A chance discovery on her first day at the University and Jepson Herbaria in 2005 changed Kelly Agnew’s life, leading her down a rabbit hole of Civil War battles and prison camps, gold rush settlements, the exploits and foibles of California’s earliest botanists, the founding of the Sierra Club and ultimately the establishment at UC Berkeley of the largest plant collection at any public university in the world.
An evolutionary biologist and lecturer in the Department of Integrative Biology, Agnew packs all of this into a 550-page biography she wrote with her father, Brad Agnew, a retired professor of American history at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.
John Gill Lemmon: Andersonville survivor and California botanist, details the life of Lemmon and his wife Sara, who collected and described plants around California, the Western U.S. and Mexico in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that included a flower common in high altitude meadows, Lemmon’s paintbrush (Castilleja lemmonii). Many of the couple’s curated specimens, as well as John’s photographs and Sara’s wildflower and conifer cone paintings, were among the earliest of the herbaria’s collections.
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Video by Roxanne Makasdjian and Alan Toth
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