Sara Plummer Lemmon

Sara Plummer, 1865

Sara Allen Plummer Lemmon (born September 3, 1836 in New Gloucester , Maine , † January 15, 1923 in Stockton , California ) was an American botanist and painter of botanical illustrations. The author's abbreviation is Plummer .

Life

Sara Allen Plummer was born in New Gloucester, Maine, in 1836. She visited the Female College of Worcester ( Massachusetts ), moved to New York City and worked as an art teacher. She later studied at Cooper Union . During the Civil War , she worked as a nurse. Plummer fell ill with pneumonia and after hearing from an acquaintance that the climate in California was much healthier, she moved to Santa Barbara in 1869 , where she hoped that her illness would improve. In Santa Barbara she opened a book and stationery store, which became the Santa Barbara Public Library: Sara Plummer was in contact with Henry Whitney Bellows , a priest of the Unitarian Church . When she told him that there was hardly anything to read in Santa Barbara, Bellows sent her 200 books and advised her to start a lending library. Plummer collected more books and opened her library next to her stationery store in March 1871. She was active in the community and development of the Santa Barbara Natural History Museum and lectured on natural history.

When Plummer arrived in Santa Barbara, she wandered a lot in and around the village. During these hikes she developed a great interest in botany. She collected plants and drew them. She suffered a serious accident in July 1870 when she fell out of her carriage. The local newspapers reported on it and they even announced their deaths. Plummer was able to fully recover from the serious injuries.

Plummer met her future husband, John Gill Lemmon , in 1876 when he was on an expedition to Santa Barbara to collect plants. They corresponded regularly after he moved to Oakland in 1877. Lemmon taught her botany, and Plummer sent him branches from a shrub she had discovered in a ravine near Santa Barbara. A friend of Lemmon's who inspected this branch named it Baccharis Plummerae in her honor . In 1880 she married John Lemmon.

Sara Plummer Lemmon sold her library to the Odd Fellows after the wedding , who continued to run the library.

John Gill Lemmon died in Oakland on November 24, 1908, Sara Plummer Lemmon died after she had suffered a breakdown in 1913 in a nursing home in Stockton on January 15, 1923. They bequeathed their herbarium to the University of California at Berkeley. They were buried side by side in Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland. Her gravestone is marked Partners in Botany .

plant

Mount Lemmon

California Poppy

Sara and John Lemmon founded the Lemmon Herbarium and studied the botany of California and Arizona. Her honeymoon in 1881, which she referred to as the Botanical Honeymoon , took her to Tucson, Arizona. There they discovered many new plants. Sara Lemmon was the first white woman to climb Mount Lemmon , a 2791 m high mountain in the Santa Catalina Mountains . This was named Mount Lemmon in her honor .

On their botanical honeymoon in 1881 and on their further travels, the couple discovered many unknown species; many of these were later described by Asa Gray , the botanist at Harvard University . Several plants were named after Sara Plummer Lemmon, such as Woodsia plummerae , a fern from the cilia family , or Plummera floribunda . In 1994 it was newly described as a subspecies of the Hymenoxys , Hymenoxys ambigens .

Sara Plummer's botanical drawings were exhibited at the 1884 World's Fair in New Orleans .

After John Lemmon became a State Botanist for the California State Forestry Department from 1888 to 1892, Sara helped him by painting plant illustrations.

On their initiative, which lasted almost ten years, was in 1903 the appointment of the California poppy ( California Poppy ) as the state flower of California back.

John Lemmon and Sara Plummer Lemmon were well known botanists in California. Sara Lemmon's part in this botanical partnership is often less recognized, and it is reduced to the status of a wife. Even so, even a colleague of the Lemmons said that much of the work for which John Lemmon was honored was due to Sara Lemmon. She illustrated all the books that she or her husband published. In addition to her diverse plant pictures, Sara Lemmon has also published extensively on botany. Much of their work, however, has been lost.

The lemmons discovered, described, and named 110 species in Arizona, about three percent of the state's species.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://www.ipni.org/ipni/advAuthorSearch.do?find_abbreviation=Plummer
2. ^ ^{A b} The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science: LZ . Taylor & Francis, 2000, ISBN 978-0-415-92040-7 , pp. 771 ( books.google.de ).
3. ↑ ^{a b} Santa Barbara Library Board. In: santabarbaraca.gov. Retrieved March 18, 2018 . 
4. ↑ ^{a b c} 'Who is responsible for setting up Santa Barbara's first library?' In: independent.com. Retrieved March 17, 2018 . 
5. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} John and Sara (Plummer) Lemmon papers, 1863-1911 | University and Jepson Herbaria Archives, University of California, Berkeley
6. ↑ ^{a b} Sara Plummer Lemmon: Pioneering Botanist | JSTOR Daily . In: JSTOR Daily . 2015 ( jstor.org ).
7. ↑ ^{a b c d e} The Southwestern Legacy of Sara Lemmon | Arizona highways. In: arizonahighways.com. Arizona Highways. Retrieved March 17, 2018 (American English). 
8. ↑ Mount Lemmon. In: peakery.com. Retrieved March 17, 2018 . 
9. ↑ An Annotated List of VASCULAR PLANTS of CHIRICAHUA MOUNTAINS by Peter S. Bennett, R. Roy Johnson, Michael R. Kunzmann, accessed on March 17, 2018
10. ↑ SIDA, contributions to botany. v.16 (1994), 1994 ( biodiversitylibrary.org ).

Web links

Commons : Sara Plummer Lemmon  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Sara Plummer Lemmon in the database of Find a Grave (English)