I produce something real and lasting
Ynes Mexía, Nina Floy Bracelin and Mimosa Mexiae
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In 1925, at age 55, Ynes Mexía undertook her first botanical excursion.
As a young woman, she’d lived an itinerant life, caring for her family’s hacienda in Mexico and managing her husbands’ various businesses. But after her second marriage ended in divorce, Ynes suffered a nervous breakdown and sought treatment in San Francisco in 1909.
In the mountains of Northern California, she found a new calling. As part of her mental health therapy, she took long hikes every day, and along the way she learned the names of the various local flora and fauna. She joined a local chapter of the Sierra Club, and in 1921, at the age of 51, she enrolled in the botany program at the University of California, Berkeley. She wrote to a friend celebrating the passion discovered late-in-life: “I have a job. I produce something real and lasting.”
She called herself a “greedy collector.” She packed multiple plant dryers and flower presses for even the shortest of trips, and on her first collecting excursion to Mexico, she brought back more than 1,500 specimens for closer study. One of those specimens was later named for her: Mimosa Mexiae.
The collecting, foraging and traveling was easily Ynes’s favorite part of the job. When she planned solo collecting trips to “dangerous” locales in South America and Alaska, she shrugged off friends’ concerns with a simple remark: “I don’t think there’s any place in the world where a woman can’t venture.”
In 1933, she made her way up three thousand miles of Amazon coastline, carrying her many plant dryers and flower presses on her back. The writings from this time are uncomfortable to revisit; like many of her contemporaries, Ynes criticized, fetishized or outright derided the indigenous people living in the Amazon. She often described her botanical work as superior to that of the locals.
Ynes relied on her friend and colleague Nina Floy Bracelin for much of the processing, labeling and selling of her collected treasures (the money from these sales would fund Ynes’s future excursions). As Ynes later wrote:
I am not a dyed-in-the-wool scientist, I am a nature lover and a bit of an adventuress and my collecting is secondary, even though very real and very important.
“Bracie,” as friends affectionately called Nina, worked as Ynes’s assistant for many years. When Ynes died in 1938, a mere 13 years after the discovery of her life’s passion, she left the majority of her life’s savings to the Sierra Club and Save the Redwoods League. But a special proviso in her will specified that Bracie must always have a job at the California Academy of Sciences.
More on 🌼:
145,000 Plants with Adventuress Ynes Mexia, The Library of Congress
How Finding Rare Plants Saved Ynes Mexia's Life, Outside Magazine
Late Bloomer: The Short, Prolific Career of Ynes Mexia, The New York Botanical Garden
Untold Stories: Ynes Mexia, The California Academy of Sciences
More from me:
I’m deep in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, reading alongside some friends from my writing group. I did not finish before traveling and so yes, I was carrying an 900-page book on the plane and everyone was staring.
This next week I’ll be in Washington, DC with 13 other National Press Foundation fellows, learning all about workplace mental health from and attending sessions with professionals in psychology and business. Read more about the program here.
You’ll hear my voice on Your Money Briefing from The Wall Street Journal again in June!
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