During her lifetime, Mildred E. Mathias (1906-1995) received so many awards, plaques, and medals that the list of those honors filled one-fourth of a column in Who's Who. Many of these memorabilia are now hidden in boxes and cabinets, but some of the most precious ones are still alive, inhabiting field sites where Mildred formerly practiced her trade as a plant taxonomist and naturalist. Six newly discovered plants--at last count--have been named to honor Dr. Mathias.
When a species is described for the first time, the author must invent a two-parted, latinized scientific name. The genus (first part) is based on its genealogical relationship to similar species; the second part (specific epithet) is a unique, as yet unused name for a species within that genus. If a plant is named to honor a person, it cannot be named for the person describing the species--that is considered self-aggrandizement--but it can be named for another person, such as the botanist who first collected the plant. Normally it is considered a high honor to be the namesake of just one species or genus. How did it come to be that Mildred Mathias was honored six times?
The genus Mathiasella bupleuroides was published in 1954 by Lincoln Constance and C. Leo Hitchcock. First collected in Tamaulipas, Mexico, this herbaceous perennial of the carrot family (Apiaceae, also called umbellifers) possesses male flowers with green and purple petals and female flowers lacking petals, both types within a showy corolla-like involucre. The authors honored Mildred for "her personal qualities, which have been an important influence in promoting an attitude of friendly cooperation and good will among botanists all over the United States" (American Journal of Botany 41: 56-58).
Sciadotenia mathiasiana (Menispermaceae) was described in 1970 by her long-term friends Boris Krukoff and Rupert Barneby, on the staff at the New York Botanical Garden (Memoirs of the New York Botanical Garden 20(2): 1-70). This is a woody vine (liana) collected in the lowland Amazonian rain forest of eastern Peru. Mildred had a special fondness for neotropical menisperms, many of which are used by the forest tribes in preparing folk medicines and poisons. In 1981, she coauthored a monograph on the menisperm genus Hyperbaena with her former UCLA graduate student Bill Theobald (Brittonia 33: 81-104).
George C. Kennedy at the UCLA Institute of Geophysics named the epiphytic orchid Lycaste mathiasiae (1978) for a species collected by Mildred in Tinga Maria, Peru, back in 1962, when she was doing ethnopharmacological research with Dermot Taylor (Orchid Digest 42: 59-61).
The most showy plant bearing Mildred's name is Heliconia mathiasiae, originally described from Costa Rica and Nicaragua by her former graduate student Gilbert S. Daniels and F. Gary Stiles in 1979 as H. mathiasii (Brenesia 15 Supplement: 33), but later corrected for spelling. This species, a distant relative of the banana, grows in closing light gaps and along rain forest edges and is commonly seen at the La Selva Biological Station of the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS) in northeastern Costa Rica. Mildred was President of OTS from 1969 to 1970, during its critical formative years, and loved La Selva. Nearly every year from 1974 until her death, she traveled to La Selva with adult classes, to teach about tropical biology and, surely, to show off her delightful heliconia, which is one of the zingiberoid (ginger-like) types. Since 1995, Professor Gibson has been part of a team doing research on that and other species at La Selva. You can see a living specimen of H. mathiasiae at MEMBG.
Stigmophyllon mathiasiae, again from Peru, is a tropical liana of family Malpighiaceae. It was named in 1981 by William R. Anderson, a noted authority on the family (Boletim do Museu Botanica (Curitiba) 43:3).
Closer to home, the latest addition to this list (1983) was Eryngium mathiasiae, Mathias' button-celery, from the Modoc Plateau of California. This very narrow endemic was described by M. Yusuf Sheikh, who received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley studying umbellifers under Lincoln Constance. "The species is named for Dr. Mildred E. Mathias, Professor Emeritus of Biology, University of California, Los Angeles, who has contributed greatly to the family Umbelliferae, especially in the New World" (MadroŇo 30: 93-101). Relatively uncommon, this species is found in wet depressions and ditches. As a namesake it is quite befitting, because Mildred was very active in preserving rare and endangered species, especially as a leader in The Nature Conservancy.
Mildred was very pleased with her "bouquet" of plants, and proudly listed these on her curriculum vitae as special honors. Particularly here at MEMBG, we should be pleased, too.