Botanist Turns Over a New Leaf : Elderly Volunteer Studies Plants at Pinnacles Monument
Cecilia Bjornerud, 73, has spent the past 5 1/2 years in this mountainous park 60 miles southeast of Monterey cataloguing plants, shrubs, rushes, sedges and trees.
A volunteer botanist, she is here year-round, doing an inventory that hasn’t been done since the establishment of Pinnacles National Monument by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908.
Every day, the hearty great-grandmother trudges 10 to 15 miles up and down mountains, along creek bottoms and in dense brush looking for new species she has yet to encounter.
To date she has catalogued more than 700 different species of plant life in the national monument.
Finding New Species
“It’s harder to find things now. Takes more time. But there are still many plants I’m certain I’ve missed. The other day I found eight new species along the creek bed,” Bjornerud said as she wrote a description of a gnaphalium, a cudweed, beside a pressing of the plant in her notebook.
She lives in a 1967 mobile home beneath the jagged spectacular Pinnacles carved by rain, wind, heat and frost that gave the monument its name.
Bjornerud has no electricity or running water in her tiny home on wheels. She cooks with propane, reads by kerosene lantern.
“My needs are simple. I’m living like I did when I was a child growing up on a farm in Wisconsin,” she said, adding: “I love it. I’m doing exactly what I want to be doing.”
Her mobile home is filled with botany books, including the $140 set of Abrams Illustrated Plants published by Stanford University, a gift from national park colleagues. There are shelves lined with notebooks representing her ambitious project, begun in January, 1980.
Once-a-Month Trek
A striking painting of a blue oak tree hangs from a wall, a gift from ranger Clyde Stonaker who painted it for the botanist when she was studying oak trees in the park.
Once a month, Bjornerud leaves the national monument in her 1969 station wagon to drive to town to pick up groceries and supplies.
In her lifetime, she has raised four children. Divorced, she has a dozen grandchildren, one great-grandchild. She has been a first- and second-grade teacher in rural Wisconsin elementary schools and worked as a nurse for 10 years in San Francisco.
Her lifelong avocation has been botany. “My father was a self-taught naturalist. He knew all the trees of Wisconsin,” she said, explaining her penchant for plants.
She is never alone as she hikes along Frog Canyon, Bear Gulch, Machette Ridge, the Chalon Peaks and Mount Defiance. The park is alive with wildlife--deer, raccoon, fox, bobcat, wild pigs, rabbits, rodents, bats, woodpeckers, quail, vultures, badgers and snakes.
Never Tires of Walks
“I carry a stick to protect myself from the rattlesnakes,” Bjornerud said. “I have no intention of doing the snakes any harm. They always get out of my way. I say ‘Excuse me’ when I shoo them.”
She says she never tires of her long walks. “You know how it is with Norwegians. A Norwegian mile is seven miles long. My health is good. It’s healthy to live in the woods. Look at the history of botanists. Many of their life spans are exceedingly long because of this kind of life style.”
When she isn’t searching for new species, Bjornerud gives nature talks and provides campers with information about the monument.
Her plant pressings and descriptions represent an important part of the Pinnacles National Monument archives at park headquarters. She plans eventually to publish a book.
Bjornerud’s favorite plant? A dry-land orchid she was surprised to find here.
“When I dried and pressed the orchid I discovered it had more than 90 tiny exquisite green flowers on the stalk. It was incredible,” she said.
