She took up botany at 51 — and in thirteen years of collecting, carried some 145,000 plants out of the wild.
In 1925, a 55-year-old woman on her first collecting trip in Mexico fell from a cliff and fractured her ribs. Most people would have gone home. Ynés Mexía kept going — and over the next thirteen years she walked, rode and paddled from the slopes of Mount McKinley to the headwaters of the Amazon, pressing and drying plant specimens by the tens of thousands.
Her life until then had not promised this. A restless childhood between Texas, Washington and Mexico; two marriages that ended badly; a breakdown that brought her to San Francisco to recover. There she found the Sierra Club, the redwoods, and — at 51 — a botany class at Berkeley. By the time she died, herbaria from San Francisco to Stockholm held her plants, and some 500 species new to science were counted among them.
A life that bloomed late
The lifeline
1870
Born 24 May to a Mexican diplomat, Enrique Mexía, and Sarah Wilmer
1921
At 51, enrolls in botany classes at the University of California, Berkeley
1925
First collecting trip, to Mexico, at 55 — survives a fall from a cliff
1928
Collects in Mount McKinley National Park, Alaska — the first botanist there
1929–32
Crosses South America, travelling some 3,000 miles up the Amazon
1938
Falls ill collecting in Oaxaca; dies of lung cancer in Berkeley, 12 July, aged 68
By the numbers
The measure of her
145,000+
Plant specimens she collected between 1925 and 1938
~500
Species new to science among them, by the most widely cited count
50+
Plants named in her honour — many carrying the epithet mexiae
51
Her age when she first enrolled in a botany class
Where the collecting took her
The expeditions
1925–27
Mexico. Her first expeditions yield a plant so distinct it became a new genus, Mexianthus — and Mimosa mexiae, the first species named for her.
1928
Mount McKinley, Alaska. A summer in what is now Denali National Park; some 6,100 specimens, and the first botanical collection made there.
1929–32
Brazil to the Andes. Up the Amazon by riverboat, then by dugout canoe on the Marañón into Peru — around 65,000 specimens from one journey.
1933
"Three Thousand Miles up the Amazon" — her account of the crossing, published in the Sierra Club Bulletin.
1934–38
Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Mexico. More expeditions, written up as "Camping on the Equator" (1937); her last ends with illness in Oaxaca.
Pressed between the pages
Recognition
In her lifetime
A collector, not a credentialed scientist — the species she found were described and named by others
Paid for her first expedition herself, offering specimens to the California Academy of Sciences against costs
Told by a well-known explorer that a woman could not travel alone in Latin America
Her death marked by a short note in the journal Madroño
Today
Her specimens are held in herbaria from Berkeley and Harvard to London, Paris and Stockholm
Celebrated with a Google Doodle in 2019
Profiled by PBS American Masters in Unladylike2020
Honoured by the National Park Service as Denali's first botanical collector
The river that tested her
The Amazon & the Marañón
She set out from Brazil's Atlantic coast, steamed up the Amazon, then traded the riverboat for dugout canoes on the Marañón, the river that comes down out of the Andes. Near the Pongo de Manseriche gorge in Peru she was still collecting in 1932.
~3,000 mi
Her journey up the Amazon, by her own account's title
~65,000
Specimens from this single expedition
2½ yrs
Time spent crossing the continent, 1929–1932
"My dryers get all filled up and still numbers of plants sit and look at me and announce that they are waiting to be collected. It is terribly trying to a greedy collector like myself."
— Ynés Mexía
