Ynes Enriquetta Julietta Mexia (1870-1938)
| Who was Ynes Mexia? One of the most remarkable plant collectors of this century, not only for the fact that she spent several years alone in remote areas of South and Central America, but also because she only began collecting at the age of 55 and yet was able to make ca 150,000 collections. How did she get interested in botany, was she from a scientific background? No she was a social worker. Her enthusiasm for botany may have developed after the death of her husband, when she enrolled as a special undergraduate student at the University of California in 1921, which led to her developing a strong interest in fieldwork. |
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Exactly how adventurous was she? Aged 59, she embarked on a two and a half year expedition to Peru and Brazil. At one point she and her team spent three months trapped by floods in a deep gorge in the Sierra del Pongo in Peru. It appears that she was not unduly perturbed at being stuck in the bottom of a 600 m deep gorge, nor that their only means of escape, were they not to starve to death, was to build a raft and negotiate a series of dangerous whirl-pools and rapids. Whilst she and her team waited for the waters to drop (which they didn't), she used the time productively, collecting up and down the sides of the ravine that she could reach. Still being trapped on Christmas Day she even prepared a Christmas tree from a palm which she then decorated with red peppers and Poinsettias that grew nearby. Finally faced with the possibility of starvation, she and her team did in fact build a raft and successfully negotiated themselves down river.
So did she work for the Museum? No she was based at the Herbarium of the University of California, Berkeley.
What is her connection to The Natural History Museum? We have a fairly comprehensive set of her collections here in our herbarium.
How come ? Botanists tend to make several duplicate sets when they are collecting. They do this so that they can distribute their collections to several different institutions, including a number in the country from where the collections were made. This means that collections, which are irreplaceable, are less likely to be lost by a chance event at any one institute. In addition, they can ensure that the specialists for any particular group of plants will receive and identify their collections, thereby providing a second opinion of their own identifications.