and lichens. The following is quoted from Ladies in the Laboratory?: American and British Women in Science 1800-1900, by Mary R. S. Creese: "Grace Cooley taught in the botany department at Wellesley for twenty-one years. She was born in East Hartford, Connecticut, on 26 July 1857. In 1881, at the age of twenty-four, after several years of high school teaching in New Jersey and New York, she enrolled at Wellesley. Although she did not immediately proceed to a degree, she nevertheless held the position of instructor from 1883 to 1896. She carried out summer research at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, and in 1893 took an A.M. at Brown University, Rhode Island. Among her publications from this period is a detailed account of the flora of southeastern Alaska, which appeared in the 1892 Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club. Still a paper of general interest, it reported a trip she and Clara Cummings had taken by coastal freighter along the Alaska panhandle the preceding summer. In the alpine meadows above Juneau, Cooley discovered a new species of buttercup that now bears her name, Ranunclus cooleyae. In 1894, following a period of research at the Naples Zoological Station and some time at the University of Zurich, she received a Zurich Ph.D. Her dissertation research on the cellulose content of seeds appeared in the Memoirs of the Boston Society of Natural History (1895). Although she became associate professor at Wellesley in 1896, she was not promoted further, possibly because she failed to publish again until 1904, when she brought out two papers on the growing of trees. She was especially active on the Missionary Committee of Wellesley's Christian Association. In 1904, at the age of forty-seven, she returned to New Jersey, where her teaching career had begun more than twenty-five years earlier. For eleven more years she taught biology in Newark high schools. The welfare of women schoolteachers was her particular concern, and she took a leading part in the formation of the Association of Women Teachers of the Newark High Schools, serving as the organization's first president. She died in Newark, 27 January 1916, at age fifty-eight." Ethel Katherine Crum (1886-1943), an American botanist, noted for collecting and studying California flora. She was born in Lexington, Illinois, and studied literature and the classics at the University of Illinois where she graduated in 1907. From 1909 to 1929 she was a public school teacher, an experience of which she spoke as "traversing an intellectual desert of the most barren sort." She was then awarded an MA degree in botany from the University of California, Berkeley. She worked as a research assistant for Dr. Willis Linn Jepson on the manuscript for volume two of A Flora of California. In 1933 she was hired as assistant curator at the UC Herbarium, where she worked until her death in 1943. She discovered and formally described at least 13 species and varieties of plants. She also served as the secretary to the editorial board of the California Botanical Society from 1933 to 1943, and for the Editorial Board of Madroño she assumed the burden of editing and preparing manuscripts. Her early training in the classics, her command of the English language and her experience in handling manuscript combined to make her particularly suited to these tasks. An article in Madrono by Herbert L. Mason said: "Upon acquaintance one soon became impressed with the fact that Miss Crum was a woman of outstanding intellectual brilliance, that she had an engaging personality and a ready flow of wit and humor. She was devoted to her work and her several hobbies crowded one another for her attention. Her passing ends a career of uncommon usefulness ; her life was a milestone in the history of a journal." She died in Lexington, Illinois. Nancy Jane Davis (1833-1921), teacher, school administrator and plant collector. She was born in the Kishacoquillas Valley near Lewiston, Pennsylvania, and graduated from Mount Holyoke College. In 1853 she was one of the founders of the Grier School in Birmingham, PA, and for over sixty years its principal. In 1863 she came to California by way of Panama and made in the district of Nevada County, according to Asa Gray “a fine and beautifully prepared collection of plants.” She visited California again in 1893 and yet again in 1915. Willis Lynn Jepson says in his “California Botanical Explorers” in Madroño (Vol. 1, No. 13): “The name Miss Davis is enshrined in many a memorial at or hard by Birmingham School [the former name of the Grier School]. It is pleasant to make more definitely known the name of another plant lover, noble in mind and generous in purpose, who belongs to the roster of California field botanists. Her plants, it is to be said, went mainly to Asa Gray, and towards Cambridge she bent her steps for several summers in order to carry on botanical work. Amongst other things she also collected a sub-alpine Polygonum in northern California which was named for her as Polygonum davisiae by W. H. Brewer in 1872." She was the collector of the type in northern California in 1863 of the rare shrub Leucothoe davisiae, and corresponded with John Torrey. She had two brothers and a sister and was unmarried. She is honored today by the naming of the Nancy Jane Davis Library at the Grier School. Mary Caroline Foster DeDecker (1909-2000), a lifelong California botanist, conservationist and plant collector, and a specialist on the flora of the Northern Mojave Desert. She was born in Oklahoma and moved to California when she was eight. Her father was a farmer, and he probably first triggered an interest in botany and taught her about observing plants. She studied at Van Nuys High School in the San Fernando Valley where she was introduced to biology, and after that completed one year at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The depression years, and her marriage in 1929, along with financial pressures caused her to give up her dream of completing her college education. She married Paul DeDecker who got a job with the Los Angeles DWP. Two daughters were born and the couple moved to Independence in the Owens Valley for Paul's job in 1935. At some point she met and began working with Mark Kerr, a botanist who focused on Paiute uses of native plants and helped her to begin learning what the different plants of the Owens Valley were, and encouraged her, despite the fact that it didn't cover the area very well, to use Willis Jepson's 1925 Manual of the Flowering Plants of California. She learned botanical terms and was inspired to become a self-trained botanist. Numerous extended family camping trips which began in the 1940s in the Sierras allowed her to become familiar with the natural history of that area and learn Sierran plants. She began studying and collecting plants and in the early 1950s sending specimens, also at Mark Kerr's advice, to Phillip Munz at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden and to John Thomas Howell at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, both of whom were impressed by what she was able to achieve. The family trips soon included the White-Inyo Mts and the desert ranges, and by this time DeDecker knew this was her calling. Around 1954 she began compiling a herbarium and eventually amassed some 6,400 specimens which was eventually donated to Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden (now California Botanic Garden). Aside from Dr. Munz and J.T. Howell, she also send specimens to Reed Rollins at Harvard and Peter Raven at the Missouri Botanical Garden. It was because of her work trying to conserve the Eureka Dunes area that she discovered the shrub that eventually bore her name, Dedeckera eurekensis, which was published in 1976 by Jim Reveal and J.T. Howell. The canyon where Mary found this shrub subsequently was named Dedeckera Canyon. She was selected by the BLM to conduct a plant survey of the northern Mojave Desert, a large area consisting of Inyo County east of Owens Valley and the southeastern tip of Mono County. Out of this study grew her book Flora of the Northern Mojave Desert which was published by the CNPS in 1984. She detailed the importance of desert landscapes and histories for the rest of her life through writing, political activism, and passionate testimonies. She was named a CNPS fellow in 1977, and she received the 1988 CNPS Rare Plant Conservation Award and the Andrea Lawrence Lifetime Achievement Award by the local Sierra Club chapter in January, 1999. She was also the author of Mines of the Eastern Sierra published in 1966 and worked assiduously to protect and conserve the Owens Valley, and she was the founder in 1982 of the Bristlecone Pine chapter of the California Native Plant Society. DeDecker was active in such organizations as the Garden Club, Civic Club, League of Women Voters, botanical organizations, Inyo Associates, and Death Valley '49ers, a supportive organization for Death Valley National Park. She served a number of years as Park Liaison Chairman and as second vice-president of the Death Valley '49ers, Her extensive knowledge and passion were crucial to the effort to pass the California Desert Protection Act in 1994, which established Death Valley National Park and stands as a monumental environmental conservation effort. Her Find-a-Grave memorial says "Botanist, mother, author, environmental leader, avid outdoorswoman, homemaker, visionary, grandmother, educator, respected friend. These are just a few of the words that could be used to describe Mary DeDecker." Few botanists, especially self-trained ones, have ever contributed so much to our knowledge of the California flora, and when she died in 2000 at the age of 91 there was left a gaping hole. (Much of this information was extracted from an interview in 1985 with Mary DeDecker conducted by Carol Holleuffer and printed as part of Women in Botany under the auspices of UCLA Regional Oral History Office of the Bancroft Lbrary) Alice Eastwood (1859-1953), self taught botanist and botanical curator for the California Academy of Sciences, indisputably one of the most significant figures in California botany who in a damaged and burning building after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake saved 1,500 priceless type specimens representing 53 years of collecting. During this time she neglected the safety of her own home which burned to the ground. She was born in Toronto, Canada, her mother died when she was six, and her father separated himself from the family. After a period of time when she and her sister were placed in a Toronto convent, her father reappeared and she moved with him to Denver, Colorado, and in 1879 graduated valedictorian from East Denver High School, following which she taught there for ten years. Her interest in flowers had been initiated first by her country doctor uncle who was an experimental horticulturist, and she later became a respected collector in Colorado where more than a dozen native plants bear her name. Having foregone a college education she relied on published botany manuals and became so adept at identifying plant species that she was asked to guide the famous English naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace up the summit of Grays Peak in Denver. In the early years of her career Eastwood made numerous collecting expeditions in Colorado and the Four Corners region by train, buckboard stage, horseback, and on foot. She became so well known locally that the railroad builder David Moffat issued her a free rail pass, and Alice reciprocated his generous support by naming a plant she had discovered, Penstemon moffatii, in his honor. She also explored the coastal ranges of the Big Sur region, which at the end of the 19th century were essentially a frontier. She joined Katherine Brandegee in 1892 as joint Curator of Botany for the California Academy of Sciences, succeeding her in 1894, and remained in that post for fifty-five years until she retired at the age of 90. After the earthquake, Eastwood studied in herbaria in Europe and other U.S. regions, including the Gray Herbarium, the New York Botanical Garden, the National Museum of Natural History of Paris, the British Museum, and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. She undertook numerous collecting trips in the Western United States, including to Alaska, Arizona, Utah and Idaho. In the 1930s and 1940s she spent a great deal of time collecting with her assistant John Thomas Howell, himself a recognized botanist who succeeded her as Curator. She was honored by Townsend Brandegee who named a new genus after her, Eastwoodia, after she came upon a new sunflower on one of her trips. She published over 310 scientific articles and authored 395 land plant species names. There are seventeen currently recognized species named for her, as well as the genera Eastwoodia and Aliciella. She served as editor of the biological journal Zoe and as an assistant editor for Erythea before the 1906 earthquake, and with Howell founded a journal, Leaflets of Western Botany (1932–1966). Eastwood was Director of the San Francisco Botanical Club for several years throughout the 1890s. In 1929, she helped to form the American Fuchsia Society. She was also an ardent conservationist and fought to preserve and protect Muir Woods National Monument and Mt. Tamalpais State Park as well as other redwood groves. She died in San Francisco. Patricia Maureen Eckel (1950- ), award-winning botanical artist, plant collector and research scientist in the bryology group at the Missouri Botanical Garden. She got her B.A and M.A. degrees at State University of New York Center at Buffalo in 1981 and 1984. Her undergraduate degree was in both art history and Greek and Latin classics and her Latin studies led her to prepare a manual of botanical Latin as part of her master's degree work also at the university. Eckel married botanist Dr. Richard Zander and together they headed the Clinton Herbarium at the Buffalo Museum of Science until 2002, when as part of the exodus of science talent from the museum, the couple left for the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis where they continue today. Eckel's credentials are extensive. She contributed to the Smithsonian Institution, is a fellow of the Explorer's Club and was a founding member and treasurer of the Niagara Frontier Botanical Society. Her artwork has adorned dozens of articles, books and exhibits. She has logged thousands of miles of fieldwork in the Rockies, the southwest, the middle Atlantic states, Canada, Mexico and Ecuador. Eckel retains her connections with western New York, however. She continues to monitor the botany of the region and her monograph, MADCapHorse, is a continually revised checklist to the wildflowers of the Niagara frontier region. Eckel has also been editing the papers of George William Clinton, son of Governor DeWitt Clinton. She recently received an award from the Linnean Society of London for her artwork. The award release text read in part: "The Linnaean Society of London announced that the Jill Smythies Award for Botanical Illustration will go to Patricia M. Eckel, of the Bryology Group, Missouri Botanical Garden. The award is given to a botanical artist for excellence in published illustrations in aid of plant identification, with the emphasis on botanical accuracy and the accurate portrayal of diagnostic characteristics. Eckel specializes in bryological artwork, and she recently completed illustrations for volume 27 of the Flora of North America published by Oxford University Press. She is also a bryologist with many publications including The Mosses of Wyoming, the botanical Latin editor for three professional journals, and maintains a website describing the vascular flora and plant history of the Niagara Falls area. The award, which comes with a purse and silver medal, will be given to her in a ceremony in London." Her beautiful illustration of a rare Rocky Mountain moss was included as the frontispiece for volume 27 of the Flora of North America North of Mexico. Elizabeth Emerson (Mrs. Samuel Tyler Atwater) (1812-1878), a female pioneer in the male-dominated field of botany, though one without formal training. She was born in Norwich, Vermont, the daughter of a successful merchant, and attended school there until she was fourteen when she was enrolled in the distinguished women’s school, Madame Emma Willard’s Seminary, in Troy, New York. She was fascinated with all things to do with nature and science. She married Samuel T. Atwater in 1839 and moved with him to Chicago in 1856. They were friends of Abraham and Mary Lincoln. Elizabeth collected an extensive number of botanical specimens and eventually donated them to the Chicago Academy of Sciences and the Chicago Historical Society, but unfortunately most of her collection was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1871. She also discovered a rare moss in California that was named for her. While in California she collected around 2,000 specimens of plants, some of which were new to science. Barbara (Jean) Ertter (1953- ), the highly-respected botanist and plant collector of the University of California at Berkeley. She was born in Boise, Idaho and received a B.S. in biology from the College of Idaho, an M.S. in botany at the University of Maryland where her major advisor was Jim Reveal, and a Ph.D. in biology from the City College of New York. She was a research associate at the California Academy of Sciences, administrative curator (formerly collections manager) for the University of California Berkeley Herbarium and Jepson Herbarium, and curator of western North American flora for the Jepson Herbarium at Berkeley. She has worked at the College of Idaho Herbarium, the BLM Northwest Watershed Research Center, as graduate teaching assistant, department of botany, University of Maryland, as graduate herbarium fellow, New York Botanical Garden, as lecturer, department of biology, University of Texas at Austin, as herbarium curator, University of Texas at Austin where she curated an 800,000 specimen collection, and she has provided plant lists and plant surveys for Lucky Peak Reservoir in Boise, Sawtooth National Recreation Area, Idaho, and the Bennett Hills and southeastern Idaho. She has taught many classes and led many Friends of the Jepson Herbarium weekend workshops, she is a past president of the California Botanical Society, she is a member of many professional associations, she has published a vast array of papers too numerous to list, she has been involved in editing and reviewing many papers for Flora of North America, Brittonia, Great Basin Naturalist, Madroño, Novon, Phytologia, Sida, and Systematic Botany, and her botanical interests are many and varied. There are hardly any areas of California botany and floristics which Barbara Ertter has not been involved in and it would not be an overstatement to suggest that she has been among the very most influential and significant botanical workers in the history of the West. Katherine Esau (1898-1997), a pioneering Russian-born botanist who studied plant anatomy and the effects of viruses. She was born in Yekaterinoslav, Russia (now Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine) to a family of Mennonites of German descent. She attended a Mennonite Parish school prior to entering secondary school, then began studying agriculture in 1916 at the Golitsin Women's Agricultural College in Moscow, but returned home at the end of her second semester due to the Bolshevik Revolution. She fled with her family to Germany where she continued her studies. After her graduation from the Berlin Agricultural College in 1922, she and her parents emigrated to the United States, where they made their home in a predominantly Mennonite community in Reedley, California. She worked first as a cook and housekeeper for a family, then began working on studying and raising sugar beets, eventually developing a sugar beet with resistance to the curly top virus. After meeting Wilfred William Robbins from the University Farm of the Northern Branch of the College of Agriculture (now University of California, Davis), she was accepted as a graduate assistant in the botany division. She was formally awarded a doctorate in 1931 which was granted by UC Berkeley. She was also elected to the Phi Beta Kappa honor society in 1932. Esau then joined the faculty in the new post of junior botanist in the Agricultural Experiment Station of the College of Agriculture. She taught at the University of California, Davis, from 1932 to 1963. In 1963 she moved to University of California, Santa Barbara to better continue collaborative work with Vernon I. Cheadle. She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1949. In 1951, she was president of the Botanical Society of America. In 1956, the Botanical Society of America awarded her a certificate of merit in its Golden Jubilee celebrations. In 1957, she was the sixth woman elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1962, she was awarded an honorary degree by Mills College, Oakland. In 1964, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society. In 1989 President George Bush awarded Esau the National Medal of Science. Her textbook Plant Anatomy (1953) became the foremost text in the United States on plant structure and was widely adopted abroad. Although she officially retired in 1965, becoming professor emerita, she continued her research work until 1994. In 1989, when she was awarded the National Medal of Science, she became the first trained botanist to be so honored. She was also the author of Anatomy of Seed Plants (1960), Plants, Viruses, and Insects (1961), Vascular Differentiation in Plants (1965), and Viruses in Plant Hosts (1968). She established the Katherine Esau Fellowship Program in 1993 at the University of California, Davis. This supports post-doctoral, junior faculty and some summer graduate fellowships. She died in Santa Barbara. Margaret Clay Ferguson (1863-1951), plant physiologist who earned her Ph.D. at Cornell University (1901) and taught at Wellesley College from 1893 to 1932. Margaret Clay Ferguson was an American botanist best known for advancing scientific education in the field of botany. She also contributed on the life histories of North American pines, and conducted groundbreaking studies on native American pines and plant genetics. She was born in New York, and like many people who gravitated to botany grew up on a farm. She attended the Genesee Wesleyan Seminary in Lima, New York, and at the age of 14 was teaching botany in the local public schools. She graduated in 1885 and was promoted to assistant principal in 1887, and then attended Wellesley College’s “teacher special” program for working teachers. She accepted a position as head of the science department at Harcourt Place Seminary in Gambier, Ohio in 1891, but returned to Wellesley two years later as a botany instructor. In 1896 she left Wellesley to tour Europe and, in 1897, enrolled at Cornell University, from which she received a B.S. in 1899 and a Ph.D. in botany in 1901. In 1929, she was elected president of the Botanical Society of America, the first woman to hold that office. She became a professor of botany at Wellesley in 1893, associate professor in 1904, then full professor and head of the department, which positions she held until 1930, retiring in 1932. She received an Honorary doctorate from Mount Holyoke. She was elected a fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and in 1943 a member of the New York Academy of Sciences. Her writings consist mainly of papers on plant embryology and physiology. In her later years she spent time in Florida before moving to San Diego where died of a heart attack in 1951. Caroline Coventry Haynes (1858-1951), an American bryologist and painter, known for her study of liverworts. She was born in New York and undertook her formal education there. She then travelled to Paris where she studied impressionist painting with Claude Monet and others. She also pursued a role as a pianist. At some point  she returned to New York and was a member of the New York Watercolor Club, showing works at several annual exhibitions. She also exhibited a work at the National Academy of Design Annual Exhibit in 1897. She was a member and served as president of the Woman's Art Club of New York in 1899. In the early 1900s she was appointed a member of the jury of selection for the New York Watercolor Club annual exhibition and also served on the hanging committee. She studied botany at the New York Botanical Garden. An article from the Steere Herbarium at the New York Botanical Garden adds this: “In 1902, she adjusted her focus to the botanical realm in spending six years working with the cryptogam collections at NYBG under the guidance of lichenologist Reginald. H. Howe. Her newfound passion for cryptogamic plants particularly liverworts prompted her to establish and become the first curator of the Hepatic Department of the Sullivant Moss Society, during which time she channeled additional efforts into producing written and illustrative resources for both novice and experienced bryologists. Caroline also founded and was president of the National Association of Women Artists, was a fellow for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was an active member of many other organizations such as the Horticultural Society of New York. She notoriously made donations in support of aspiring and amateur botanists, though sought no public acknowledgement and was known to make contributions on the grounds that the recipient not reveal her as a benefactor. She also used her personal funds to help keep the Sullivant Moss Society afloat during times of hardship. Preceding her passing in New York, Caroline donated her life’s collections to the Farlow Herbarium and her specimens are held in many North American herbaria today.” In later life she moved to Highlands, New Jersey, where she continued to collect hepatics before returning to New York where she died in 1951. Ellen Hutchins (1785-1815), Ireland’s first female botanist and a talented botanical artist who made beautiful and accurate drawings that were used by a number of botanists in their publications. She was particularly interested in cryptogams like mosses, liverworts, lichens, seaweeds and other seashore plants of the Bantry Bay and County Cork area where she lived. She also collected around Belfast and along the west coast of Ireland. Most of her collection is at Kew Gardens. She contributed to the Flora Hibernica by James Townsend Mackay, curator of the botanic garden at Trinity College. She discovered a great many plants new to science and contributed greatly to our understanding of seaweeds and other non-flowering plants. She was also an avid gardener and she tended plants in a field near her home which was referred to as Miss Ellen’s garden. Her health had been poor as a youth, and in the latter part of her life she suffered from tuberculosis and died in Cork just before her 30th birthday. The genus Hutchinsia (Brassicaceae) was named in her honor by William Townsend Aiton in 1812 and, even if now replaced by the name Hornungia, the common name “Hutchinsia” persists in the UK for Hornungia alpina. Jeanne Russell Janish (1902-1998), a botanical and paleontological illustrator who traveled extensively in China as a young woman and produced many pencil drawings and watercolors of that country, particularly its flora. As a youth she spent summers in Colorado where she learned the names of many plants of the Rocky Mountain region. She was a Latin major at Vassar College graduating in 1924, then received a Masters degree in geology at Stanford. Her career in botanical illustration began there with work on Permian ammonites by her paleontology professor. She was in China from 1920 to 1934 and she got married there to Carl Frederick Janish. Upon her return she and her husband moved to Nevada. In her later years, she concentrated on the Southwestern region of the U.S. Between 1929 and 1974 she prepared illustrations for thirty-two najor books in addition to many short papers and articles. Her work illustrated Roxana Ferris's Flowers of the Point Reyes National Seashore and Abrams' Flora of the Pacific States. Roxana Judkins (Stinchfield) Ferris (1895-1978), an early staff member of the Dudley Herbarium of Stanford University, author of Native Shrubs of the San Francisco Bay Region (1968), Flowers of the Point Reyes National Seashore (1970), Death Valley Wildflowers (1983), and co-author with LeRoy Abrams of Flora of the Pacific States, Vol. IV. The following is quoted from Sara Timby, "The Dudley Herbarium" in Sandstone and Tile, the journal of the Stanford Historical Society, Vol. 22, No. 4: "Ferris was the mainstay of the herbarium. Her official, full-time job lasted forty-seven years, but she was a student assistant three additional years, and she continued her connection with the herbarium in many capacities after her retirement. John Thomas, her colleague and staunch admirer, wrote 'Although the titular curators came and went, Roxy ran the place.' That is not to say she was always there; she did a tremendous amount of fieldwork, collecting some 14,000 specimens, often with many duplicates that were traded with other herbaria. Ferris received her A.B. degree from Stanford in 1915 and her A.M. in the following year with a thesis on the "birds beaks," the genus Cordylanthus. Her husband, Gordon Floyd Ferris, was an entomolgist who studied the scale and sucking insects such as lice and aphids. They married in 1916, when both started working for Stanford. They had one daughter, Beth, born in 1917. Roxy's mother lived with them and cared for Beth. Roxy's professional titles did not come as quickly as the men around her, but eventually she did become assistant curator, associate curator, curator, and finally urator emeritus. Ferris officially retired in 1963, and shortly thereafter had a heart attack. But she kept working at the herbarium until the early seventies and died at age eighty-three in 1978. Naomi Fraga (1979- ), director of conservation at the California Botanic Garden. is a research assistant professor of botany at Claremont Graduate University. She was born in West Covina, California, and grew up between West Covina (where her family lived) and La Puente (where her grandmother who took care of her lived and where she went to school. She attended K-12 at Hacienda La Puente Unified School District, graduating from La Puente High School in 1997. She got her B.S. degree in biology and botany from Cal Poly, Pomona, and her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in botany from Claremont Graduate University. She says “I wasn't particularly inclined towards botany before college, mainly because I didn't know a thing about it. I was interested in nature, environmental conservation and doing something that seemed worthwhile for society. I found botany when I started volunteering at CalBG (RSABG then) in 2000 as a herbarium intern. I just found it on google or whatever search engine I was using in 2000 and thought it could give me some kind of experience related to my major (Biology) and it was close to school and home. Obviously it changed my life!” Fraga’s research focuses on systematics of the species formerly treated in the genus Mimulus (commonly known as monkeyflowers), of which she has identified several new species. Fraga is also interested in floristics of California, conservation biology, pollination biology, and rarity and endemism. Since 2001, Fraga has served in varying capacities at California Botanic Garden (formerly Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden), first as in intern, then as a curatorial assistant, and later as a conservation botanist. In that role, Fraga oversaw the field studies program and worked with federal, state, and local agencies on baseline botanical surveys and conservation strategies for plant species. As director of conservation programs since 2015, she is responsible for preparation of contract and grant proposals, planning and conduction of fieldwork, report preparation, budget management, supervision of staff and interns, dissemination of research, and coordination and collaboration with complementary activities of other RSABG programs. She has received the Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation Fellowship for leadership in environmental conservation (2010), and the US Fish and Wildlife Service Certificate of Appreciation (2008). She is a member of the American Public Gardens Association, American Society of Plant Taxonomists, Botanical Society of America, California Botanical Society, California Native Plant Society, and Nevada Native Plant Society. She is primarily concerned with floristics in western North America, plant conservation, rarity and endemism in California, the  systematics of the Phrymaceae, and pollination biology. She also adds “Other species I have worked on include Hidden Lake bluecurls (Trichostema austromontanum ssp. compactum). I have done a lot of work with the rare plants of the San Bernardino Mountains.  Right now I am working on a research project that includes the five listed meadow species (Taraxacum californicum, Poa atropurpurea, Thelypodium stenopetalum, Sidalcea pedata, and southern mountain buckwhea (Eriogonum kennedeyi var. austromontanum), and I also have research projects focused on the Tecopa bird's beak (Chloropyron tecopense) and spring-loving centuary (Zeltnera namophila). And of course I have done a lot of advocacy work for Tiehm's buckwheat.”  Adele Gerard Grant (née Lewis) (1881-1969), American botanist specializing in Mimulus. She was born in Carpenteria, California, graduated with a B.Sc. degree from the University of California, Berkeley and an M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the Henry Shaw School of Botany at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri. While there she served as a teaching fellow and was associated with the Missouri Botanical Garden. She taught at Cornell University and then moved to South Africa in 1925 where she lived for five years, during which time she visited Rhodesia, the Belgian Congo, Kenya and Mozambique. She taught botany for several years at Huguenot College in Wellington, South Africa. JSTOR adds: “Working with botanists at the University of Cape Town's Bolus Herbarium she published little at the time but developed an important herbarium. On her return to the USA in 1930 Grant began to work at the Missouri Botanical Garden, but soon returned to California with her collection to study the material at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1969, when the Missouri Botanical Garden was recognised as the official center for the study of African plants in North America, the collection was moved there for study. Grant continued to teach, working at San Francisco State College, the University of Southern California and at George Pepperdine College, and on retiring became supervisor of science for the Los Angeles County schools. As a botanist she published monographs of the genera Mimulus and Hemimeris L., but was also interested in ornithology and marine life.” She died at the age of 87 and is buried in Carpenteria, California. Jette Lewinsky-Haapasaari (Mrs. Øjvind Moestrup, Mrs. Matti Kalervo Haapasaari) (1948-1998), Danish bryologist. She was born in Copenhagen and received elementary education at Lyngby Statsskole secondary school and enrolled at the University of Copenhagen in 1967. Her courses included biology, mathematics, physics and chemistry and she matriculated as Candidate of Science in 1973 with a Master’s degree. She did fieldwork in East Greenland in 1970 and 1971, West Greenland in 1973, and the Faroe Islands in 1973 and again in 1985 and 1987. She attained a Licentiate in Science degree for bryology in 1976, and spent a good deal of time in Australia and New Zealand in 1974, 1979, 1980 and 1987-1988. Shorter excursions were made to East Africa, the American West, Scotland, Alaska, Iceland and Hawaii. In furtherance of her bryological researches, she also visited several foreign herbaria and museums. She was active in the Nordic Bryological Society holding the positions of both vice-president and president, and received a Ph.D. from the department of botany at Helsinki University. She was a course assistant at the University of Copenhagen 1969-1970, a junior lecturer at the botanical Museum in 1976-1977 and a Senior lecturer from 1977 to 1992. From 1983 to 1986 she was Keeper at the Botanical Museum in Copenhagen working primarily in the bryophyte herbarium. She moved to Finland in 1992 and continued working as an associated scientist at Kuopio Natural History Museum and in 1995 became Docent Lecturer of Botany at Helsinki University. She was one of the foremost bryologists of her time, held many national as well as international positions, contributed to scientific journals and collaborated on many international flora projects such as Flora Neotropica, Illustrated Mossflora of Arctic North America and Greenland, Flora of Australia, Moss Flora of the Huon Peninsula, Papua New Guinea, and Nordic Moss Flora. Few other bryologists have had such a wide and global knowledge. She was married twice, had two children, was very artistic and interested in classical music and arts and crafts, and was fond of growing lilies.  Carlotta Case Hall (1880-1949), American botanist and university professor who collected and published on ferns. She was born in Kingsville, Ohio, and studied botany and zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a B.S. in 1904. She married Harvey Monroe Hall who was a botanist and professor of botany at the University of California, Berkeley in 1910. Their daughter, Martha Hall, was born in 1916. Carlotta Hall became a fern collector and an assistant professor of botany at the University of California, Berkeley. She published on ferns of the Pacific Coast and co-wrote the illustrated handbook A Yosemite Nature (1912) with her husband as a pocket-sized botanical guidebook to Yosemite National Park. The book covers more than 900 species, omitting only the grasses, sedges, and rushes. She was a member of the California Academy of Sciences and a corresponding member of several European scientific societies. She became a member of the suffrage movement during the Progressive Era when women were becoming more involved in public social issues, and helped organize and direct events that led to the victory of women's suffrage both in California and nationwide. As a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, she was a member of the College Equal Suffrage League of Northern California. In May 1911, Hall was elected as one of the directors of the College Equal Suffrage League. She served on the advisory committee at the headquarters and helped with the organization of the 1911 suffrage campaign. The league was instrumental in helping pass the suffrage amendment in California in October of that year. She died in Ann Arbor, Michigan, at the age of 69. Vesta Florence Hesse (1901-1982). The following is quoted from John Hunter Thomas's The History of Botanical Collecting in the Santa Cruz Mountains of Central California (1961): "Vesta F. Hesse is one of the most astute collectors who has ever dealt with the local flora. The following is a brief account of her life which she sent me in February 1959: 'I was born in Boulder Creek, California, on Sept. 11, 1901, and graduated from the Boulder Creek Union High School in 1920. I went to college at the University of California in Berkeley, receiving an A.B. degree in 1924, and a secondary school teacher's credential in 1925. I taught in the high school at Angels Camp, Calaveras County, from 1925 to 1927, but was not a particularly good teacher. Teaching was a strain and I thought (mistakenly, as I know now) that it might be easier in another school. However, I was not able to find another position at that time. After staying a few years in Berkeley without finding any satisfactory employment, I came back to Boulder Creek to live. Here I became curious about various wild flowers, and in March 1938 bought a copy of Jepson's Manual of the Flowering Plants of California, so that I would be able to look them up. I had a wonderful time that first year, and identified some 500 species in this area, without paying much attention to Gramineae and Cyperaceae. Since then I have studied plants from all parts of California that were available to me, though the bulk of my collecting has been done in the Santa Cruz Mountains, with emphasis on the San Lorenzo Valley in Santa Cruz County.' Her specimens are to be found in the herbaria at the California Academy of Sciences, the University of California, and at Stanford University. Miss Hesse has published the results of some of her explorations (Hesse, 1957, 1959). and others (for example, Howell, 1949; Lewis and Raven, 1960) have reported upon some of her other finds. Her name is commemorated in Calyptridium parryi Gray var. hesseae Thomas." Ethel Bailey Higgins (1866-1963), American botanist and the curator of botany at the San Diego Natural History Museum. She was born in Vassalboro, Maine, and educated at the Wesleyan Seminary and Female College (now Kents Hill School) in Readfield, Maine. In 1900, she moved to Los Angeles, California with her parents and worked as a photographer, first in the studio of Frank G. Shumacher, then setting up in her own studio, specializing in botanical subjects. The following is quoted from Wikipedia: “In 1914, she married John C. Higgins; the next year, the couple moved to San Diego. During her career as a photographer, Higgins produced a series of 300 plant portraits, taking up the study of botany to properly identify her subjects. Higgins exhibited hand-tinted photographs of wild flowers during the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in Balboa Park. In 1931, Higgins authored Our Native Cacti; she joined the staff of the San Diego Natural History Museum in 1933, becoming curator of botany in 1943 upon the retirement of Frank Gander. Higgins compiled the first checklists of San Diego County plants, publishing “Annotated Distributional List of the Ferns and Flowering Plants of San Diego County, California,” in 1949 and “Type Localities of Vascular Plants in San Diego County, California” in 1959. During the 1950s and early 1960s, Higgins participated in several of the museum's research expeditions, collecting plant specimens in Baja California and on islands in the Gulf of California. She was curator of botany at the San Diego Natural History Museum until 1957 when she stepped down. As associate curator (working with her successor as curator of botany, Reid Moran), she helped build the herbarium's specimen collection. She wrote a series of interpretative guides to southern Californian plants and trees and continued collecting specimens in Baja California, Mexico, into her mid-90s. She died in 1963 in San Diego.” Minerva Hamilton Hoyt (Mrs. Albert Sherman Hoyt) (1866-1945), a California desert activist and conservationist. “She was born on March 27, 1866, on a plantation near Durant, Mississippi, to an upper-class family. She attended a local school for white students, many from the planter class. After marrying Dr. Albert Sherman Hoyt, they live for a time in New York and Baltimore, and had two sons together. In 1897 they moved to South Pasadena, California. In California, Hoyt used her influence as a wealthy socialite to support civic causes. Among these was the Los Angeles Philharmonic. There she gradually became deeply interested in desert plants and habitat. Hoyt became interested in Southern California's desert plants through her interest in gardening, particularly cactus and Joshua Trees. After the death of her husband in 1918, she became concerned that increased automobile traffic in the desert was threatening the area. Hoyt began to exhibit desert plants across the country, to educate people about their qualities. Exhibitions included the national 1928 Garden Club of America show in New York, where the work was seen and commented on by Secretary of Agriculture William Jardine. She later exhibited as far as London. The exhibitions were significant efforts—for the New York exhibition, seven freight cars of rocks, plants, and sand were shipped across the country, and fresh flowers were flown in. Throughout the 1930s she worked to encourage the state of California to create three parks, including Joshua Tree, Death Valley, and Anza-Borrego Desert. Though initially thwarted, in 1936, she gained support by the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which designated more than 800,000 acres in California desert area as the Joshua Tree National Monument. She also worked to appeal to the Mexican government, appealing to the latter to set aside 10,000 acres for cactus preservation.” She gained international fame as the ‘Apostle of the Cacti’ and the ‘Woman of the Joshua Tree.’ “ (from Wikipedia) An article in the LA Times says: “When Hoyt founded the International Desert Conservation League in March of 1930, the honorary vice presidents of the board included museum directors and university presidents, and the founder of the U.S. Forest Service. By 1934, Hoyt’s group had become powerful enough that the National Park Service was forced to take her proposal for a new park seriously. And so, in March of that year, the agency dispatched Roger Toll, superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, to the desert. ‘Toll was a major player, and his opinion carried or destroyed a number of places,’ Dilsaver [author of Protecting the Desert: A History of Joshua Tree National Park] said. ‘If he said no, that was the end of it.’ Hoyt met Toll in Palm Springs with her chauffeur and the desert botanist Philip Munz. On her desert excursions, Hoyt often looked as if she was hosting a tea — dressed in long skirts, hats and heels. They spent three days touring the desert together at a relentless pace, but the weather was cold and unpleasant and Toll was not impressed.” He recommended a small area to be preserved. Unbowed, she continued to press infuential people until she got the attention of FDR and in 1936 he signed the proclamation creating Joshua Tree as a national monument of 825,000 acres. Much work remained to be done but the heavy lifting had been accomplished. Minerva died in 1945 and was buried in Altadena. Although mining interests succeeded in slashing Joshua Tree’s acreage by almost a third in 1950, that land was returned in 1994 when Joshua Tree became a national park. We wouldn't be able to enjoy it today were it not for this remarkable woman. Clare Butterworth Hardham (1918-2010), distinguished American botanist and cattle rancher born in Santa Barbara, California, where her family had a nut farm near Templeton. She grew up in Connecticut and received a BA degree from Vassar College in 1939, did graduate work at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and received her MS in botany from U.C. Santa Barbara. In college, she met long-time Paso Robles physician, John F. Hardham. They married, and after World War II moved to California. She made extensive studies of the flora of the Santa Lucia Range, Sierra Madre Range, and other areas of the Central Coast during the 1950s and 60s. She collaborated with James Reveal on Chorizanthe and related genera. She discovered and named several new species in the Monardella genus. Her field work on the central and south coasts and the Santa Lucia Mountains was legendary; she had a number of special plants named for her, including the rare/endangered Pogogyne hardhamiae, Eriogonum butterworthianum and Galium hardhamiae, all of which are found in Monterey County. She is the plant name author of Collinsia antonina which she found near Fort Hunter Liggett.In later years, her other main interest was developing the ranch she inherited from her father to produce top quality polled Hereford cattle. She died at the age of 92 in San Luis Obispo County. Clara Adele Pike Blodgett Hunt (1859-1931), schoolteacher and amateur botanist. The Jepson Manual refers to this taxon as Clara Hunt's milkvetch, and originally spelled it as clarianus, but that has been corrected. She was the daughter of Edward P. and [Lucy] Schattuck Pike and was born in Claremont, New Hampshire. She came to California when 12 years old and married her first husband, George Farwell Blodgett, in 1878. He died in 1883. In 1891 she married her second husband, Daniel Otis Hunt and made St. Helena in the Napa Valley her home. Before her marriage she was a successful school teacher in the East Bay area. She was a great lover of flowers and had a liberal education in botany. Her particular delight for many years was the study of wildflowers with which our hills and valleys abound and several years the flower shows she gave either at her home or under the auspices of the Women's Improvement Club, attracted a great deal of attention. Mrs. Hunt was a past President of the Women's Improvement Club and in her earlier years took a great deal of interest in civic affairs. Her second husband died in 1914. Almut Gitter Jones (Mrs. George Neville Jones) (1923-2013), an American botanist, mycologist, curator, plant systematist and plant collector. She was born in Oldenburg, Germany, received a B.S. degree with high honors in agriculture from the University of Illinois in 1958, completed her M.S. degree in botany with a minor in agronomy from UI in 1960, and in 1973 received her Ph.D. from the botany department at UI specializing in plant taxonomy with a minor in agronomy. During her career, she held various positions in plant biology, and was Curator of the UI Herbarium until her retirement. Her field of research centered on the plant genus Aster and she published many papers about the systematics of this large, complicated group of species, being recognized nationally and internationally as an authority. The genus Almutaster was published in 1982 by Áskell Löve and Doris Benta Maria Löve. Her husband was killed in an automobile accident in 1968 and she survived him by 45 years. Louise Kellogg (1879-1967). An American mammalogist, botanist, and botanical collector born in Oakland, California. Her grandfather came west during the gold rush, and her father was an avid sportsman who taught Louise to fish and hunt and founded the first duck club in California. I don’t know anything about her youth or early education but she attended the University of California, graduating in 1901 with a degree in classics, and soon after, began teaching school. In 1908, Louise’s cousin, and the former university president Martin Kellogg, introduced Louise to Annie Alexander. Alexander had already suffered the death of her father in 1904 on an African wildlife safari, and his death was the catalyst for Alexander to found the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology on the Berkeley campus, and in 1908 Miss Alexander invited her to join a group from the Museum on a collecting expedition to Alaska. She needed another woman along because it was not then the norm for a woman to travel as the only female in the company of men. This trip marked the beginning of a 42 year relationship between the two women who became lifelong companions and friends. Kellogg proved herself an invaluable companion. And in 1910 Kellogg gave up her teaching job. In the fall of 1911, Annie purchased land on Grizzly Island in Suisun Bay, in the Sacramento Delta. Together, Louise and Annie established the Grizzly Island Ranch and became known for their asparagus crop, hay and milking cows. Over the next 40 years the two women conducted biological and botanical surveys and collected thousands of specimens mainly of birds and small mammals throughout western North America and abroad, specimens that were meticulously prepared but they also came with maps, photographs, and detailed field notes. On December 26, 1936, Louise and Annie set off from Big Pine, California for the Saline Valley on what became one of their more infamous expeditions. Saline Valley is located in the northern reaches of California’s Mojave Desert and their trip was the museum’s first opportunity to collect specimens and survey the area. Louise and Annie, now experienced field workers in their late 50s to 60s, had planned to stay for a week, but shortly after arriving storms blew in and one of the coldest winters on record descended on the area. Annie and Louise were trapped in the snow and their only exit was blocked by fallen rocks. They survived in isolation for weeks, eating beans and cornmeal, while fierce winds tormented the valley. Eventually on January 26, 1937, the roads were cleared and Louise and Annie were freed. Despite the harsh conditions, they managed to collect over 95 specimens of birds, gophers, and kangaroo rats to add to the museum’s collections. By the 1940s they were shifting their primary focus to plants. In that year they embarked on their last major collecting trip, this time to Baja. When they returned they had 4,608 sheets for the herbarium representing over 700 taxa, many of which were undescribed species or significant range extensions of previously known taxa. Alexander died in 1950 after a major stroke, but Kellogg continued her botanical work and frequented the university’s herbarium to work on the growing collections they had amassed. Over the course of their careers, Louise and Annie collected roughly 34,000 species for the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and other university museums. In addition to her time in the field, Louise pursued more formal scientific endeavors. In 1910, her first paper “Rodent fauna of the late Tertiary beds at Virgin Valley and Thousand Creek, Nevada” was published and was noted as the second paper in paleontology published by a woman. She was also the first American woman to publish papers in mammalogy. Additionally, the Siberian tundra ptarmigan, Lagopus rupestris kelloggae, and a Baja California plant, Senegalia kelloggiana, are named in her honor. Louise Kellogg died in 1967, outliving her partner by 17 years. Annie Ellicott Kennedy (Mrs. John Bidwell) (1839-1918). The following is from Wikipedia: Annie Kennedy Bidwell, with her husband John Bidwell, was a pioneer and founder of society in the Sacramento Valley area of California in the 19th Century. She is also known for her contributions to social causes, such as women's suffrage, the temperance movement, and education. Annie Bidwell was a friend and correspondent of Susan B. Anthony, Frances Willard, and John Muir. Born Annie Ellicott Kennedy, she was the daughter of Joseph Kennedy, a politician in the Whig party, who served as Director of the United States Census for 1850 and 1860. The Kennedy family lived in Washington, D.C. from Annie's 10th year until after her marriage to John Bidwell in 1868. Her strong religious beliefs motivated her to dedicate herself to social and moral causes. From her teenage years, she was associated with the Presbyterian Church. She was later to commission the building of a Presbyterian Church in Chico, California. She married John Bidwell on April 16, 1868 in Washington, D.C. Their wedding guests included then President Andrew Johnson and future President Ulysses S. Grant. After their marriage, Annie returned with her new husband to his home in Chico, California. The Bidwell mansion in Chico is now preserved as a state historic park. While Annie and John Bidwell resided in the mansion, they were hosts to many prominent figures of their era, including: President Rutherford B. Hayes, General William T. Sherman, Susan B. Anthony, Frances Willard, Governor Leland Stanford, John Muir and Asa Gray. Annie was concerned for the future of the local Mechoopda Native Americans, and was active in state and national Indian associations. She also worked to provide education to the Mechoopda. As a woman interested in botany in the 19th century, alongside the extremely high barriers for women to enter academia, Annie studied botany in her own free time, and collected the first known specimen of a small annual plant, which was named Bidwell's knotweed (Polygonum bidwelliae), after her. She clearly was a woman of some significance because her name was also put on an Allium and a Corydalis by Sereno Watson and an Orthocarpus by Asa Gray. After her husband's death Ann remained a beloved citizen of Chico, the town her husband founded. Her final act of benevolence was to donate to the city of Chico on July 10, 1905, some 2,238 acres (almost ten square miles) of land, along with a Children's Park in downtown Chico. Since then the land has remained in the public trust and is now known as Bidwell Park, and is home to the University of Califoria, Chico. Elva Lawton (1896-1993), American botanist and bryologist known for her research on ferns and her comprehensive study of the mosses of the western United States. She was born in West Middletown, Pennsylvania, graduated from high school in 1915, and was an elementary school teacher in Pennsylvania from 1915 to 1919. She received a B.S. degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 1923. Initially intending to major in chemistry and Latin, her interests shifted to biology. From 1923 to 1925 she taught biology and Latin at Crafton High School while completing requirements for a master’s degree. She was a laboratory assistant at the University of Michigan while seeking a Ph.D. from 1925 to 1928, then taught at Hunter College in New York. She finally completed her doctoral degree in 1932. She remained at Hunter until 1959 when she moved to the University of Washington as a Research Associate, curating the herbarium’s bryophyte collection. During this lengthy period she had worked at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the Michigan Biological Station, and at Lakeside Laboratory in Iowa, so she was well acquainted with laboratory work. She also collected mosses from across the western United States, receiving several grants from the National Science Foundation and the University of Washington’s Anderson Research Fund. She worked almost daily in the Herbarium until she was 90 years old and lived alone in her own house to the age of 95. She was a member of the Torrey Botanical Club, serving as both treasurer and president. In 1971 she published Moss Flora of the Pacific Northwest, which was perhaps her most significant contribution to bryology. As she aged, she pursued opera and classical music, gardening, leathercraft and needlepoint, and theater. Lilla Irvin Leach (1886-1980), independent field botanist who specialized in the flora of Oregon for thirty years, and her husband, John Ray Leach. She was born in Barlow, Oregon, and developed a love of wildflowers while wandering the family acreage as a child. She attended Tualatin Academy in Forest Grove and then the University of Oregon, from which she graduated with a B.A. in 1908. She established the botany department of Eugene High School and taught there. She was married to John Ray Leach in 1913 and moved to Portland where her husband established a pharmacy. For years she concentrated on field trips and the botanical garden she created which is now called the Leach Botanical Garden. Between 1928 and 1938 she and her husband spent nine summers in the Siskiyou Mountains of Curry County in southwestern Oregon where she discovered the beautiful Kalmiopsis leachiana. Kalmiopsis is endemic to southwesterm Oregon and the Kalmiopsis Wilderness is named for the plant. In 1963 she donated her large collection of more than 3,000 pressed specimens to the University of Oregon. John Ray Leach (1882-1972) was born in Weston, Oregon, and he received a degree in pharmacy from Oregon Agricultural College (Oregon State University) in 1906. After years of wooing, he pursuaded Lilla to marry him based on his assurance that he knew how to handle pack animals and "could take her where the cake-eating botanists could never get." He was founder and first president of Southeast Portland Chamber of Commerce and active in the Y.M.C.A., Boy Scouts, and many other community projects. John died in 1972 and Lilla followed him eight years later, their ashes being scattered in the Kalmiopsis Wilderness that had been such a love of their life. Sara Allen Plummer Lemmon (1836-1923), a botanist and expert on ferns and seaweeds, and the wife of John Gill Lemmon (see lemmonii). She was born in New Gloucester, Maine, and attended the Female College of Worcester, Massachusetts, before moving to New York City, where she taught art for several years and studied at Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. She served as a volunteer nurse during the Civil War. She fell ill in 1868 and moved to California in 1869, settling in Santa Barbara where in 1871 she founded the town's first library. Operating out of a jewelry store on State Street, Plummer charged $5 membership or 10 cents for borrowing books, and sold a variety of art and music supplies, and held cultural gatherings including lectures and art exhibits. Five years later she met self-taught botanist, Civil War veteran and former Andersonville prisoner John Gill Lemmon who was instrumental in turning her life toward botany, and they were married in 1880. She sent him a shrub she had found near Santa Barbara and he named it Baccharis plummerae in recognition of her. She sold the library and began travelling seriously with Lemmon in pursuit of plants. In 1881, Mt. Lemmon outside of Tucson, Arizona, was named in her honor after she became the first white woman to climb it. In 1882 Asa Gray published the genus Plummera in her honor. While on their trip, the Lemmons endured several hardships and discovered and cataloged a number of species unique to the mountain, and after returning, they continued their botanical endeavors. The Lemmons co-developed the Lemmon Herbarium at their home, later donating it to UC Berkeley, where it was merged into and called the University and Jepson Herbaria. She continued her botanical illustrations, as the official artist for the California State Board of Forestry from 1888–1892, and acquired a national reputation for her work. In 1893, she lectured on forest conservation at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. During the 1890’s she also advocated for the adoption of the golden poppy as the state flower of California, eventually writing the bill which was passed by the California Legislature and signed by the Governor in 1903. Her husband J.G. died in 1908, and Sara Plummer Lemmon died in California in 1923. Margaret Rutherford Bryan Michell Levyns (Mrs. John Edward Philpott Levyns) (1890-1975), prominent phytogeographer, botanist and taxonomist. She was born at Sea Point, Cape Town and was educated by her mother and then at Ellerslie Girls School. In 1908 she entered South African College to study for a B.A. degree. Subsequently she enrolled at Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1912 for botanical research. After three years, she worked at the John Innes Horticultural Institution at Merton Park, London, returning to South Africa in 1917 to take up an appointment in the botany department of the South African College. For 54 years she was on the staff of the College, later the University of Cape Town,. or closely associated with it. In 1923 she married John Edward Philpott Levyns (1897-1984), later assistant provincial secretary of the Cape Province who was on the council of the Botanical Society of South Africa. She actually became the first woman staff member to retain her post after marriage. Together they hunted for plants, on foot and by wagon and cart, over veld and mountain, as well as making a memorable trip across Australia by motorcar in 1959. Then in 1932 she became the first woman to receive the degree of D.Sc. from U.C.T., awarded for her thesis "A taxonomic study of Lobostemon and Echiostachys." She was also the first woman to become president of the Royal Society of South Africa. She lectured in the Botany Department at the University of Cape Town and published A Guide to the Flora of the Cape Peninsula in 1929 and major sections of Flora of the Cape Peninsula by Adamson & Salter in 1950. She died in Cape Town at the age of 85. Marie-Anne Libert (1782-1865). The following is from the 'Lichens of Belgium, Luxembourg and northern France' website: "Two undisputed personalities dominate the lichenological world in Belgium around the mid 19th century: M.-A. Libert and J. Kickx. M.-A. Libert worked in the Malmédy region, which at that time belonged to Germany and was later incorporated into Belgium by the Versailles treaty (1919); this explains why her results were not mentioned in the 'Prodrome de la Flore de Belgique' published beforehand (De Wildeman 1898). Whilst the four magnificent exsiccata fascicles she dedicated to the cryptogams found near Malmédy contain very few lichens, her herbarium, now housed at BR, has many, most of them collected and processed with great care and demonstrating how astonishing the lichen biodiversity of the area was at that time. Except for a few specimens, her herbarium remains to be studied. No doubt such a study would result in several changes to the current checklist: species new for the study area are expected to be found, but most should unfortunately appear as extinct since then." The following is from Mary R. S. Creese's Ladies in the laboratory II: West European women in science, 1800-1900: a survey of their contributions to research: "Unlike most girls of her time and her station in life, she was intensely interested in just about everything she saw around her. During long walks in the countryside around Malmedy she observed in detail and made extensive collections, particularly of plants and minerals. These she attempted to identify and classify using her father's library. The fact that the scientific and informational works available to her were in Latin was not an insuperable barrier; without any help she learned the language, becoming very proficient. She took her first plant collections to Alexandre Louis Lejeune (1779-1850), a physician in the neighboring community of Verviers and the most prominent botanist of the region. Lejeune had undertaken to prepare a catalogue of the plants of the department of Ourthe for an official survey of the flora of northern France. Requesting her to collect and dry for him the mountain plants of the Malmedy region, Lejeune offered to supply her with the necessary reference works. With these in hand she quickly became an expert on the Malmedy flora. Many of the vascular plants listed in Lejeune's Flore des environs de Spa were found by her; notable among them were new species of brambles and roses—Rubus arduennensis, Rubus montanus, Rosa nemorosa, and Rosa umbellata. In 1810 she met the celebrated Swiss botanist Auguste-Pyrame de Candolle (1778-1841), then professor of botany at Montpellier University, who was making a scientific tour through Belgium. Together with Lejeune she accompanied De Candolle through the high country to the north of Malmedy. De Candolle was impressed both with the knowledge and abilities of Mile. Libert and with the exceptionally rich cryptogamic flora of the region. He suggested that she begin studies in the area, one that had hitherto received little attention. She accepted the idea and began to collect extensively in the woods, on the mountain slopes, and in the broad, upland marshes typical of the region. Marie-Anne Libert's scholarly contributions were not confined to botany. Having decided about 1837 that at age fifty-five she was too old for plant collecting, she switched her attention to local history and archaeology, also subjects that had long interested her. Her collection of artifacts included ancient coins and a Merovingian ring, the latter found in a bog by a peasant. All her steady scholarly activity did not prevent Marie-Anne Libert, a capable and enterprising woman in many areas, from doing her share of the work of managing the flourishing family business; she and her brothers greatly expanded the tannery they inherited from their parents. They nevertheless led a simple life. Of the nine surviving Libert children only three married and Marie-Anne, her sister Marie-Elisabeth-Therese, and four brothers stayed on in the family home, five of them living into their seventies or beyond. Upright in character and unwilling to accept injustice in any form, Marie-Anne was active in civic and community affairs. After the notice taken other by Emperor Friedrich-Wilhelm, her opinions carried considerable weight. She died on 15 January 1865 after three days of illness, three months before her eighty-third birthday. Although Libert's Plantes cryptogames collections established her reputation in the European botanical community, after her death it was her personal herbarium that became the particular interest of specialists. Sold to the Jardin Botanique in Brussels by her nephew Hubert-Remade Libert of Malmedy for 2,000 francs, it included an extensive collection of cryptogams, phanerogams, and published herbaria. Specimens were well prepared and documented. The fungi and lichen collections became especially famous; parts of the collection were published by Casimir Roumeguere in Revue Mycologique in 1880, additional material was brought out the following year by Italian fungal taxonomist Pier Andrea Saccardo,13 and other botanists continued the work. The material was still being used a century after Libert's death and even a few forms thought to be unknown in Belgium were found in it from time to time. This is hardly surprising because Libert worked in the early nineteenth century before extensive damage had been done to the vegetation of the area; further, she was the only person collecting there at the time and for long after." Fay Agnes MacFadden (née McDonald) (1888-1964), Canadian/American plant collector, bryologist and fern enthusiast. She was born in Medicine Lodge, Kansas, and grew up in Cripple Creek, Colorado. She briefly studied medicine at the University of Boulder but did not attain a degree, instead marrying mining engineer Joel Parkhurst MacFadden in 1912. They moved to eastern Oregon and then settled in British Columbia. Fay was intensely interested in botany and spent years collecting flowering plants, mosses, ferns and lichens and had cabinets filled with about 5,000 specimens. She was a member of the Canadian Alpine Club, the Sullivant Moss Society and the British Biological Society, and was on the executive council of the National Park Association. She published in The Bryologist, Rhodora and the American Fern Journal. In 1929 the couple relocated to California where they settled in the San Fernando Valley. She continued to collect extensively not only in California but also in Idaho and Oregon. Her attention turned to ferns in her later life and her personal herbarium of over 25,000 vascular plants and 12,000 bryophytes, as well as some 800 lichen specimens, was sold to California State College in Fullerton (Now CSU Fullerton) after her death in Los Angeles in 1964. The herbarium at that institution now bears her name. Mildred Esther Mathias (1906-1995), plant taxonomist and naturalist. "Mildred Esther Mathias was born on September 19, 1906, in Sappington, Missouri, then a rural truck farming area just south of St. Louis. Her father, Oliver John Mathias, was a teacher, and the family moved around eastern Missouri, to Cape Girardeau, Ste. Genevieve, Festus, and Desloge, as Mildred was growing up. She showed an early interest in nature and gardening and a love to learn. In Desloge, where her father was school superintendent, Mildred graduated from high school in the class of 1923 and presented the valedictory address. Remarkably, while still a senior in high school, she was the first student to enroll at the nearby, newly established Junior College of Flat River; each day Mildred attended her high school typing class at 7:00 a.m. before catching a train to college. That intensity to learn never changed. Mildred transferred to the State Teachers College in Cape Girardeau, and then registered in fall, 1923, at Washington University in St. Louis. Her family relocated to St. Louis so that Mildred could live at home while attending WU. There Mildred majored in mathematics until her junior year, but switched to botany when classes for her major were unavailable, and when the dean of engineering would not give permission to a woman to take a math course in his male-only college. Fortunately, Mildred was soon hooked on botany, and at Washington University earned the AB (1926), MA (1927) and PhD (1929) while conducting her graduate research at the Missouri Botanical Garden. For her doctoral dissertation, Mildred Mathias, at the age of 22, produced a very fine taxonomic monograph on Cymopterus and relatives of the carrot family (Umbelliferae). New World umbellifer genera and species then were poorly defined-and she was set to change all that. During the summer of 1929, Mildred, in her Model T Ford, which she could repair herself, and with two female companions, traveled across the western United States to visit numerous populations and type localities of Umbelliferae. After marrying Gerald L. Hassler, a PhD in physics, in Philadelphia on August 30, 1930, Mildred carried on independent research on the umbellifers during various research appointments, often without pay. In 1939, Dr. Lincoln Constance at the University of California, Berkeley, joined in the study, and from 1940 to 1981 they published together more than 60 scientific papers on Umbelliferae of the New World, including descriptions of about 100 new species, hundreds of new combinations, and several new genera. In 1954, an umbellifer from northeastern Mexico was named as the genus Mathiasella in her honor. Her expertise on umbellifers earned her early international recognition in taxonomy, and in 1964 she was elected as the first woman president of the American Society of Plant Taxonomists. In 1944, the Hasslers permanently settled in southern California. Mildred, now mother of four, was pleased to accept a staff position at UCLA in fall, 1947, as herbarium botanist, under the supervision of professor Carl Epling. In 1951, that position was elevated to lecturer, so that her talents could be utilized to teach plant taxonomy, and four years later Dr. Mathias was appointed as assistant professor in the Department of Botany, one of very few women who then held a faculty position at UCLA, and vice chair of the department. As a "young" assistant professor, she took her first trip outside the US in 1958, to Baja California, with an energetic UCLA botany graduate student named Peter H. Raven. 1951 was the year that Mildred Mathias published her first articles on California horticulture. She with several other horticulturists began introducing nurseries and gardeners to a diverse palette of botanically interesting and nonconventional subtropical plants that would thrive in coastal and desert southern California. The quality of landscape planting in Los Angeles improved immensely thereafter, and the UCLA campus was converted into an arboretum of exotic trees. She published and spoke often on the importance of correct scientific identification and nomenclature of horticultural materials, and her educational exhibits at garden shows won awards. In 1956, Mildred Mathias was appointed director of the Botanical Garden, and served as such until retirement in 1974, providing tireless service to horticultural organizations in California and around the world, as well as generating a huge following of landscapers and amateur gardeners plus admiration from public and private gardens throughout the world. Her professional career took a major turn from 1959 to 1964, when Mathias joined Dermot Taylor, Chair of Pharmacology at UCLA, to collect and screen plants of tropical forests for new medicines. She made expeditions to Amazonian Peru and Ecuador, Tanganyika, and Zanzibar, and was able to learn about drug plants from native herbalists and medicine men. This was when the field of ethnopharmacology was in its infancy. Her pioneering efforts in the tropics earned the great admiration of her colleagues and led to her selection as UCLA Medical Auxiliary Woman of Science Award (1963), and weighed heavily in selecting Mildred Mathias as one of twelve Women of the Year (1964) by the Los Angeles Times. UCLA Chancellor Franklin D. Murphy called her "one of the great ladies of this campus." Since her early research days, Mildred Mathias appreciated natural areas in California, and that interest grew at UCLA. Her earliest successful conservation effort (1957) helped to establish Rancho Las Tunas in San Gabriel as a state park. She used her influence to save historic oaks, and assumed leadership in the southern California chapter of The Nature Conservancy. For such local achievements, she received the Merit Award of the California Conservation Council (1962) and The Nature Conservancy National Award (1964). During the early 1960s Mildred Mathias, with several other professors, worked diligently to establish the UC Natural Land and Water Reserves System, now called the Natural Reserve System, whereby important parcels of undisturbed California habitats could be acquired and managed by UC for university teaching and research. These visionaries helped this to become a national model for conserving natural ecosystems. She was great at taking people on hikes through natural areas and converting them to the cause, and a personal achievement was her conservation effort on Santa Cruz Island, California. Mildred served as Chair of the university-wide advisory committee for 22 years, and along the way held many other positions of leadership on advisory boards for other conservation programs. In 1963, Mildred Mathias was speaking critically about careless destruction of tropical forests, which are where "many promising drugs from plants are being lost for all time." She turned to the tropics, and became a major conservation voice in the establishment of the Organization for Tropical Studies, formed to obtain protected field sites for conducting scientific research in the tropics. For her dedication, Mildred Mathias was chosen as president of OTS from 1969 to 1970, and was a critical leader during its first ten years of existence, when funding was very precarious. She was the motivator to incorporate botanical gardens of Costa Rica in the master plan for OTS, and helped to formalize Las Cruces Biological Station. Beginning in the mid-1960s, demand for Mildred's time increased dramatically as she willingly and enthusiastically served as an officer for or on advisory boards of numerous horticultural programs. She once wrote, "life is a series of intermittent meetings." But from those long hours in board rooms and airplane cabins came many achievements in horticulture. Among awards, she received the American Horticultural Society Scientific Citation (1974), the Award of Merit by the American Association of Botanical Gardens and Arboreta (1976), the Liberty Hyde Bailey Medal (1980), awarded to an outstanding horticulturist who has made a contribution in the fields of research and education, the Medal of Honor from the Garden Club of America (1982), and the Charles Lawrence Hutchinson Medal of the Chicago Horticultural Society (1988). At UC her contributions were honored in 1979 by naming the Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden on the Westwood campus. She was also the first executive director of the Association of American Botanical Gardens and Arboreta (1977 to 1981), which under her watch created a certification program in horticulture that linked universities with hands-on training at a network of horticultural gardens. Her career of botanical accomplishments led to her receiving the Botanical Society of America Merit Award in 1973 and being elected president in 1984. Similarly, her interests in ethnopharmacology were rewarded when in 1993 she was named Distinguished Economic Botanist by the Society of Economic Botany. When she retired in 1974, UCLA Extension persuaded Mildred Mathias to lead a natural history trip to Costa Rica. At that time tours to Costa Rica were mostly limited to a stop in San José and a trip up the volcano, but she led the first group of amateurs into the field for an experience they would value forever. Thereafter, Mildred Mathias had a new career, tour guide for adult education, and her stamina in the field was respected and renowned. Annually she visited Costa Rica and the Peruvian Amazon, and she immersed her adult students in native culture as well as all aspects of tropical biology and geography. Such tours are now a major source of foreign money in the country, so-called "ecotourism". La Selva Biological Station was a standard stop on her tours, and while visiting there Mildred entreated tropical biologists to give lectures to the adults on current research. Since 1974 she led 53 groups, with a thousand participants, to foreign natural areas, gardens, and musea to more than 30 countries. Her most recent tour, at the age of 88, was in November, 1994, to Chile, and before her death on February 16, 1995, resulting from a stroke suffered gardening at home in Westwood, she had scheduled group trips again to Costa Rica and the Amazon in 1995. Many organizations-national, statewide, local, and campus--that now are very successful and important have credited Mildred Mathias as having played pivotal leadership roles in the early years. This is a major reason why she had such a huge and loyal following of admirers. Above that, she befriended all age groups, and welcomed anybody seeking knowledge from her. Mildred Mathias never lost purpose or direction, certainly never lost her enthusiasm and energy, and freely expressed her appreciation for humor in any situation. This very special person left a remarkable legacy of botanical and conservation achievements and a wide trail of friendships around the globe." Mary Isabel McCracken (1866-1955), American entomologist, researcher and teacher, born in Oakland, California. She began her teaching career at Oakland’s public schools, and at the age of 34 after a decade of teaching she enrolled at Stanford University, being awarded a BA degree in 1904, an MA in 1905, and a PhD in 1908. Wikipedia relates the following: “While at Stanford she started her University teaching career during her senior year when she was employed as an assistant in physiology and entomology. While at Stanford McCracken also began to undertake field trips and laboratory research on the genetics of beetles. She published several papers founded on the results she obtained from these investigations. She also engaged in research on a wide range of other insects including mosquitoes, silkworms, aphids, and bees. McCracken also conducted field observation on numerous birds in the Sierra Nevada. Over the years she climbed the academic ladder to obtain the position of professor of zoology. The only period she took as a sabbatical from her teaching was during 1913-14. During her sabbatical McCracken travelled to Europe where she studied at the University of Paris, returning at the beginning of World War I. She retired in 1931 having obtained professor emeritus status. After her retirement from Stanford she held the position of Research Associate at the California Academy of Sciences from 1931 through 1942. McCracken worked in the bird and insect collections of the Academy. She was a member of the California Academy of Sciences from 1915 and was named a fellow in 1929.” She passed away in her home on the Stanford campus. Susan Adams Delano McKelvey (Mrs. Charles Wylie McKelvey) (1883-1964), American botanist and author, plant collector and cousin of Franklin D. Roosevelt and a descendent of the Adams of Braintree and the Bradfords of Plymouth. Originally a native of Philadelphia, Susan Magoun Delano moved with her family while still a child to New York where she entered and was a graduate in 1907 of Bryn Mawr College. By birth and upbringing a member of New York social elite, she married attorney Charles Wylie McKelvey in 1907. One of her two sons died during WWI and her husband was called away to Washington, D.C. Upon his return their marriage broke up and she fled to Boston, where her career as a botanist began when she approached professor Charles Sprague Sargent, the founding director of the Arnold Arboretum, about a volunteer job at the Arboretum. She started by washing clay pots in the greenhouses, studying the plants on the grounds, took an interest in the lilac collection in particular, and for the next four and a half decades the Arboretum became her home. She engaged in collecting expeditions to the western United States and published three scholarly works. In 1921 she and her surviving thirteen-year old son participated in a difficult five-week trip to Glacier National Park which had been established in 1910 and where little botanical work had taken place. She made another trip to the White Mountains of New Hampshire in July of the following year. From both collections she shipped around 200 specimens to Alice Eastwood at the California Academy of Sciences, initiating a long and fruitful relationship. Her developing interest in the lilac collection at the Arboretum led to her making visits to lilac collections elsewhere in the US, Canada, Britain and France, and communicating with lilac growers and specialists also in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands and other countries. Her book based on these researches entitled The Lilac: A Monograph appeared in 1928, and was greatly praised in numerous scientific and horticultural journals. After Sargent’s death in 1927, her sights turned to the American southwest and she made eight trips there over the following eight years. Her first trip was spent in the company of Alice Eastwood, visiting New Mexico and Arizona, and by the end of 1928 had made over 400 collections and a lifelong friend. On her second trip taken from January to March, 1929, she became a devout yucca and agave enthusiast, and made a total of over 500 collections before returning to Boston, and Eastwood joined her again for her third trip later in the year. Her fourth excursion took her again to Arizona and New Mexico, but also to Nevada and California. It was during this trip that she finally was awarded a divorce from her husband, from whom she had been separated, and during the drive east visited the Missouri Botanical Garden and the University of Illinois where she called on professor of botany William Trelease who had worked on yuccas and agaves. On subsequent trips she also travelled to Texas, Utah, Oklahoma and Colorado to study yuccas and agaves there. Her chauffeur-bodyguard-photographer Oscar Edward Hamilton who had accompanied her on so many excursions took thousands of high quality photographs of plants and landscapes that are now in the Photography Archives of the Arboretum. In 1931 she was appointed a research assistant at the arboretum, a position she held for many years. From December 1936 when her brother Moreau died, she devoted herself to her book project about yuccas, and in mid-1938 the first volume entitled Yuccas of the Southwestern United States Part One was published. Part Two would not be released for another nine years, and both were received with overwhelming approval. Her final and crowning achievement, the classic Botanical Exploration of the Trans-Mississippi West 1790-1850, was published in 1956 when she was 73. She relinquished her position as research associate only a month before she died. It is hardly an overstatement to say that she was a very consequential figure in the history of American botany, and she had a life exceedingly well-lived. Charlotte Eden Nash (Mrs. Hugo Smith) (1899-1982), who collected extensively in the southern Sierra Nevada and the Mojave Desert in the 1930s for Willis Linn Jepson, and throughout Kern County for several decades thereafter, and whose collections are noteworthy for the precise and complete ecological notes that accompanied her specimens. She was born in Minnesota of Norwegian ancestry, and when her parents separated in 1901, her mother took her and her sister Hester to Tennessee, where she began work on a teacher’s certificate. She was told that both she and Charlotte had tuberculosis and her only hope of recovery was to move to California. She obtained a teacher’s certificate in San Francisco and taught first in San Luis Obispo, then at the one-room Joiner School in the hilly, rural area around Woody northeast of Bakersfield, which is where Charlotte grew up. After a brief stay in Los Angeles, they went to San Francisco, where Thea obtained her teacher’s certificate, and on to San Luis Obispo, where she taught school. Hearing that teachers in Kern County were better paid, Thea hired a man with a wagon and team to take the family and their possessions to Bakersfield. There, she went to see Robert L. Stockton, then Superintendent of Schools for Kern County, to ask for a teaching job. Stockton convinced her to take the one- room Joiner School, about thirty miles northeast of Bakersfield in the hills above Woody. And thus began, in 1904, a new life for Thea and her daughters. Charlotte attended the schools where her mother taught, and in the spring of 1917 entered high school in Bakersfield. After graduation, on the urging of her mother and sister — and at a time when few women went to college — Charlotte went to Berkeley to study at the University of California. Charlotte taught for a number of years in Kern and Tulare Counties. In 1935 she married Hugh Smith, from a neighbor ranching family, who ran his own ranch. In 1955 Charlotte and her sister purchased from their mother what Charlotte called “the ranch that had been our life and our love,”—by then 4,300 acres in size. They operated it until 1971, when they in turn sold it. It is difficult to imagine how Charlotte, busy with teaching and ranching, also found time for all her work with native plants. Ernest Twisselmann, in Leaflets of Western Botany, Oct. 1962, would credit Charlotte with possessing “an intimate knowledge of the botany of the Greenhorn Range, [located in eastern Kern County and Tulare County].” (Taken from an article by Nancy Nies in the Mimulus Memo, newsletter of the Kern County chapter CNPS) Doris Kildale Gillespie Niles (1903-1995), author of Wildflowers of Humboldt County, who "attended Eureka Junior College from 1920 to 1922 when she passed her teacher's examination. In 1926 she earned a degree in biological science from Stanford University. This was followed by a master's degree in 1927, and finally a Ph.D. in botany in 1930. Doris taught first at Dobyn Creek School, then at Humboldt Normal School where she taught biology from 1927 to 1929. From 1930 to 1950 she taught biological science at Humboldt State part-time. In the years from 1960 to 1990 Doris became an extension teacher for the University of California at Davis. In t he northern California area she taught the natural sciences, consisting of ecology, seashore, wildlife, rocks and fossils, and wild flowers. She was responsible for the Humboldt County Office of Education's Wild Flower Show in May from 1980 to 1989. With a grant from the Humboldt Area Foundation, The Doris K. Niles Humboldt County Science Series, consisting of twenty illustrated booklets, was produced in the years from 1982 to 1990." Quoted from a website called "Women Making a Difference in Humboldt County" by the American Association of University Women. A Facebook post from the Clarke Historical Museum in Eureka added this: "She described the habits of fishers, martens, salamanders, orchids, ferns, mosses, lilies and northern spotted owls. Niles was entranced by the relationship between the fog and the forest. 'You wouldn't have redwoods if you didn't have fog.' Without the redwoods, 'there would be some fog but not nearly the way we have it. They need each other.' The naturalist helped others to see the beauty of Humboldt County." Patricia Lois Packard (1927- ), botanical illustrator, professor of biology in the department of biology, Albertson College of Idaho, 1959-1989, and co-author of Identification Key to the Common Native Evergreen Trees of Oregon. She grew up on the family farm in Nampa, Idaho, and the mining community of Yankee Fork. It has been said that her botanical interest was triggered because she had no one to play with. She began her undergraduate studies at the College of Idaho, where she switched from chemical engineering to biology and survived a bout of polio from a field trip. She received her BA from the College of Idaho, her MS from Oregon State University in 1953, and her PhD from Washington State University, when her research focused on genetics and experimental evolution, and taught school in Wendell, Idaho for three years. In 1959 her father died and she took a position at the College of Idaho in order to care for her mother, interrupting her doctoral program which was finally completed in 1965. She was instrumental in establishing the Idaho Native Plant Society, and was apparently a mentor to Barbara Ertter and others. She was also the first holder of the Orma J. Smith-Lyle M. Stanford Chair in Biology, the co-author of the initial catalog of the rare plants of Idaho, and was co-author with her former professor Helen Gilkey of Winter Twigs, a guide for wintertime identification of the deciduous plants of northwestern Oregon and western Washington, which was her masters thesis. She had field trip experience in Costa Rica, and the focus of her research shifted to regional flora and biogeography. There were several taxa named for her but none of them seem to have survived taxonomic changes. She significantly expanded the Harold M. Tucker Herbarium giving it national recognition. There were several taxa named for her, e.g. Artemisia packardia, Mentzelia packardiae, Lomatium packardiae, Astragalus cusickii var. packardiae, and Eriogonum shockleyi var. packardiae, but some of them seem not to have survived taxonomic changes. Mary Elizabeth Parsons (Mrs.John Carpenter Hawver) (1859-1947), author of The Flowers of California: their names, haunts and habits (1897). She was born in Chicago and moved to the Bay Area in her formative youth and later studied in San Francisco at the John Hopkins Institute of Art. Her mother was Melissa Dutton Parsons whose younger sister was Adaline Elizabeth Dutton, married to Albert Emmett Kent, also loving in Chicago. The Kents had a son William, the future Congressman from California, and it was in 1871 that they moved to Marin County, California. Mary Elizabeth’s mother passed in 1883 and it was in that year she went to stay with her aunt Adaline and her cousin William who was like a brother to her. Through her cousin she came to know a wide circle of friends who shared her interests in natural history including Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir and Alice Eastwood, curator of botany at the California Academy of Sciences. During her studies in the 1890s, Parsons would venture into natural gardens and outside spaces, sketching alongside fellow artists Alice Brown Chittenden and Margaret Warriner Buck. Parsons began a project with Warriner Buck to record and catalog the flowers encountered. This resulted in the 1897 publication of The Wild Flowers of California: Their Names, Haunts, and Habits, which was one of the first field guides to identify and classify the wild flowers of California. Republished multiple times over the past century, this volume represents a collaborative project between Chittenden and naturalists Mary Elizabeth Parsons and Margaret Warriner Buck. Both Parsons and Buck exuded the era's persona of the “new woman.” Parsons, a represented artist in Saint Mary’s College Museum of Art's exhibition Feminizing Permanence, sought to create a guide specific to California flora. She intended the guide as a West Coast version to complement Mrs. William Starr Dana's plant guide, How to Know the Wild Flowers, published in 1893, which mostly dealt with the East Coast. Recognizing a need to identify the West Coast foliage, Parsons observed and recorded field notes on the plants she and Warriner Buck encountered on their hikes and excrsions. Later, Parsons transcribed these notes into precise guide entries, taking into consideration her audience and other similar plants as points of comparison. Ultimately, Parsons determined to organize the book classifying the flowers by color. Indeed, she credits her book's organization to Dana's guide. Despite both women working as artists, the pen-and-ink illustrations (over 100 engraved into plates for the book's publication) were drawn by Warriner Buck and not by Parsons. The original printing plates made from these illustrations for the 1897 publication version were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. The 1906 edition was printed with new plates following the disaster. In 1910 she met the dentist Dr. John Carpenter Hawver of Auburn, California, who shared her love of natural history and was impressed with her book. He arranged to meet her and they were married two years later. For all his life he had been interested in the natural world and particularly in geology. He had participated in the excavation of many extinct animal fossils, especially in a cave in El Dorado County now known as Hawver Cave. Regrettably, he died from an apparent heart attack only two years after their marriage, and Mary left Auburn and returned to the Kent estate in Marin County, where she lived for the remainder of her life. It was John Muir who gave her the moniker of Miss Wildflower of California. Francis Dorris Payne (Mrs. Alfred Wood Stickney) (1902-1961), a biology teacher, botanist and ardent collector of wildflowers. She was born near Alturas, California, and taught at Alameda High School for 30 years until she moved to San Mateo. She collected particularly in Modoc County and found the type specimen of Castilleja payneae on Mt. Warren in the Warner Mts. in 1929. She deposited her collection at the University of California and the California Academy of Sciences. She was a member of the Sierra club and the California Academy of Sciences. She died at Burlingame, California. Mary Ellen Pulsifer (Mrs. Charles Cooper Ames) (1845-1902). The following is from Joseph Ewan, "San Francisco as a Mecca for Nineteenth Century Naturalists" (1955): "Comparatively little is known of Mary E. Pulsifer Ames of Auburn, whose plant collections, like those of Mrs. Austin, are occasionally cited in the Botany of California, particularly the second volume. She was evidently at one time a resident of Taylorsville, Indian Valley, a correspondent of C. Keck of Austria, as was Mrs. Austin, and a contributor to the California Horticulturist and Floral Magazine. Astragalus pulsiferae of Plumas County was named in her memory by Asa Gray. She died at San Jose, at the age of fifty-seven." And from an article in the San Jose Mercury, 21 March 1902, that contains a perhaps overly complimentary tribute by her sister: "In the death of Mrs. Mary E. Pulsifer Ames at her home at No. 43 Webster street, East San Jose, yesterday afternoon, there was lost to the world, except that her works will live after her, a distinguished woman--one whose fame as a botanist was world-wide, and especially honored in the Royal Botanical Directory of Austria. So quietly and unassumingly did she live, largely content with the society of her aged mother and loving sister, her husband having died some years ago, that it can be truthfully said that she was better known in the world of science and of letters than in her home city. One who knew her best and loved her most, her sister, Miss Martha Pulsifer pays the following tribute to her memory: 'May E. Pulsifer Ames, elder daughter of John W. and Salina Pulsifer, was born in Lowell, Mass., March 2, 1845. From a very young child she was passionately fond of books and was a natural student, showing a fondness for all studies, the arts as well as the sciences. She possessed great artistic talent, and had she fully cultivated the gift would have risen to equal fame as an artist and botanist. Botany being her life-long study. The greater part of her education was received in the Academy of Notre Dame, Lowell and at the College of Notre Dame in San Jose. She was frail of constitution, her poor health at all times interfering with the progress of her studies. The most serious impediment was an affliction of the eyes, an affliction of the optic nerve from which she was practically blind for nearly three years. To the good well-behaved Sisters of Notre Dame she said she owed every success she achieved in life, and to her alma mater, the College of Notre Dame, to which she was ever loyal and devoted, she bequeathed her exquisite and extensive collection of valuable plants, books and stones, in grateful memory as she often said of the home where she had learned 'the beautiful sciences' to which she devoted her pure, serene and lofty life. Her monumental work lives after her, and future generations will draw inspiration from her uplifting and indefatigable labors. Her fame as a botanist was world-wide; her name being an honored one in the Royal Botanical Directory of Austria. Her correspondence was large and varied among the leading botanists of the world. Her last days, and almost hours, were spent in classifying her plants, a large and choice collection, from many European countries as well as the United States." Jennifer Helen Richards (1949- ), professor emerita of biological sciences at Florida International University (FIU), who has studied the plants of Nemacladus richardsiae in the field with the senior author, Nancy Morin, while accompanying her on many Nemacladus collecting trips. This taxon was first published in Madroño 67: 44 (2020). She went to Tates Creek High School in Lexington, Kentucky, and in 1972 received an AB degree in biology at Radcliffe College of Harvard University, a graduate degree from Indiana University Department of Plant Sciences, and a PhD in botany from the University of California in 1980. From 1981 to 1982 she was an assistant professor in the department of biology at Wellesley College. Positions she has held include secretary of the Botanical Society of America and associate editor of the American Journal of Botany. She is the author or co-author of a vast number of articles, reports and symposia papers. Richards' lab studies wetland plant ecology, especially how plants respond to the hydrologic and nutrient challenges presented by the aquatic environment, and the landscape and community ecology of south Florida vegetation. A website of Florida International University provides this look at her work: “Nearly 40 years into her career, the FIU biological sciences professor speaks with an awe for flowers, ferns and grasses similar to a botanist launching her career. Richards was named this year’s Distinguished Fellow by the Botanical Society of America, one of the world’s largest societies devoted to the study of plants and wildlife that interact with it. ‘It’s great to have my work recognized by the society,’ Richards said. ‘Some of the people I have most looked up to in my career have been honored with this prestigious award, I feel humbled to be in their company.’ Richards studies plants in the Florida Everglades as part of the Florida Coastal Everglades Long Term Ecological Research Program. She turns to sawgrass, spikerushes and other plants for clues into how water, climate change and people affect the tropical wetlands. She is currently working with the GIS [Geographical Information Systems] Center to map vegetation throughout Everglades National Park using remote sensing techniques. This will shed light on how large areas of vegetation respond to restoration efforts over time, Richards said. Richards has also studied how invasive species, including ferns, reproduce and what methods are most effective for controlling them. She has conducted this research through the International Center for Tropical Botany at The Kampong, a collaboration between FIU and the National Tropical Botanical Garden. She also studied water lilies as indicators of Everglades ecosystem health in the Southeast Environmental Research Center in FIU’s Institute of Water and Environment. As a young undergraduate at Harvard University, Richards did not intend to pursue a career in botany or science at all. She started out as an English major. But the counterculture of the 1960s grew popular and she realized she had a calling for environmental stewardship, Richards said. She changed her major to biology and fell in love with the study of plants when she took her first botany course. Richards landed at FIU in 1982 joining the Department of Biological Sciences as an expert in plant morphology, development and ecology. Richards has served the Botanical Society of America in a number of roles, including secretary and associate editor of the American Journal of Botany, the society’s flagship journal. Richards hopes her work will inspire and inform future generations of scientists working to solve some of the planet’s toughest challenges, from climate change to environmental restoration and conservation.” Edith Alma Ross (1867-1940). She was born in Westfield, Massachusetts the eldest of five children. The family moved to Davenport, Iowa sometime around 1875 or 1876 where her father became a prominent architect. Edith graduated from high school in Davenport in 1886 where her interest in the natural sciences had been evident. She was one of eight Davenport high school graduates who have herbarium specimens at the Putnam Museum (now Putnam Museum and Science Center). Edith was an active member of the Agazziz Association by 1884, and the Iowa Assembly of the Agazziz Association was established in Davenport the following year with Edith Ross listed as first vice-president in 1886. She contributed her first specimen to the Putnam Museum in 1886 and over the course of the following years she put together an impressive personal herbarium. Most of her field work was done between 1886 and 1891, but she also established an exchange program with other members of the Association. In 1931 she donated her plant collection to the Davenport Public Museum and the Putnam Museum today has over 2,200 specimens that list her either as collector or co-collector. A significant but poorly documented activity of hers was being a member of a field trip to Yellowstone National Park which was established in 1872. The trip took place sometime in 1890, visiting a variety of localities in the park, and about 100 species were collected, among which was the short, innocuous grass growing near hot springs along the Firehole River. Samples of this made their way to George Vasey at the US National Herbarium who pronounced it new to science and named it Agrostis rossiae in her honor. Commonly called Ross's bentgrass, it is still known from less than a dozen geothermally active locations in Yellowstone National Park. She was a founding member of the Davenport area's Nature Study Club and a member of the Tri-City Garden Club. She worked as a clerk and stenographer for two department stores, she was a secretary for a transfer company, an office worker for a storage company, and she worked on the membership committee for the Davenport Chamber of Commerce. She was also an artist and china painter, glazing and firing porcelain dinnerware, and becoming a teacher of the art and a vendor of merchandise. Gertrude Ellen Lester Rowntree (Mrs. Bernard Rowntree) (1879-1979), renowned field botanist and horticulturalist, and a pioneer in the study, propagation, and conservation of California native plants. She was born in Penrith, England, and moved with her family to a frontier homestead in Kansas where two children died because of contaminated well water. After two hard years in Kansas, her father moved the family to a Quaker community near Los Angeles, and this was where she developed a passion for the California flora which was to occupy her life. She attended high school near Philadelphia and after marriage to fellow Quaker Bernard Rowntree settled in New Jersey. In 1920 they relocated to southern California and then to the Carmel Highlands in 1925. Within five years she had begun a wildflower seed business, but her domestic life went downhill and she was divorced in 1931. She established a small wooden house and nursery nearby where she lived until her death in 1979. She was the author of two well-received books on native plants and shrubs, Hardy Californians and Flowering Shrubs of California, four children’s books, and over 700 magazine, newspaper, and journal articles. She botanized widely throughout the West including several winter seasons in northern Mexico. She gave many public talks and lectures about native plants, horticulture and her travels. In 1949 a series of wildfires destroyed her seed collections, the nursery house with hundreds of potted plants, and the writing studio that contained her field notes, photographs and several book manuscripts. From the late 1950’s until she lost her driving permit in 1968, she spent many winters exploring Joshua Tree National Monument. When the California Native Plant Society was formed in 1965, she was named its honorary president, a position she held until her death. She was honored by the American Horticultural Society in 1971 and the California Horticultural Society in 1974. She died five days after her 100th birthday. Frances Emily Schmidt (Mrs. James Hovey Bullard) (1863-1923). The following information has been gleaned from a website of the Anaheim Public Library. She was born in Anaheim, California, the daughter of one of the founding families of the Anaheim Colony in 1857, where she grew up among vineyards and wineries. She attended public school in Anaheim until at the age of 12 she was sent to a convent in Freiburg, Germany, to finish her education. She met her future husband first upon her return in 1884. In 1891 she joined her father in New York City. Two years later Dr. Bullard travelled east to attend the Chicago World’s Fair and visit relatives in Boston. He also spent some time in New York City and that’s where they met again, and subsequently were married in September 1893, returning to Anaheim two months later. Dr. Bullard continued his successful medical practice there and then in 1895 they relocated to Los Angeles. Frances was a lifelong student of California wildflowers, and she created a garden that contained more than 10,000 specimens. She collaborated with such well-known horticulturists as Theodore Payne and Luther Burbank. She won many awards and prizes for floral displays and was involved in the creation of the succulent gardens at the Henry E. Huntington Estate, now known as The Huntington, in San Marino. She was also an accomplished artist and was close friends with the famous actress Madame Modjeska, for whom her husband had served as personal doctor. She died at the age of 69 following a serious operation. Aline Sawhill Strutz (Mrs. Louis Strutz) (1899-1995), pioneer Alaskan, expert gardener, amateur botanist and authority on Alaska’s wildflowers. She was born on a ranch near Nimrod, Montana, attended a one-room school through eighth grade, and then moved to Missoula for high school and business college. She was working as a stenographer for the US Forest Service in Thompson Falls, Montana, and then was a division storekeeper for the Northern Pacific Railroad in Parkwater, Washington, when she met her future husband, Louis Strutz, and followed him to Anchorage when he was transferred there in the army, marrying in 1920. In 1924 they moved into a house that she would live in for 71 years. Aline Strutz led a subsistence lifestyle in assisting to provide for her large family. This description was given in the Strutz family file in the Atwood Resource Center, Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center: “ . . . for the first years life went on in a two-bedroom home without electricity or running water and cooking on a wood stove. It was truly subsistence living. She learned how to mend salmon nets; in the spring she strung them between the three trees on the front lawn, and mended them. Each tide found the children on the beach picking the salmon from the nets and carrying them up the hill where Aline cleaned and canned or readied the salmon for the smokehouse. Many quarts of salmon were consumed each year by this large family. Aline also traded the surplus from the vegetable garden to the local grocer for canned and dried fruits.” She was active throughout her life in the Anchorage Garden Club and was a life member of the National Council of State Garden Clubs. She belonged to a number of other societies. She and her husband were also founding members of the Cook Inlet Historical Society. The Anchorage Daily News in 1995 said: “Her yard was featured for many years on the local home and garden tours. As an amateur botanist, she was considered an authority on Alaska wild flowers by professionals in many parts of the world, and she regularly corresponded and traded seeds with her fellow botanists in Canada, South America, Austria, Switzerland, New Zealand, Africa, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, England, and Scotland. She also traveled extensively into remote regions of Alaska to collect and photograph new flowers. She wrote several articles for gardening journals, and many of her pictures of Alaska wild flowers were printed in Alaska-Yukon Wild Flower Guide and Alaska's Wild Berry Guide and Cookbook.” The website Alaska History says: “She visited many areas to find wild plants which she transplanted in her yard. She eventually collected over two-thousand specimens and wrote articles for national and international gardening journals about Alaska’s wild flowers and wild berries. She also contributed to rock garden publications and other bulletins in the United States as well as in Britain. As a member of the Anchorage Garden Club, she participated in its flower shows, winning numerous honors. In addition to botany, she judged flower shows, furnished flowers for flower-arranging workshops, and preserved vegetables and fruits to share with friends. She went bowling and dancing, and continued her other hobbies into her late eighties.” She died in Anchorage at the age of 96. Ellen Louella Powell Thompson (Mrs. Almon Harris Thompson) (1843-1911), called "Nellie," American naturalist and botanist, and an active advocate for women's suffrage. She was born in New York and was a founding member of the Women's Anthropological Society of America, Washington DC. She was the sister of John Wesley Powell and having a degree in botany she accompanied her husband, Almon Harris Thompson, on an expedition through the Escalante Wilderness in 1872. Thompson had been appointed by Powell to lead the expedition after he left to return to Salt Lake City to visit his wife and new child. They charted the course of the Escalante River which was the last named river in the United States. At one point the expedition climbed a pass between two peaks: Mt. Ellen and Mt. Pennell. "Prof" Thompson named Mt. Ellen after his wife, "Nellie." She was the first person to do botanical studies in the region. On his expedition of the year before, Powell had named one of his boats the Nellie Powell. Another brother was William P Powell, superintendent of Washington DC public schools. She attended Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, in the mid-1850s and taught school from the age of 16. In 1862 she was married to professor, topographer, explorer, geologist, geographer and Civil War veteran Almon Harris Thompson, who was a colleague and friend of her brother John. Ellen Thompson accompanied her husband on expeditions to map the western United States. During this period, she made friends with members of a number of Indian tribes, learning the language of the "Pah Utes" and studying their customs. When her husband entered the Army, she took her husband's position as superintendent of schools, and spent one summer caring for the sick and wounded soldiers. She had at least five taxa named for her. Kaye Hugie Thorne (Mrs. James Meyers Thorne) (1939-2004), teacher and botanist. She graduated from Utah State University and taught elementary school in Walnut Creek, California. She was married and the family moved to Provo in 1966 where her husband taught chemistry at Brigham Young University. She had two children and when they were in school she obtained a master's degree in botany and was hired as the assistant curator of plants at the BYU Herbarium. She took numerous field trips collecting plant specimens for use in teaching and research at BYU and elsewhere. She was especially talented in drawing plants in pen and ink, and her scientific illustrations have appeared in a number of books and botanical journals. Her excitement about wild plants was infectious, and she lead numerous nature walks for non-scientists. She also ran the Colorado River to train boating guides in the plants of the area. Her husband, James Meyers Thorne, received a PhD in physical chemistry at UCLA., and spent his professional career as a professor of chemistry at Brigham Young University. Kaye Hugie Thorne died after a long struggle with Alzheimer's disease. María Amelia Torres (1934-2011), Argentine botanist and professor of biology. She was born in Tandil, province of Buenos Aires, where she spent her childhood and adolescence. She graduated in 1953, with a bachelor's degree from the General San Martin Mixed Normal School of her native city. The following year she began her studies at the Faculty of Humanities and Educational Sciences of the National University of La Plata where she graduated as a Biology Professor. In 1958 she entered the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Museum of the same university where she graduated in 1966 with a degree in Botany. In July 1976, under the direction of Ángel L. Cabrera, she obtained the title of Doctor of Natural Sciences with her work: "Systematic, anatomical and phytogeographical study of the Argentine species of the genus Melica (Gramineae)". She studied the Poaceae making numerous trips and visiting almost all Argentine provinces. and collaborated in a floristic survey that covered Tierra del Fuego, Antarctica and the South Atlantic islands in 1967. She worked as a teacher for a number of years at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Museum in the Department of Systematic Botany and in that of Phytogeography and Plant Ecology. She was also a teacher in the Department of Genetics and Animal and Plant Improvement at the Faculty of Agricultural and Forestry Sciences of the National University of La Plata, becoming Curator in 1986. She was a tireless and extremely thorough, careful and dedicated curator, a virtue that was reflected in the excellent functioning of the Herbarium during its working period and that today benefits everyone who works with the Division's collections. Even after her retirement, she continued to conduct scientific activities regarding the species she was interested in. She was an independent, cordial, warm person, always ready to help and advise, and above all with a great sense of humor, a nice, interesting person with a high degree of culture. These qualities meant that love and affection were never lacking in her life. As a pending project, in 2009, she published a book of short stories dedicated to her grandmother Amelia, which reflected her personality and deep thinking. Even when her colleagues could see the end approaching, it was she who comforted them with an overwhelming humility. She died in 2011 after a long illness, much missed by her friends and colleagues. The genus Amelichloa was published in her honor by Mirta O. Arriaga and Mary Elizabeth Barkworth in 2006. Luella Blanche Engle Trask (1865-1916). She seemed to have had a love of flowers from the earliest age, and recalled the story that her mother would find her in the garden at the age of 2 or 3 kissing the pansies and verbenas and telling them how much she loved them. The following is from the website Islapedia. “She was born in Waterloo, Iowa, and later moved to Minnesota with her family [where she began collecting wild plants]. Her father was a nurseryman which is probably where she developed her first interest in plants. Although she also explored some of the desert mountains of the west, such as the San Jacinto Mountains, Colorado Desert, Death Valley, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and Yellowstone, it was the Channel Islands that held her. She became a botanist, poet and island explorer who lived on Santa Catalina Island at Avalon and Fisherman’s Cove from 1893-1912. She made extensive collections on the Southern Channel Islands during the late 1890s and early 1900s. As early as 1896 she made field trips to San Clemente Island, and in April 1897 she collected plant specimens on San Nicolas Island. In 1900 she collected plants on both Santa Rosa and Santa Cruz island, at the latter of which island mountain mahogany, Cercocarpus betuloides var. blancheae bears her name. In 1901 she discovered a species of Dudleya on Santa Barbara Island which was named in her honor, Dudleya traskae. The locoweed, Astragalus traskae, found on both Santa Barbara and San Nicolas islands, was also named in her honor, as was Catalina mahogany, Cercocarpus traskae. Mrs. Trask spent an additional three months on San Clemente Island in 1903, but specimens from this trip, as well as many others were lost in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fires. Nine years later, Trask’s personal herbarium was destroyed by fire at Avalon on Santa Catalina Island in November 1915. Trask authored more than a dozen articles and poems, particularly about Santa Catalina Island. On March 6, 1886 at age 20, Blanche married Walter Trask in Minnesota, and they had a daughter, Caroline, born December 6, 1887. They divorced in 1895 when Caroline was 9 years old.” Willis Linn Jepson described Trask this way: “No one knows so much about Catalina Island as Mrs. Blanche Trask who has been here about 17 years. For the island as a whole, its rocks, cliffs, and canyons, as well as its plants, trees and shrubs this woman has a most remarkable love. It has grown out of her love for its wildness, its inaccessible cliffs, and its great solitudes of canyon crest, and sky. She has worked through all its canyons, even on the inaccessible south coast, and beyond ‘the isthmus,’ at all times of the year but especially in the winter season. It is so intolerably hot in the dry season that she hibernates, usually from May to September or October. There is little water on the island, only a few springs, which are frequented by the sheep or goats. I have never known anyone anywhere who knows the plants individually over such a large area as she does. She seems to know the individual trees and shrubs like old friends and knows whether they have changed in the last ten years and how much.” In addition to botany, her interests included archeology, history, zoology and geology, and she carried on an extensive correspondence with Alice Eastwood and Willis Jepson. Blanche Trask died in Colfax, California on November 11, 1916 where she had gone due to her pulmonary trouble. It was the year following the devastating destruction of her herbarium caused by a fire that swept through Avalon on Santa Catalina Island. She collected on six of the eight Channel Islands, was a great friend of Alice Eastwood, and found a mammoth tooth on San Nicolas in 1902. Her winter home was in Avalon, but she also had a summer refuge in Fisherman's Cove, and frequently walked the roundtrip route over the ridge trail in a day. She was described by Charles Frederick Milspaugh, former Curator of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, as an "indefatigable pedestrian." Trask was 51 years old at the time of her death, and undoubtedly would have accomplished much more had she been granted a longer span of life. Mary Adelia Davis Treat (1830-1923), an American naturalist and correspondent of Charles Darwin, whose contributions to both botany and entomology were extensive. She was born in Trumansburg, New York, and moved with her family at the age of nine to Ohio, where she attended public and private girls' schools. She married Dr. Joseph Burrell Treat, an abolitionist and professor, in 1863. The couple lived in Iowa until 1868, when they moved to Vineland, New Jersey. After moving to New Jersey, Treat began her scientific studies in earnest, and collaborated with her husband on entomological articles and research. Over 28 years, she wrote 76 scientific and popular articles as well as five books. Her research quickly expanded from entomology to ornithology and botany, detailing bird and plant life in the southern New Jersey region and specifically the Pine Barrens.  She separated from her husband in 1874 and supported herself by publishing popular science articles for periodicals such as Harpers and Queen. Beginning in 1870, she published popular naturalist pieces in Garden and Forest, Hearth and Home, Harper's, and Lippincott's. In 1882, Treat published the book Injurious Insects of the Farm and Field, which was reprinted five times. She also collected plants and insects for other researchers, including Asa Gray, through whom she was introduced to Charles Darwin. She traveled to Florida several times between 1876 and 1878 to investigate insectivorous plants further. On one of these trips, she discovered the lily Zephyranthes treatae (named after her by Sereno Watson) and discovered that another lily was not extinct. She was made a member of the Cambridge Entomological Society for her contributions to the field of entomology. In 1871 she began a five year xorrrespondence with Charles Darwin mostly about carnivorous plants. Darwin was so impressed with Treat’s work on carnivorous plants that he referenced her, both within the main text and in footnotes, throughout his publication Insectivorous Plants (1875). She had six species of plants and animals named after her, including an amaryllis, Zephyranthes treatae, an oak gall wasp Bellonocnema treatae, and three ant species.  Fanny Emily Fish Irving Trollope (1829-1905), who apparently discovered the taxon Polygonum fishiae near Todos-Santos Bay, Lower California. Fanny Emily Fish was born June 17, 1829, just north of present-day Birmingham, Michigan. She was a very popular young lady and unusually well-educated for those times. Though she would have liked very much to have been able to attend college her mother's poor health kept her at home. Sometime after her father's death, which occurred in 1861, her younger brother, William, married and moved to Ovid, Michigan, in 1865, and Fanny, her mother and her nephews Spencer and Charles (sons of her brother Henry, who died in the Civil War) joined him there a few years later. William brought his wife and daughter to Santa Barbara, California, in 1874, coming by way of the Isthmus of Panama, and in 1876 they moved to El Sauzal, near Ensenada. As William's daughter, Anna Roberts, later recalled, “They carried not only a deck load of lumber for a ranch house, but chickens and pigs.” Meanwhile, about 1878, Spencer moved to Hillsboro, Illinois, and then bought a farm nearby in Butler. Fanny went with him and stayed a while, but then travelled to California, visiting cousins in Martinez, and then joined William at El Sauzal in July, 1879. On April 10, 1882, a party of Americans arrived at El Sauzal on a botanizing expedition and were welcomed by the family. The group consisted of Marcus Eugene Jones, Dr. Charles Christopher Parry, Cyrus Guernsey Pringle and Pringle's assistant. They had also hired a driver and cook in San Diego, a nurseryman's son named Charles Russell Orcutt who was later to become an enthusiastic botanist. Later in the expedition, Jones quarrelled with the others over which had first discovered a new rose, and then 'held up' Orcutt at gunpoint! A fascinating and detailed account, written by Dr. Lee Lenz appeared in Aliso Vol. 10, no 2, in 1982. Some weeks later Dr. Parry, remembering that Fanny had shown an interest in botany, wrote offering to send her books and paper in exchange for fruiting specimens of the plants the botanists had collected in flower. She enthusiastically agreed. Hoping to insure her continued interest, he named a plant after her, Polygala fishiae, which she had collected at El Sauzal, near the southern limit of its distribution. Parry also returned the following winter in person, with the same purpose in mind. Fanny's interest in botany did not fail but, alas, the ranch did. Frequent and severe drought limited the ranch's productivity, and there was no demand locally for what the ranch did produce. In 1883 the Fish family returned to Alta California [as opposed to Baja California], settling this time at Tecolote Canyon, just north of San Diego. Fanny Fish continued to botanize at San Diego. She corresponded with her botanical acquaintances and was visited by other local naturalists. She especially liked young Charles Orcutt, to whom she sold most of her botanical collections. She even wrote up a few random thoughts about watching ants at work, and Orcutt published them in his journal, West American Scientist. On April 8, 1886, she left San Diego by train, and arrived in Hillsboro, Illinois, where her brother Edmund lived, three days later. After only a few days she went on to her nephew Charles' house in Butler, and stayed with his family until late October, when she left to visit her brother Charles in Elkhart, Indiana. Her diary ends with Thanksgiving day, 1887. Soon after, she returned to Birmingham, Michigan, where on May 23, 1888, she married Hugh Irving, a retired hardware merchant. After Mr. Irving's death she met again her childhood sweetheart, Mr. Albert Trollope, of Detroit, after a separation of fifty years, and they were married in November, 1901. Her death occurred July 5, 1905, not far from the spot where she was born. Harriet Ann Walker (1845-1929), American botanist. The following is quoted from the book The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science: L-Z by Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie and Joy Dorothy Harvey (2000): “Born in eastern New York to a Congregational minister, Harriet Walker was educated at My. Holyoke. There she received a bachelor’s degree [1870] while it was still a seminary; she was twenty-five. No record exists for what happened during the five years after her graduation, but she spent two years as the curator of the Wellesley College museum [1875-1877], and spent twelve years [1892-1903] as an assistant in the department of botany at Wellesley, and two years as the curator of the Wellesley College museum [1875-1877], while expanding her knowledge of botany. For thirteen years [1879-1892], she left university work and her botanical studies to work as a missionary in New York City. In the early 1890s, however, she spent two years studying at the New York State Library School. By 1905, then sixty years old, Walker moved to San Francisco, where she worked on the Berkeley campus of the University of California as an assistant in the herbarium; she stayed until she retired at the age of eighty-three. During this time she made collections of the native plants for the herbarium and distributed duplicates to other institutions. Most of her excursions were in the San Francisco Bay region, but she sometimes went further afield to the Mendocino Range and to the Sierra Nevadas. She died two years after she retired, leaving property valued at about four thousand dollars to the University of California." Olga Augusta Wuertz (Mrs. John C. Reifschneider) (1900-1978). She was born on a farm in Illinois and grew up and attended school in St. Louis, Missouri. She did not complete high school but married Jack Reifschneider and in 1920 moved to Ukiah, California. In 1929 they moved to Reno, Nevada, and opened an auto body shop. While there she pursued botany as a hobby. Quoted from the website of the Nevada Womens History Project: “Reifschneider took occasional college classes, but did not enroll full-time at UNR until 1944, the year her daughter Nita Reifschneider Spangler graduated with a journalism degree. The elder Reifschneider gained a bachelor’s degree in botany in 1949, and attended the Yosemite Field School for Ranger Naturalists that same year. While taking the Botany 1 course at the University of Nevada in 1946, she learned that very little was known about the earliest botanists in Nevada. She began keeping a list of people whose names appeared in Nevada plant genera and species. Through the years, the names grew into a collection of biographies. She performed some of her research at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. Studies under prominent Nevada botanists such as William Dwight Billings, Philip A. Lehenbauer, and Ira La Rivers sparked her interest in the historical and biographical aspects of botany and eventually resulted in her book, Biographies of Nevada Botanists, published by the University of Nevada Press in 1965. The book has entries on 48 botanists, only five of whom were women — and she did not include herself. She pinpointed the specific year or years each person was directly involved with botanical work in Nevada and included a photograph if one was available. Although occupied as financial manager for her husband’s business until his retirement in 1968, Reifschneider maintained a second career as botanist and nature writer until her death in early 1978. Through contact with James R. Henrichs, Agnes (Scott Hume Train) Janssen, and W. Andrew Archer, who worked on the Nevada Indian Medicine Project in the 1930s and 1940s, she developed a lifelong interest in native medicinal plants. Reifschneider lectured and wrote articles on wildflowers, desert biology, and the environment, as well as Nevada history, petroglyphs, and Benjamin Franklin. In the field she was an avid plant collector and photographer. One small wildflower she collected near Pyramid Lake in 1956 was identified as a new species and given the name “Mimulus reifschneiderae.” Several of her articles were published in Nevada Parks and Highways magazine. Olga remained physically active most of her life. In 1974, she was swimming a mile every day. During a month-long vacation to Hawaii in 1976, she rode a mule down a 2,000 foot cliff on the island of Molokai. Her notes from the trip indicate the cliff trail was 3 ¼ miles long, with 26 switchbacks. Olga was a member of the Sierra Club, the Nevada State Historical Society, the Camera Club, the Nevada Horticultural Society, the National League of American Pen Women, the Nevada Corral/Westerners International, and the Order of Eastern Star. She was one of the original seventeen sponsors responsible for creating the Northern Nevada Native Plant Society in 1975 and retired from its board of directors in November 1977, a few months before her death.

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