When Women Seldom Travelled Alone, is Botanist Wandered the CA Deserts in Search of Rare Plants

Mary Beal captured by Harold Weight while photographing rare Mojave plant life. | Photo: Desert Magazine, December 1948

The Mojave Project is an experimental transmedia documentary by Kim Stringfellow exploring the physical, geological and cultural landscape of the Mojave Desert. The Mojave Project reconsiders and establishes multiple ways in which to interpret this unique and complex landscape, through association and connection of seemingly unrelated sites, themes, and subjects thus creating a speculative and immersive experience for its audience.

Readers of the now-defunct Desert Magazine, known as DM to its most faithful, followed Randall Henderson's popular editorial column entitled Just Between You and Me. On this page, the founder and editor of the magazine commented on new developments concerning the desert, recounted recent travels, and announced changes to the magazine. In the November 1939 installment, at the beginning of the third year of publication, he celebrated DM's success and announced two new regular features: a page for rockhounds, and a botany column to be written by Miss Mary Beal of Daggett.

At the time, Beal was unknown to DM readers, except those who had noticed her second-place photograph in the August photography contest the previous year. Her photograph Mammillaria Blossoms 1 was just one of many that she would have in DM throughout her 56 plant profiles for the magazine published between 1939 and 1953. Her columns were much loved by the DM audience, many of whom didn't live in or near or have the opportunity to travel to the deserts of the Southwest. Althea Hill, a DM reader, described the experience of meeting Beal in the January 1940 Letters section of the magazine:

Continuing to Daggett we were looking for a camping spot, and asked directions of a lady bound for the post office. Her hospitality included a welcome to a secluded and shady table under the cottonwoods at the Van Dyke ranch. Then we learned that the woman who had been so kind to us was your writer, Mary Beal. She showed me her writing den, with its array of books and nicknacks and Indian baskets. Her next botany article was sticking out of the little red typewriter. She writes with such authority, and her articles are spiced with a sense of humor that attracts even a novice in the field of botany.

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Beal's regular botany column often introduced plants by anthropomorphizing them - ol' man mesquite, 2 for example - before she described them extensively, giving readers detailed information about occurrence and identifying features for each plant. Her articles were known for their botanical accuracy, but she also included folklore about the plants. Her first article, for example, featured the desert agave, also known as the century plant-which does not bloom once a century, but rather after one or two dozen years, as she noted.3 Within her first year of DM writing, she featured chia, describing how it has been used historically by local Native Americans for food, and included a tidbit describing how her landlord, desert writer and judge Theodore Strong Van Dyke, would use it to sustain him for a long day of hunting. 4 She, too, was familiar with this use, and was known to pack chia for her all-day botanizing expeditions - of course long before today's health conscious discovered it as a nutrient-packed superfood.

Two Desert Magazine articles penned by Mary Beal showcasing her own photographic images. Left: Samija (Mentzelia involucrata) appeared in June 1941. Right: Ghost Flower (Mohavea confertiflora) was featured in April 1948.

In her most beautiful columns, she managed to find poetic descriptions of desert plants rather than cutesy clich d ones: her description of the ghost flower captures how its blossoms are like a swarm of butterflies settled down to rest. 5

Her most exciting pages remind the reader that finding plants can be an adventure. For instance, her June 1941 article describes her rediscovery of a flower known as Stick-Leaf, Samija, or Mentzelia involucrata, after having thought she would never see it again, and even that she had dreamt it into existence:

Since that first discovery of Samija I have looked for other specimens, in Ord mountain and elsewhere, but it was not until many years later I found one lone flower, a rather runty one at that, near Chloride, Arizona. Even in its better known haunts in the Colorado desert it eluded me. If it had not been for the photograph I had taken of that Ord mountain specimen I would have doubted my memory of finding it.6

After the Arizona discovery, she had the fortune to stumble upon Samija in a specimen box delivered to her house, which led her to a treasure-trove beyond my most wishful dreams in the Bullion Mountains.

Just as Beal remembered plants through taking photographs of them, she illustrated each of her articles with plant photographs, while other botany contributors sent botanical illustrations to accompany their written pieces. For example, professional scientists Philip Munz and Jerry Laudermilk's 1944 contribution includes no less than six of Laudermilk's botanical illustrations to illustrate the water retention strategies of desert plants.7

A hand-colored photo by Mary Beal. Verso lists Desert Garden 1937 - West of Power Line, N.E. of Molly's. Basket Evening Primroses, Sand Verbenas, Blue Gilias, Gold Mats. etc. | Photo: Courtesy of the Mojave River Valley Museum

Beal's preference for photography could be a reflection of her lack of formal botanical training and relative inexperience with botanical illustration. When asked, she would tell questioners that she had learned everything she knew about plants from none other than Willis Linn Jepson - through his Manual of the Flowering Plants of California, which was the first comprehensive guide of its ki

LINK:	https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/mary-beal-botanist-desert-magazine...
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