Rebecca Merritt Austin
American botanist and plant collector (1832–1919)
Rebecca Merritt Austin (née Smith, formerly Leonard; March 10, 1832 – March 4, 1919) was an American botanist and naturalist who collected and sold native plants in California and Oregon. Lomatium austiniae and Cephalanthera austiniae are named in her honor. She studied the chemistry, natural history of, and insects captured by the carnivorous pitcher plant Darlingtonia californica, and sold collected specimens to botanists and collectors. Her specimens are included in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution and the California Academy of Sciences.
She carried on a regular correspondence with botanist J. G. Lemmon and others. Her experiments and correspondences have been published or cited by Asa Gray, John Gill Lemmon, William Marriott Canby, and other prominent botanists of the time.
Life
Rebecca Merritt Smith was born on March 10, 1832 in Cumberland County, Kentucky, one of eight children. When she was five her family moved to Missouri: her mother and two sisters soon died. Rebecca eventually attended school in Magnolia, Illinois, and at the Granville Academy in Granville, Illinois. By age sixteen, she was teaching in rural schools.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rebecca Merritt Austin” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.