“You Must Go Afoot If A Real Botanist”: The Legacy of Willis Linn Jepson

August 19, 1867

Oh, my dear botanical companions, today we commemorate the birth of a true garden aristocrat - Willis Linn Jepson - who graced this earthly garden on this day so many seasons ago.

Etched upon his final resting place are words that might make even the most stoic among us reach for a handkerchief:

"Profound Scholar, Inspiring Teacher, Indefatigable Botanical Explorer, ...

In the ordered beauty of nature, he found enduring communion."

Our dear Jepson pursued his education at Berkeley, my fellow plant-pursuers. During his junior year, in a stroke of brilliance that would benefit generations to come, he embarked upon that most noble of practices - keeping a botanical diary. He collected everything with the fervor of a magpie with excellent taste - not merely dates, darlings, but every morsel of botanical intrigue.

This magnificent obsession never left him and culminated in over fifty Jepson field books, each brimming with verdant discoveries!

By 1894, our intrepid explorer fixed his sights on a rather ambitious project - creating a Flora of California.

Can you imagine the audacity, my greenhouse goddesses? The sheer botanical bravado!

And while nurturing this flora into existence, Jepson, ever the overachiever, thought he might as well establish a herbarium. This collection of pressed botanical treasures he considered his true legacy to the world of stems and stamens.

Despite often proclaiming a distaste for common names (oh, the botanical snobbery!), our Jepson couldn't help but craft many himself. In a delightful moment of horticultural humor, he christened one unfortunate plant "Mountain Misery" after suffering the rather unpleasant consequences of traipsing through a patch of it.

One imagines his trouser cuffs were never quite the same again!

As automobiles began their conquest of American roads in the early 1900s, Jepson stood firm in his botanical principles, declaring:

"You must still go afoot if a real botanist. No field botanist should become soft and travel only in an auto."

I ask you, my soil-under-the-fingernails friends, isn't there something gloriously defiant about a man who insists on proper botanical protocol even as the world races toward modernization?

Our passionate plant scholar began numbering specimens for his flora in 1899. His final entry, specimen No. 27,571, was the Salsola kali - that prickly little upstart commonly known as Prickly Russian Thistle. Jepson collected it on October 28, 1945, perhaps unaware that his own season was drawing to a close.

Earlier that same year, our botanical hero suffered a heart attack while attempting to fell a dead Almond tree on his ranch - a rather poetic skirmish between man and nature. Sadly, he never fully recovered from this arboreal encounter. Jepson departed this garden of earthly delights on November 7, 1946, leaving behind a legacy as enduring as the California landscape he so meticulously documented.

And so, my garden-gloved darlings, as we nurture our own plots and plants, let us remember Willis Linn Jepson - a man who understood that in the soil and seed, in petal and pistil, there exists a communion with something far greater than ourselves.