Lilla Irvin Leach

Leach Botanical Garden, Oregon, 2013

Lilla Irvin Leach (born March 13, 1886 in Barlow , Oregon , † September 10, 1980 in Portland , Oregon) was an American botanist who specialized in the flora in Oregon from 1915 to 1945 . She discovered more than a dozen species and two new genera, Kalmiopsis leachiana and Bensoniella oregona .

Kalmiopsis Leachiana, an endemic shrub discovered in 1930 by Lilla Leach in the gold basin in southwest Oregon. This plant is the namesake of the Kalmiopsis wilderness in the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest

Bensoniella oregona, a monotypic genus known only from the mountains of northwest California and southern Oregon, seen here near a damp meadow in the mountains in southwest Oregon

life and work

Irvin Leach attended the Tualatin Academy and the University of Oregon , where she studied with the botanist Albert Sweetser and where she received her Bachelor of Arts in 1908 . She then taught in the botany department of Eugene High School, which she founded. In 1913 she married the pharmacist John Leach, who owned Phoenix Pharmacy in Portland from 1920 until his retirement in 1946 and was the founder and first president of the Southeast Portland Chamber of Commerce. She and her husband bought land in southeast Portland where they developed a botanical garden called Sleepy Hollow. With her husband, she systematically collected plants across Oregon and other western states. She was particularly interested in the Siskiyou Mountains in Curry County, Oregon . She and her husband spent nine summers there between 1928 and 1938, exploring the area, discovering more than a dozen species and two new genera, Kalmiopsis leachiana and Bensoniella oregona. Two years after it was first collected, the plant was officially named Kalmiopsis leachiana. The genus Kalmiopsis is endemic to southwest Oregon and is found nowhere else in the world. The Kalmiopsis Wilderness in Oregon is named after this plant. In September 1945, Irvin Leach was voted Portland Citizen of the Week for her wartime and conservation work. From 1945 to 1948 she was the director of Save the Myrtle Wood. She was honored by the Garden Club of America in 1950 as the first recipient of the Eloise Payne Luquer Medal for Excellence in Botany. In 1963 she donated her large private collection of more than 3000 pressed plants to the University of Oregon. The specimens are now in the collections of the Oregon State University Herbarium in Corvallis, Oregon . Lilla Leach died in Portland at the age of 94. Their ashes were scattered in the Kalmiopsis wilderness. Her house and garden became the property of the City of Portland in 1982. The garden, laid out in 1931, is now the Leach Botanical Garden and in 2011 covered an area of ​​8.5 hectares.

literature

• Henderson, LF: "New Plants from Oregon." Rhodora 33 (1931): 203-206.
• Kirkpatrick, Golda, C. Holzwarth, and L. Mullens: The Botanist and her Muleskinner. Portland: Leach Garden Friends, 1994.
• Love, Rhoda M .: "The Discovery and Naming of Kalmiopsis leachiana and the Establishment of the Kalmiopsis Wilderness." Kalmiopsis, Journal of the Native Plant Society of Oregon 1 (1991): 3-8.

Web links

• Lilla Irvin Leach papers, 1930-1963
• biography