Sara Plummer Lemmon, the Botanist and Artist a Mountain Remembers

Episode 144 of the National Park Service's Preservation Technology Podcast, from the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training, has host Catherine Cooper talking with Wynne Brown, a Tucson writer, editor and graphic designer who has spent years researching Sara Plummer Lemmon and campaigning to conserve her scientific illustrations.

The episode: "Uncovering the Work of Sara Plummer Lemmon, a Forgotten Botanist", from the National Park Service's Preservation Technology Podcast.

Finding her

Brown first came across Lemmon around 2012, while working on the second edition of her book Remarkable Arizona Women: a botanist and artist of the 1880s, and the woman southern Arizona's Mount Lemmon is named for. She had climbed it in 1881, on her honeymoon, at age 44.

A couple of years later Brown learned that the University of California and Jepson Herbaria Archives in Berkeley, California, held six linear feet of material on Sara and her husband, John Gill Lemmon. It turned out to be 1,200 pages of Sara's handwritten letters. Brown made three trips to photograph them all, and in reading them was won over by Lemmon's powers of observation, her voice and what caught her interest. With her own background in scientific illustration, the artwork sealed it: she set out to write a book so that Lemmon's story would no longer be neglected.

A life reinvented

Every biographer reads through a filter, Brown said, and hers was Lemmon as both scientist and artist — and as someone who remade herself. Born in Maine, educated in Massachusetts and then in New York City, where she also worked, Lemmon moved to California at 33, knowing no one, because constant bronchitis and pneumonia had made her health desperate. A New England gym teacher became a Western scientist and artist, and that transformation shaped what Brown kept from so much material. Lemmon's voice was strong enough that Brown walked around Tucson hearing it, and the balance in the book was to let Lemmon speak for herself while giving readers enough context to place her in her time.

Brown was most struck by her resilience. Lemmon's lungs made her constantly ill, and her husband, known as J.G. Lemmon, had been badly damaged by his time as a prisoner of war at Andersonville and Florence. Yet these two supposedly frail people climbed mountains, camped in wilderness and reached remote places, and got an astonishing amount done. What Brown admires most is Lemmon's relentless curiosity.

Erased from the labels

The couple collected plants all over the West, but the labels read "J.G. Lemmon and wife"; Sara's name was left off their scientific discoveries. That was typical of the era, Brown said, and it is why Lemmon's contributions to conservation, suffrage, art and science have been underrated: nobody knew about her. One painting shows a morning glory later named Plummer's morning glory, after Sara's maiden name. Whether any of her paintings show the type specimens themselves is hard to say, since the couple recorded locations loosely — sometimes by their campsite, a mile or two from the plant.

Saving the watercolors

When Brown first saw the artwork in 2017, two relatively small boxes at Berkeley held 276 watercolors on paper. Some were in terrible condition — insects had eaten the paper around the pigment, leaving them looking like cutouts — while others had come through some 140 years beautifully. The paintings were so fragile that the archivist had not dared take them out to count them.

With help from donors and all of the book's proceeds, Brown paid to bring conservator Susan Filter to Berkeley to assess them. The work is preservation, not restoration: rehousing and stabilization, putting each watercolor in its own archival folder with a glassine sheet, inside archival boxes, so it stops falling apart. On a return trip one August, the first 276 were done. Meanwhile the archivist had found two more boxes during COVID, about 200 more paintings, including some from the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson, home to Mount Lemmon; new donations will pay to finish rehousing them.

Not forgotten

Brown's main aim was that Lemmon not be forgotten, and she believes that is happening. The book is in its second printing and has won a Spur Award, for best Western biography, and a WILLA Award, for best creative nonfiction. The lesson she takes from Lemmon: follow your interests, because reinventing yourself can succeed.

Sources

Based on the National Park Service's Preservation Technology Podcast, Episode 144, "Uncovering the Work of Sara Plummer Lemmon, a Forgotten Botanist," produced by the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (public domain); the guest's words are rewritten in hubnx's own words. The episode places J.G. Lemmon's imprisonment "after the Civil War"; the page gives no date for it. It also spells the mountain "Mount Lemon" once, corrected here.

• The episode's audio is the National Park Service's own file, from the podcast's feed.