Author, 84, Digs Her Botanical Detective Work

Some elderly people like to have their adult children nearby for security and moral support. But when Grace Heintz, 84, asked her daughter and son-in-law to move into the Santa Monica family home after her husband’s death, she had something different in mind.

“I wanted them to take care of the yardwork,” she said briskly in a recent interview. “I was busy running around all over the place, so that way I could take my camper and go wherever I wanted to.”

Where Heintz goes in her camper is up and down the state for weeks at a time on horticultural expeditions, hot on the trail of trees to be studied and identified for universities, arboretums, gardens and parks. Regarded in horticultural circles as one of the state’s leading plant detectives, she is particularly noted for her expertise in the 600-member eucalyptus group.

She is the author of one tree guidebook, “Trees of the Palisades,” and recently published her third revision of “Trees of Santa Monica,” a work written by George Hastings in 1944 and updated by her in 1976 and 1981.

With four children, 20 grandchildren, 21 great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild on her own family tree, Heintz could have easily settled down to a life of grandmotherly pleasures. But the enthusiasm she conveys when she talks about her adventures makes it clear that she is far from ready for a rocking chair.

Heintz, who says her interest in botany goes back to early childhood, has been an eager teacher of it for almost as long. While still in her teens, Heintz taught in a one-room schoolhouse in Wisconsin, and she says she always included nature walks in her curriculum.

“I still remember the names of all the plants she had us identify,” said former student Peter Goeldner in recalling the field trips. He is a retired teacher from Alaska who recently visited Heintz. “She was an excellent teacher who was ahead of her time, extremely progressive in teaching and in everything.”

For some years after marriage, Heintz juggled her teaching career with the demands of family life on a dairy farm, which included weekend shopping, cooking, baking, cleaning and laundry marathons, with water she carried from a creek.

“I was never, ever good at the domestic arts,” she said. “I had too many other passions, like botany and reading.”

When the family moved to California in 1951, Heintz delighted in identifying the local flora, much of it new to her, and eventually served as president of the local chapter of the California Native Plant Society for 10 years.

She also worked toward her state teaching credential, but deliberately avoided studying botany. “I was approaching 50 then,” she said, “and I didn’t want to switch careers. I told myself, ‘Don’t ever take botany because if you do you’ll neglect everything else you need for a degree.’ Craziest advice anyone ever gave herself.”

Credential in hand, Heintz taught fifth and sixth grades for the Los Angeles Unified School District for many years and it wasn’t until 1972 that she permitted herself a botany class. It was with now-retired Santa Monica College instructor Robert Armacost.

“She had a lot of background and she did awfully well,” Armacost recalled. “Grace really sticks to things. She digs and digs. She’ll go back to look at a tree many times and consult others.”

So persistent is her nature that when Armacost gave his class a list of 30 trees missing from the Hastings book on Santa Monica trees, Heintz hopped on her bicycle and tracked down every one. Armacost had planned to update the book, but when ill health prevented him from doing so, Heintz stepped in.

The book is a thorough inventory of trees growing on Santa Monica public streets, with descriptions, sketches and photographs.

At one point during the two years she spent researching the revised edition, she identified a rare species of eucalyptus--and that got her started on a whole new sub-specialty.

“They’re interesting and really terribly hard to learn,” she said of the eucalyptuses. “That’s why no one else does it so thoroughly. There are about 600 kinds, with very little difference between many of them. . . . I had my nose in a eucalyptus book for 13 years, and I loved the intensity.”

In time, Heintz gained a reputation for her expertise and local botanists began to call on her for assistance. She has identified eucalyptus trees for such places as the Los Angeles County Arboretum, Huntington Gardens and UCLA’s Botanical Garden.

“She’s taken on this incredibly difficult group and mastered it, and we all rely on her for identification,” said research associate Barry Prigge of the UCLA Botanical Garden.

The Los Angeles Zoo turned to Heintz for guidance when it wanted to import koalas from Australia. Koalas will eat the leaves of only 17 of the 600 eucalyptus species, so it was up to Heintz to determine if the appropriate trees grew at the zoo, and to send samples to Australia for a koala taste test.

As requests came in from UC Santa Cruz, Stanford and other places farther afield, Heintz perfected her camping routine, her trips always planned during the six months of the year when her husband returned to Wisconsin to visit their sons on their farms. “We allowed each other liberty,” she said. “I could go my way and he could go his, and working on the boys’ farms was his passion.”

Packing up books, microscope and sleeping bag, Heintz has traveled the state for about 15 years, only recently slowed a bit by fading eyesight.

She readily acknowledges that her research techniques might appear a bit peculiar to those unfamiliar with her work.

“When I’m after a tree sometimes I climb, I crawl, I scratch, I dig, I write down what I find, I make maps. If I weren’t a little old lady, I would probably have been shot by now, because I stop for nothing. For nothing!

“People often wonder what I’m doing and sometimes they think I’m crazy, but that’s the way I make friends. After they know me they guard my trees and I get letters all the time from people saying they think a tree is in danger, or it’s about to be removed, and what can I do about it.”

In recent years, she has begun to get some recognition. She has been honored with awards from botanical societies at UC Santa Cruz, UC Davis and Stanford. The Southern California Horticultural Institute named her the outstanding horticulturist of the year in 1988. This spring she’ll be named a Fellow of the California Native Plant Society.

A recent highlight for her was a monthlong tour of Australia last year with a group of classification experts, where she met some longtime correspondents. “I send all my difficult specimens to Australia for identification, and it was super to meet the taxonomists I’ve written to over the years.”

After so many years of eucalyptus sleuthing, it would seem inevitable that Heintz write a book about her favorite trees, and she was eager to do so until a recent insect infestation put the eucalyptus in jeopardy.

“The long-horned eucalyptus borer beetle was brought over here by accident in 1984,” she said, “and the future of the trees is in question. They’re going, and that’s been stopping me from writing my book. We’ve imported wasps from Australia that may in time stop the beetles, but it might take as long as 10 years for something to happen.

“But,” she continued, “I’ve just decided to start the book anyway. I don’t know if I’ll ever finish it, and I’m worried about the trees. But I’m going to work as if they’re going to be able to stop the beetles. It’s what I want to do.

“Besides,” she said, “now that my revision of ‘Trees of Santa Monica’ is finished, I’ve got to have another project to keep me busy. I can’t just sit around and do nothing.”