Botanist · Author · Keeper of seeds
"My mother spent more hours in the field than anywhere else. She came home with muddy boots and new Latin names for things I didn't know existed. She could identify a plant by its smell before she'd even touched it. I miss the way she talked about them — like old friends she was catching up with."
For twenty years I collected and stored heritage seeds from gardens across Portland and the Willamette Valley. What began as a personal obsession became something the whole neighbourhood relied on. 800 varieties are now catalogued, labelled, and stored in climate-controlled drawers at the Woodstock Community Centre — but they need someone to maintain the lending system and expand the collection each growing season.
I have been writing this book for eleven years. 220 manuscript pages exist — covering the medicinal uses of 60 native species of the Pacific Northwest, drawn from both ethnobotanical research and my own field observations. I need a writer or botanist who can synthesise the remaining species, honour the indigenous knowledge I have referenced, and bring it to a publishable standard. The research notes are meticulous. The voice just needs to continue.
The Willamette Valley is losing its native wildflower population faster than it is being documented. I started this field guide in 2018 to change that. Sixty botanical illustrations are complete — watercolour, hand-labelled, scientifically accurate. The remaining 120 species have been identified and located. What is missing is someone with botanical illustration skills to finish the drawings, and a writer to complete the species descriptions. The valley won't wait much longer.
"Eleanor taught an entire generation of botanists to slow down and really look. Her patience with a specimen was unlike anything I have seen in thirty years of teaching. She once spent an entire afternoon on her knees in the rain, sketching a single flower because, she said, 'it deserves to be seen properly.' She was right."
Tributes from those whose lives Eleanor touched.
"I took her Introduction to Native Plants course in 2003. I am now a conservation biologist because of that class. Eleanor always said: 'The land remembers even when we forget.' I carry that with me every day."
"She walked through my garden once and identified every plant by name — common and Latin — without hesitating. Then she told me which ones were native and which ones were slowly crowding them out. She changed the way I garden forever."
"Her seed library saved our community garden during the drought years. When nothing would grow from the commercial suppliers, Eleanor had heritage varieties that remembered how to survive. We owe her more than we can say."
Did Eleanor touch your life? Share a memory for her family and the community.