Ynes Mexia: The Women Who Collected the World

Natural history, at its heart, is an act of attentive recording. To identify a plant, you must first look—closely—at its leaves, its flowers, the way it branches and bends. You note the shape of a seed pod, the scent of a crushed stem, the soil beneath it. Identification today might involve a field guide, a herbarium sheet, or an app that matches images to species, but the essence remains the same: careful observation, naming, and preservation. These acts of noticing have long been the quiet foundations of science.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this quiet work opened a back door for women into a world that otherwise excluded them. Barred from universities and scientific societies, they contributed by collecting plants, shells, insects, and fossils, often for family members or for emerging museums (check Mary Anning's work for example). These collections whether kept at home or sent to herbaria or a museum, were crucial to expanding scientific knowledge even though their names were often left out of official records. 

Ynes Mexia with her plant dryer under a tree, Copyrights @ University of California Berkley

Ynes Mexia carried this tradition into the twentieth century with an energy that defied both convention and age. Born in 1870 in Washington, D.C., to a Mexican diplomat father and an American mother, she spent a restless childhood moving between households and countries. After her parents’ separation, she lived in Mexico, managing the family ranch after her father’s death. Two marriages—one ended by her husband’s death and another by financial ruin—left her seeking a new direction. She eventually moved to San Francisco for treatment of depression and chronic illness, where her physician encouraged physical activity and purposeful hobbies. Hiking in the California hills, Mexia discovered the restorative power of the natural world and joined the Sierra Club, becoming active in the movement to preserve the state’s redwood forests.

At the age of fifty-one, Mexia enrolled in botany classes at the University of California, Berkeley. What began as a therapeutic pastime quickly became a vocation. In 1925, she embarked on her first major collecting trip to Mexico and returned with more than 1,500 specimens, including a new species later named Mimosa mexiae. From that point on, her expeditions grew steadily more ambitious. She collected plants in the western United States, Central America, and deep into South America, often traveling alone or with small local teams. She was the first person to collect specimens from Denali in Alaska and repeatedly ventured into regions few botanists of her time dared to explore.

Mexia approached these journeys with a mix of discipline and daring. On a 1926 expedition to Mexico, she admitted that “it was hard to know where to begin to collect and still harder to know when to stop.”Her most challenging journey was a 3,000-mile crossing of South America against the flow of the Amazon and Marañón Rivers. Beginning on the eastern coast of the continent, she boarded a steamship that stopped daily for wood supplies, using each stop to gather specimens. From Iquitos, Peru, she traveled by canoe into the Upper Amazon, pressing plants in the rain and waiting out floods in temporary camps. Despite violent weather, she returned with 65,000 specimens from this single trip.

Dolichandra unguis-cati, example specimen collected by Mexia, copyrights @ Smithsonian Institutions

Over just thirteen years of active fieldwork, Mexia collected more than 145,000 plant specimens, identifying around 500 new species and two new genera. Yet she cared less for classification than for discovery itself. It was her friend Nina Floy Bracelin ensured that the specimens Mexia gathered were carefully processed, labeled, and distributed to herbaria worldwide, securing their scientific value.

Mexia died in 1938, only thirteen years after beginning her botanical career. By then, over fifty plants carried her name, and her collections enriched institutions across the globe. She left her estate to the Sierra Club and Save the Redwoods League, and a redwood grove now honors her memory.

From Alaskan peaks to the flooded forests of the Amazon, she traveled with a fearless curiosity that matched the vastness of the landscapes she explored. Ynes Mexia forged a path where others hesitated. As she once put it herself, she was “a nature lover and adventurer first, a scientist second.” She proved that passion can bloom late in life — and that curiosity can turn healing into history.

Written by Janaky S., edited by Parvathy Ramachandran

References:

1.  https://www.nps.gov/people/ynes-mexia.htm
2.  https://www.calacademy.org/scientists/library/untold-stories/ynes-mexia
3.  https://blogs.loc.gov/inside_adams/2024/10/ynesmexia/
4.  https://archive.org/stream/ynsmexabotan00bracrich/ynsmexabotan00bracrich_djvu.txt