Joan Fosback, Mildred Theile, Lois Hopkins, Mary Carlson

Last Updated on March 23, 2024 by Tom Pratum

This is the story of four Douglas County women, self-proclaimed “Little Old Ladies in Hiking Boots,” whose passion for native plants placed their county at the forefront of the Oregon Flora Project. The four women, Lois Wesley Hopkins, Mildred Thiele, Joan Fosback, and Mary Carlson, founded the herbarium at the Douglas County Museum of History and Natural History, without any formal education in botany.

In 1994, the US Department of Agriculture presented the four with a certificate “in recognition and appreciation for the outstanding commitment and dedication to the identification of the flora of Douglas County.”

After decades of devoted volunteer work, the four women knew Douglas County plants better than else anyone did. During this time, they focused their energies on finding every plant that grew in the county. Collectively, they filled the herbarium in the Douglas County Museum with pressed specimens of more than 3,000 plants.

Their great partnership started in the early 1960s over an orchid. Lois Wesley Hopkins, a first grade teacher, learned that Mildred Thiele, a second grade teacher, thought a coral root was a member of the heath family. Lois knew a little bit about botany at that time, and had recently taken a class in natural history just to have something extra to share with her students.

Also, in 1960, the late George Abdill, former director of the Douglas County Museum talked Lois into working on a herbarium project for the museum. Lois remembered his request was simple,—he wanted a sample of every plant that grew in Douglas County. When Lois began the herbarium project she knew she had to have help.

After letting Mildred know that the coral root was in the orchid family, she asked Mildred if she’d care to join her in the herbarium project. It was then they discovered a mutual interest in a new-found love of wildflower identification. “I was already doing art work in watercolors and illustrating the plants seemed like something I’d enjoy,” Mildred said. “I grew up in Tyee and marveled at the many wild plants in the woods, but I never got into the scientific part until I got together with Lois.” When Lois and Mildred met Joan Fosback at the Glide Wildflower Show in 1967, they became a team of three.

Joan became interested in botany as a child in Medford. Her mother and maternal grandmother were crazy about gardening and Joan took a great interest in plants and being outdoors. She and her husband Ollie moved to Roseburg in 1947.

Ollie gave her a simple wildflower book, which led to a lifetime of learning about plants, including volunteering at the Glide Wildflower Show. The three ladies immersed themselves in the wild, week-long frenzy of plant gathering that precedes the show each year. They scoured hillsides, forests, meadows, cliffs, and shores to find plants to take back to the show and carefully identify.

Fortified with the ladies’ extra energy, the Glide Wildflower Show grew from a very modest collection of locally collected plants to an extravaganza of hundreds of correctly identified plants all neatly arranged by family. As Joan became more and more interested in native plants, she acquired a microscope, a set of botany textbooks, and a plant press. She was seldom seen without a flora and plant press during family vacations, on summer botany surveys with Mildred and Lois, and collecting for the Glide Wildflower Show. I

n 1980, the group was invited to house their private botanical collection at the Douglas County museum and to establish a scientific herbarium. The Friends of the Museum generously supplied cabinets, dissecting microscopes, scientific books and various supplies. Dr. David Wagner and Dr. Kenneth Chambers gave valuable suggestions to the three ladies. Collecting and mounting plant specimens moved them to the next level.

Soon they needed a more workable system for recording plant lists and accessions to the herbarium. Mary’s contributions to the group included her knowledge of Latin and computer skills. In the summer of 1987, Lois Hopkins asked Mary to baby-sit her computer and by summer’s end, Mary had entered all the collections in a computerized plant database!

In 1993, they completed a 53-page book documenting their collections, sorted by family, from Aceraceae to Zygophyllaceae– plants from every nook and cranny of the county. They admitted they hadn’t yet found all of the plant taxa growing in Douglas County, but they certainly hadn’t given up searching. In 1997, the group, still actively botanizing, found western wahoo (Euonymus occidentalis), a common shrub in California but not previously recorded in Douglas County. Although the four modestly described themselves as the “Little Old Ladies in Hiking Boots,” it would be a mistake to underestimate their audacity and tenacity. They didn’t sit around waiting for others bring plants in for identification.

As hands-on researchers who combed every corner of the county looking for plant specimens, they had more than a few stories to tell about their wild adventures. Mildred said she once fell into a “real pothole” while walking in the woods in search of plants. The hole was the leavings of a marijuana grower who had been growing his illicit plants in a large bucket. “We figure the grower must have pulled up the bucket and left the hole,” she said. Mary said once she was so busy looking at a plant she walked right off a cliff. Lois ventured out on some mossy ground, only to find herself up to her neck in a bog. “I can’t tell you how many tires we’ve changed,” Mildred said, and noted that her husband was not too happy about her ruining a dual muffler on her car during a single outing (punctured by two separate rocks in the road).

A variety of challenges were overcome: what to do when a tree fell across the road, trapping them at the dead-end; how to break the car window after locking the keys inside; or getting lost (who moved that creek because it was not there on the map?).

They also remembered driving through an open gate in a mountainous area and upon returning, found the gate closed and locked. On another adventure, they almost got stuck on a narrow logging road miles from civilization in a sudden snow storm. All four admitted to botanizing whenever and wherever they traveled. “You just can’t help yourself,” Joan said. The four met every Tuesday to process and identify their plant specimens. In the winter, they mounted and labeled the pressed plants and wrote the history of the finds made during spring, summer, and fall field work.

In 1995, they published a book, Flora Distribution Survey for Douglas County, based on their field work from 1978 to 1993. When their work was incorporated into the Oregon Atlas Project (Oregon Flora Project), it became apparent that their contributions put Douglas County far ahead of other counties in cataloging the native flora.

In the late 1990s, the four admitted that age was a problem. Because they knew that someone had to eventually take over their work, they openly sought new recruits interested in “making a lasting worthwhile contribution to the botanical study of Douglas County.” Lois Wesley Hopkins, who turned a coral root question into a lifetime of botanical adventures, died on December 6, 2005, at the age of 94. The Glide Wildflower Show and the Douglas County Museum were very important parts of her life.

Mildred Thiele was 91 when she died September 10, 2006. She was “still going strong” at the age of 90 when she donated nearly 5,000 color slides to OSU for the Oregon Flora Project. She had carried two cameras on her field excursions since 1982 and presented programs of her wildflower adventures to many organizations. In addition, she was an outstanding artist and especially proficient in watercolors.

Mary Carlson so loved identifying plants that she could still identify most of them by touch after she lost her vision. She died on March 3, 2007 at the age of 86. Joan Fosback, now approaching 80, was unable to attend the 2007 NPSO annual meeting in Mosier. Members of the Umpqua Chapter will present the award to her in her home in Roseburg.

—Sam Friedman, Umpqua Chapter, adapted from the Oregon Flora Newsletter and a News Review article by Bill Duncan.