I identify northern Peruvian plants, curate the South American plant collections, and do taxonomic research on the family Eriocaulaceae.

How did you become interested in your field?

When I was young I really wanted to be an artist or an actress. I was not the sciency little child. Some kids are really sciency from a young age and I wasn't.

I got interested in botany when I was a flower child in high school. I liked the structure of plants, the way they looked. They seemed like such pure, otherworldly beings. My grandparents were farmers--quiet, hard-working people who didn't believe in calling attention to yourself. And I saw plants that way - just by growing silently, being themselves, they provided food for the entire world, made all life possible. I liked that image.

I also loved the outdoors. My dad took us wilderness camping every summer and always made everything feel like a big adventure. When I went to college, I liked the botany classes where we'd go outside and wander around in the woods, not knowing what we'd find.

I settled on plant taxonomy right away, the field where you classify plants into species, and natural groupings of species. To me it makes the world seem like a richer place, and it's a way of honoring living things.

Has being a woman made a difference in your career?

I think it always makes some difference being a minority. Academic science for most of its history has been an almost exclusively male institution, and museum science is still one of the most male-dominated disciplines. But I'd be lying if I didn't admit that was part of the attraction for me. Only later did I realize that there was a down side, that even really good men can have difficulty relating to women, and vice versa.

But on the positive side, being an outsider can sometimes help you see things with greater clarity. For example, science can be really competitive rather than cooperative, which is often wasteful and counterproductive. Scientists are sometimes obsessed with demonstrating to each other the hardness of their methods or the power of their techniques, to the point that they get distracted from what matters.

I have kept a low profile, professionally, in order to stay away from the politics and competitive pressures. I've never even applied for a Ph.D.-level position. But as far as how I've been treated by people personally, I think I've been treated well, judged by the quality of my work, and given freedom and respect. I'm kind of a hermit and that probably helps.

How does gender affect other aspects of science?

One of the annoying things to me is that we're not allowed to say that there is any art in what we do because that seems to trivialize it. There's this annoying machismo about how hard it's supposed to be to know the truth--This is rigorous. We're doing something hard. We're stripping away the illusion from the truth.

I think it relates to the idea of physics envy. Within the sciences you go from hard to soft science-talk about masculine and feminine! Hard science is physics. You go from mathematics to physics to chemistry to molecular biology to biology to organismal biology. And then you get up into ecology and, God forbid, psychology and sociology, which are barely considered sciences. It's called physics envy. It's like everyone is trying to reaffirm their identification with physics and chemistry. Right now we have this drive to analyze DNA, as if we don't really know what something is until we know what its DNA looks like. We can't say we know anything until we know that. And this is such a masculine single-focus kind of thing.

In about fifth grade, my role model was James Bond. I read all Ian Fleming's books. I loved the sense of mystery, the dark alleys and secret codes.

There's one role-model figure of the 20th century that has no female version and that bothers me: the brilliant absent-minded professor. Like Albert Einstein. Woman scientists on TV and in fiction are never spacy or goofy or warm-hearted. The absent-minded professor is an inspired visionary with a sense of humble perspective, and you never see that figure portrayed in female form.

The brilliant and eccentric women in science are the ones most likely to be misunderstood. It's like you have to be tough as nails and intimidating all the time or nobody will take you seriously.

Did anyone else influence or inspire you?

I had this biology teacher in high school who was from Iowa. For some reason I always ended up with mentors from Iowa. They were just very dry and non-threatening, these guys with their brown suits on, talking about plants. I liked them. They were easy to connect with.

In spirit, what I really hope to accomplish is to make plants visible to people. There are thousands of different forms of life out there, all with different needs and different capabilities, just like people, and they need to be understood and acknowledged.

I think most people don't realize how poorly we know the plants on earth. There are many tropical plant families, for example, which no one in the world knows how to classify into species. We have cases of specimens with only a genus name on them, and we don't know how many species there are, how to tell them apart, what their distribution is, or how threatened they are with extinction.

It isn't easy to come up with this information. It can take weeks or months of studying specimens before you begin to see the faces of the individual species emerge. It's a visual kind of learning, and it's so satisfying when it happens---it's like watching the skyline of a city appear through the fog. Once you see the species, you can usually explain to other people how to see them, and you can begin to learn something about them and hopefully care for them.

People often have a misconception that what we taxonomists do is just slap names on things--that we have this neat, pre-existing system for sorting things into pigeonholes, and that's what we do all day. But the reality is that living things have their own system of order, and we have to be very attentive and patient to see it. So, yes, part of what I do is simply identify plants using other people's published work, but another part is the original work of trying to see the faces of the species for the first time.

How does that all fit into the greater conservation issue? Is there a race to identify things quickly?

I feel that actually, especially in the tropics, we have very little influence. Doing the descriptive work and the inventory work is not going to stop people from destroying those habitats. We're talking about political issues and land-reform issues and whether the people have a way to make a living. I think what I do helps incidentally, but if I were to go out and commit my life to conservation, I'd have to try to influence people who are not botanists, and think in dollars. Not too many of us are doing that.

I think a lot of people have a romantic, "Star Trek" image of science, which is not real. When I was in high school, I thought scientists were more down-to-earth, more reasonable, more trustworthy, and less egotistical than other people. I thought the people on nature programs were really saving the world. None of that is necessarily true.

So to those romantic types, like me, I would advise: Focus on what you want to do, rather than what you want to be. Go out and get as detailed a picture as you can of what scientists do, and why, and if it seems really important to you in your heart to do those things, then go for it.

Are there any changes you'd like to see in your field?

I've noticed that botanical art such as Margaret Mee did is considered in modern industrialized countries like the United States not to be part of science. Serious scientists always hire professional illustrators to draw their new species. If you do your own drawings you're considered an eccentric. Science and art are treated as two separate, even contradictory, spheres.

But in India and Latin America and the third world, many botanists do their own illustrations. They consider drawing a tool for training their eyes to see what's there. And I think that's right.

Not only that, but illustrations are the best and most effective way to communicate the visual knowledge that results from taxonomic study. One thing I think is strange is that a paragraph description in Latin is required if anyone wants to publish a new plant species. This is somehow supposed to make the information universally accessible, even though no one speaks Latin anymore, and even though these descriptions are often only a few lines long.

As far as I know, no one has ever proposed a requirement to provide a line drawing of the new species, even though it would be much more useful and universally understood. I think that says something about how alienated science and art are in the modern world.

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