Mexican-American botanist YNES MEXIA [1870-1938] is believed to be the most prolific plant collector of her time. She is also proof that it is never too late to pursue your passion as she did at age 55. She discovered five hundred new species and collected some 150,000 specimens.<\/p>\n

Born in Washington, DC to a Mexican diplomat father and American mother, her parents difficult marriage forced her to live in many different places and change schools on a regular basis. Yn\u00e9s struggled for almost four decades, then finally settled in San Francisco where she indulged her fervor for hiking. At 50, she started to travel with the Sierra Club, and in 1921 enrolled as a special student at UC Berkeley. It was there that her profound interest in botany grew.<\/p>\n

$\"\"$ <\/p>\n

Her career began in 1925,\u00a0 when she joined Roxanna Stinchfield Ferris<\/em> of Stanford University on a collecting trip to Western Mexico. On this trip alone, they collected\u00a0 500 species and the\u00a0Mimosa mexiae <\/em>was named in honor of Yn\u00e9s. She began writing and collecting for the next thirteen years in both North and South America and worked with Alice Eastwood<\/em> and other famous scientists. She took delight in having plants named after her as it gave her a sense of immortality. She was remembered by\u00a0 colleagues for her\u00a0meticulous, careful work and her collecting expertise.\u00a0 Yn\u00e9s willingly faced long journeys that included plenty of exotic bugs and even fell off a cliff once. Nothing however, could keep her from the adventure of collecting plant specimens. Her last trip took her back to Mexico and Yn\u00e9s Mex\u00eda died in 1938 of cancer.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n
$\"\"$
Final Portrait of Yn\u00e9s Mex\u00eda for Bravo! Poems about Amazing Hispanics by Margarita Engle.<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mexican-American botanist YNES MEXIA 1870-1938 is believed to be the most prolific plant collector of her time. She is also proof that it is never too late to pursue your passion as she began her career at age 55. She discovered five hundred new species of plants and collected some 150,000 specimens.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6430,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[256,279,33,19,20,21,22,23,34,308],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaellopez.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6429"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaellopez.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaellopez.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaellopez.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaellopez.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6429"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/rafaellopez.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6458,"href":"https:\/\/rafaellopez.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6429\/revisions\/6458"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaellopez.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaellopez.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaellopez.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaellopez.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}