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Ynés Mexía, a Mexican-American botanist, took her first botany course in her fifties and began collecting expeditions soon afterwards. In about thirteen years of fieldwork she gathered some 145,000 plant specimens, around 500 of them species new to science.

Ynés Mexía

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The story behind the card

Mexía came to botany by an unlikely route. In 1909, aged 39, she suffered a mental and physical breakdown and moved to California for treatment; hikes with the Sierra Club helped her recover and drew her to nature, and in her early fifties she enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley. On her first expedition, to Mexico in 1925, she fell from a cliff and broke ribs, yet came back with 500 specimens. In 1928 she collected more than 6,000 in what is now Denali National Park in Alaska, and a two-and-a-half-year South American journey, including some 4,800 kilometres by canoe on the Amazon, yielded about 65,000. She died of lung cancer in 1938, aged 68. A genus, Mexianthus, and about fifty species carry her name.

Türkçe oku
Meksika asıllı Amerikalı Ynés Mexía ilk botanik dersini ellili yaşlarında aldı ve kısa süre sonra bitki toplamak için yolculuklara çıktı. Yaklaşık on üç yıllık arazi çalışmasında 145.000 kadar bitki örneği topladı; bunların 500 kadarı bilimin o güne dek tanımadığı türlerdi.

Mexía botaniğe beklenmedik bir yoldan geldi. 1909'da, 39 yaşında ağır bir ruhsal ve bedensel çöküntü yaşadı ve tedavi için California'ya taşındı. Sierra Club'la yaptığı doğa yürüyüşleri iyileşmesine yardım etti ve onu doğaya bağladı; ellili yaşlarının başında Berkeley'deki California Üniversitesi'ne kaydoldu. İlk seferinde, 1925'te Meksika'da bir uçurumdan düşüp kaburgalarını kırdı, yine de 500 örnekle döndü. 1928'de Alaska'da, bugünkü Denali Ulusal Parkı'nda 6.000'den fazla örnek topladı. İki buçuk yıl süren Güney Amerika yolculuğunda Amazon'da kanoyla 4.800 kilometre kadar yol aldı ve yaklaşık 65.000 örnek topladı. 1938'de, 68 yaşında akciğer kanserinden öldü. Mexianthus adlı bir bitki cinsi ve elli kadar tür onun adını taşıyor.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Ynés Mexía
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