Author's Entries

• Albert Sweetser (1861-1940)

  Albert Raddin Sweetser established the University of Oregon Herbarium and for twenty-nine years was a much-loved teacher of botany. He was an early Oregon conservationist and author of many popular natural history articles. Early in his tenure at Oregon, he was appointed State Biologist. Sweetser was born in Mendon, Massachusetts, …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Carrie Phinney Sweetser (1863-1952)

  Carrie Sweetser was a watercolorist, a life-long diarist, and her botanist husband's devoted travel companion. She was married for fifty-two years to Albert Raddin Sweetser (1861-1940), professor of botany and founder of the University of Oregon Herbarium in Eugene. Her surviving paintings, photographs, and diaries provide a vivid picture …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Georgia Mason (1910-2007)

  Georgia Mason was unique among twentieth-century Oregon botanists in that she did not arrive in the Northwest nor begin her serious study of botany in the state until she was in middle age. The summers she spent botanizing alone in the rugged, isolated Wallowa Mountains were in the decade between …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Lilla Leach (1886-1980)

  Lilla Irvin Leach was an independent field botanist who, with her husband John, systematically collected plants throughout Oregon and other western states. She was particularly interested in the Siskiyou Mountains of Curry County in southwestern Oregon. She and John spent nine summers there between 1928 and 1938, exploring the heart …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Louis F. Henderson (1853-1942)

  Louis Forniquet Henderson was one of Oregon's most important early botanists. During his long and vigorous career, he collected plants in virtually every corner of the state as well as in Washington and Idaho. At the time, he may have understood the flora of the Northwest better than any living …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Thomas Howell (1842-1912)

  The life of Oregon's Thomas Jefferson Howell is surely unique among botanists. The words "untutored" and "impoverished" have often been used to describe Howell, and certainly he was both, but he nevertheless managed to write and self-publish the first book on the regional flora of the Pacific Northwest. Howell was …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Thomas Nuttall (1786-1859)

  Thomas Nuttall was one of the most enthusiastic and energetic of the early Oregon botanists. Although he arrived in Oregon country in 1834, some time after Lewis and Clark and David Douglas, he nevertheless made enormous contributions to our knowledge of the state's flora. Susan Delano McKelvey, author of …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• William Cusick (1842-1922)

  William Cusick was a Northwest pioneer botanist who contributed enormously to the early knowledge of Oregon's flora. Cusick's particular area of exploration was the Wallowa-Blue Mountain region in the northeast corner of our state, but his botanizing and plant collecting had covered virtually every Oregon county by the time he …

  Oregon Encyclopedia