Botanist’s 2nd Career as Pied Piper of the Jungle
Mildred Mathias doesn’t care much for formal portraits of herself. A world-renowned botanist, horticulturist and conservationist, she is ranked among the top scientists in her fields. So lofty is her academic reputation that almost a dozen flowers are named after her around the world.
But she much prefers more casual portraits, taken in the jungles of the Amazon, the mountains of South and Central America or the cloud forests of Costa Rica, with their brilliant green and red quetzal birds.
Pied Piper of the Jungle
One image in particular seems to capture her best. It was taken last year at a national park in Costa Rica and shows Mathias, handsome and silver-haired, grinning from under a blue canvas hat on which is perched a scarlet macaw named Lapa.
It’s all in keeping with Mathias’ second career--one that is drawing her a public following far greater than any she could have expected in the groves of academe. At 81, after a distinguished 27-year career as a botany professor at UCLA, Mildred Mathias has become a sort of Pied Piper of the jungles.
On Tuesday, Mathias begins her 12th tour of the Peruvian Amazon, where she first did field work in 1959 in conjunction with the UCLA department of pharmacology, collecting plants that might be used for medicinal purposes.
She’s not going to Africa this year, where she did 20 years of field work, or to New Zealand, Australia or New Guinea, where she also has conducted natural history tours. But on Aug. 7, she will co-lead a nature tour group on a 20-day tour of China, highlighted by a trip to the Wolong Panda Reserve.
Dozens of her followers will travel with her. “Botany is not the greatest love of my life,” said one, Louise Harris, a Santa Monica audio-visual consultant. “But I don’t care where Mildred is going, I’ll go. I will follow her to the ends of the Earth. It is phenomenal to go on a nature walk with this woman.”
Harris and many of Mathias’ disciples have taken the same trip with her up to five years in a row. Since she began leading tours for UCLA Extension 14 years ago, Mathias has guided more than 1,000 non-scientists through the jungles, mountains and rain forests of Latin America, to the Galapagos Islands and to observe the mountain gorillas of Rwanda in East Africa.
“She is a fantastic character and an outstanding scientist with a brilliant record,” said Lincoln Constance, botanist emeritus at UC Berkeley. “She wins another award about once a month. If we were living in the British Empire, she’d be a Dame.”
“Not many people just run off to Borneo, but Mildred does,” said Harlan Lewis, retired chairman of the UCLA botany department, where Mathias once served as his vice chairman. “Very often when I’ve been traveling in out of the way places, like Bulgaria, the only person’s name they know is Mildred Mathias.”
Bored With Retirement
Sitting in her office at the UCLA botany building, a cluttered tiny corner room that is up two flights of stairs and behind the library, Mathias confessed to being bored with retirement. “I wouldn’t want to sit at home playing bridge,” she said, “and I wouldn’t want to live somewhere where there were no young people.”
But where she goes, even some young people might fear to tread. “Mildred can outwalk and outtalk anybody a third of her age,” said Jane Marshall, a landscape designer from Malibu who has been on two of Mathias’ trips to Peru and one to Costa Rica. “People are dropping like flies and she continues on. Her energy is incredible.”
Marshall, who uses Mathias’ book “Color for the Landscape” in her work, is already planning to sign up for Mathias’ next Costa Rican tour, in January or February of 1989. “There are maybe 300 people in the world who have this kind of knowledge,” Marshall said, “and she stands out from all of those.”
Marshall told a story about hiking in the Andes with Mathias during a recent tour. “Here we were 13,000 feet up in the Andes on that last trip to Peru,” she said. “It was snowing and she wasn’t paying any attention to it. She was pointing out pin cushion plants that were growing there, well above the timber line. She has never lost that sense of wonder, and of loving what she does.”
Mathias’ interests aren’t limited to mountains or the tropics. In a recent two-month period, she led a tour of the Historic District of Savannah, Ga., and the plantation gardens near Charleston, S.C.; appeared with the Nature Conservancy on Santa Cruz Island to rededicate it as a special reserve; traveled to San Francisco for the premiere of a movie on research in the tropics, attended seminars in Sacramento, Miami and Phoenix, and gave a symposium for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power on drought tolerance.
A Special Place
Santa Cruz Island is a special place for Mathias. She was instrumental in the acquisition of much of the 50,000-acre reserve by the Nature Conservancy, a national environmental organization for which she serves as president of the Southern California chapter. She also has chaired since 1968 the University of California’s Natural Reserve System, which controls 26 sites around the state where ecologists can do field studies of natural habitats.
At home in Los Angeles, Mathias, who specializes in studying Umbelliferae (the carrot family) and in taxonomy, the science of classification, is busy writing and lecturing, and continuing her botanical research.
Mark and Sandra Newton, who have been to Peru and Costa Rica with her, insist that her trips are not tours, but “a life experience with ‘Dona Mildred.’ ” Newton, a professor of geology, geography and earth science at Los Angeles City College, says Mathias “shares wheel and woe with everybody.”
“And scientists all over the world know her. I couldn’t see how there could be anybody else who compares with her,” he said. “But her trips are not for people who don’t want to get dirty or don’t like bugs.”
“Bugs are really beautiful in rain forests,” Mathias confided while walking through UCLA’s botanical gardens, named in her honor in 1979. Along the paths, she pointed out some of the rare plants and talked about her life and family.
Born and raised in a small town in the Ozarks of Missouri, located on the New Madrid fault, she recalls the house shaking and chandeliers rattling from time to time during her youth, so California’s quakes don’t bother her.
She met Gerald Hassler when they were both students at Washington University in St. Louis and they married in 1930. She kept her maiden name, not because she was an early feminist, but “because it was a convenience. My husband said it was because I didn’t plan to stay married long. But I had already published under my maiden name. I had my doctorate before we were married.” She received her doctorate in botany at age 22.
“When I came to UCLA in 1947, they wanted me to use my legal married name,” Mathias said. “I said ‘you hired Mildred Mathias, not Mildred Hassler.’ I went out and got a list of MDs, women who were using their maiden names to show them. They said OK, but the checks will go to Mildred Hassler. The travel vouchers went to Mathias as did the royalties.”
Today she and Hassler, a retired thermodynamic engineer, live in Westwood, where her garden contains exotic plants she has gathered from around the world and an extensive collection of cymbidiums. They have three children and six grandchildren.
Her current passion is the effort to restore the rain forests of Costa Rica. “If they keep cutting the trees, they are going to ruin the world,” she predicted. “The worst thing that happened to Latin America is the diesel-powered chain saw.”
Protected Status
She applauds Costa Rica’s recognition of the problem and wishes the United States would do as well. “Costa Rica has about 20% of the country in a protected status, while the U.S. has 3%,” she lamented. “And here--greater Los Angeles has fewer parklands than any other major city.”
To her fans, she will always seem unflappable. And Mathias herself tells a story that seems to confirm it. Her worst fall ever, she says, was not in some jungle or on a mountain trail--but in the Los Angeles County Arboretum.
“I was taking a class on a field trip after a hard rain. And I slipped on some decomposed granite. Broke two bones above my wrist,” Mathias chuckled. “It was on the path for the blind.”
