History's Greatest Women Botanists
OSGF
Plants play an essential role in our lives, serving as our primary food source, a key ingredient in life-saving drugs, and filtering the air we breathe, just to name a few examples. In order to best conserve and utilize plants, we have to be able to identify them and understand how they work - which is why the research of botanists is so important.
Many of history’s most innovative and celebrated botanists were women, often defying convention and sexist laws in the pursuit of knowledge. In honor of Women’s History Month, we are highlighting six of history’s most impactful female botanists - just a few of the many women throughout history whose pioneering research changed the way we understand some of the earth’s most important and mysterious organisms.
Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717)
Portrait of Maria Sibylla Merian (c. 1700) by Jacobus Houbraken
Maria Sibylla Merian, “Desert Honeysuckles.” (1718) See more of her work at OSGF’s Google Arts and Culture exhibit on Women Botanical Artists.
No list of historical botanists would be complete with Maria Sibylla Merian, whose groundbreaking scientific illustrations of the relationship between plants and insects influenced many future naturalists and scientists.
German-born Sibylla Merian received her initial artistic training from her stepfather, Jacob Marrel, who was a student of the still life painter Georg Flegel. While her chief interest lied in entomology, she also identified many of the plant species that were essential to insects as food and habitat. She depicted both insects and their host plants accurately in popular volumes that included The Caterpillars’ Marvelous Transformation and Strange Floral Food ( 1679) and The Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname (1705), receiving assistance from unattributed slaves for the latter.
Although illustrating plants and insects (particularly the pretty ones) was considered an acceptable pursuit for women at the time, observing and documenting their biological processes, including reproduction, was not - making Sibylla Merian’s work all the more remarkable and ahead of her time.
Jeanne Baret (1740 - 1807)
1816 engraving of Jeanne Baret by an unknown artist. Photo source: exploration.marinersmuseum.org.
One of history’s most fascinating and botanists was Jeanne Baret, who became the first woman to circumnavigate the globe in 1769, collecting many unknown-to-Europe plant specimens along the way - all while disguised as a man.
Baret was born to a peasant-class family in the historical Burgundy region of France. Her knowledge of botany stemmed from her work as an herbalist, and it drew the attention of botanist Philibert Commercon, for whom she worked as a housekeeper (and was likely romantically involved with.) When Commercon was invited to join an exploratory expedition as the ship’s naturalist, the pair decided that Baret would go with him as his assistant, dressed as a man in order to get around the ship’s “no women allowed” rule.
Baret helped to collect more than 6,000 plant specimens on the voyage, frequently leading the field expeditions herself when Commerson was unable to due to poor health. She likely deserves credit for one of the expedition’s best botanical finds: Bougainvillea brasiliensis, a pink flowering vine native to South America.
While Baret’s true identity was discovered two years into the trip, she wasn’t persecuted, likely because she had been such an asset to the expedition. Her accomplishments were given recognition over 200 years after her death in 2012, when the South American species Solanum baretiae was named in her honor.
Agnes Arber (1879 - 1960)
Agnes Arber, c. 1916. Photo source: wikipedia.org
Agnes Arber was a plant morphologist and historian of botany, who became the first woman botanist to be elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1946. The daughter of a London art instructor, she developed an interest in plants and scientific illustration after meeting Ethel Sargant, another well-known plant morphologist, at a school presentation. During and after her time as a student at University College in London, Arber would spend years working as an Sargant’s assistant.
Over the course of her career, Arber published multiple innovative research papers and books on botany, including two books which focused on the morphology (or external structure) of water plants and grasses in the Gramineae family. In addition to her scientific research, she released several publications on the history and philosophy of botany, including a book on the evolution of herbals.
In addition to being elected as a Royal Society Fellow, Arber was also awarded the Gold Medal of the Linnean Society of London in 1948 for her contributions to botany - becoming the first woman in history to receive the honor.
Janaki Ammal (1897 - 1984)
Janaki Ammal. Photo source: The Indian Academy of Sciences.
Janaki Ammal was one of India’s most notable scientists, her work on sugarcane cross-breeding resulting in the sweetest sugarcane variety in the world.
Ammal was born to a family of 19 children, and, like her sisters had, was expected to wed through an arranged marriage. Despite living during a time when literacy among women in India was less than one percent, she decided to spur tradition and attend college, eventually receiving a doctorate in botany from the University of Michigan. Her expertise in cytology - the study of genetic composition in plants - led to the development of a sugarcane crop that allowed India to stop importing the plant from other countries, greatly bolstering their economic independence.
Over the course of her career, Ammal worked alongside some of the best scientists in the world at the Royal Horticulture Society in the UK, and was responsible for restructuring India’s botanical survey. Although she is best known for her cytology work, she was also a staunch environmental activist, most notably using her status as a renowned scientist to protect hundreds of acres of pristine tropical forest in the Indian state of Kerala from the construction of a hydroelectric dam.
Ynés Mexía (1870 - 1938)
Ynés Mexía in the field. Photo source: nybg.org
Ynés Mexía was one of the twentieth century’s most prolific collectors of botanical specimens - and she didn’t even start studying botany until she was in her fifties.
The daughter of a Mexican diplomat, Mexía lived throughout the U.S. and Mexico before settling in California, where she became enamored with the state’s wild landscapes. After a short stint as a social worker, she began taking classes in botany and science at UC Berkeley at the age of 51, and soon began joining sampling expeditions throughout the west.
Over the course of her career, she made multiple solo field trips to Mexico and South America, often traveling through remote wilderness, and collected as many as 150,000 plant samples during her expeditions.
Unfortunately, Mexía’s work was cut short when she died of lung cancer in 1938. Despite of her relatively short scientific career, she left behind quite a legacy: while many of her specimens are still being analyzed by researchers today, she likely found as many as 50 new species and two new genera. One genus, Mexianthus - a lovely group of Mexican plants related to the sunflower - was named after her.
Katherine Esau (1898 - 1997)
Katherine Esau. Photo source: Wikipedia.com via UC Davis.
Russian-born botanist Katherine Esau’s pioneering research laid the groundwork for modern scientists studying plant structure and cell function, and continues to influence generations of botany students.
Esau began studying agriculture in Moscow and then Berlin. After her family immigrated to the United States, she received her doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley. Her early career in botany centered around researching the hybridization and viruses of crops, and later focused on light-microscope studies of plant anatomy as technology advanced; phloem, the food conducting tissue in plants, was a major subject of her research. Her popular 1953 textbook, Plant Anatomy, is still an often-assigned classic in the field of botany.
When she was a professor emerita at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1989, Esau was awarded the National Medal of Science for her work, becoming the first trained botanist to receive the accolade.
Want to learn more about pioneering women working in fields related to botany? Read our blogposts about ecological landscape designer Beatrix Farrand, scientific illustrator and medicinal plant expert Elizabeth Blackwell, and botanical illustrator Dorothea Eliza Smith.