Ida Twitchell was born at Bangor, Maine, but lived in Iowa from 1857-1880. She graduated from the State College at Ames in 1878 and moved to Santa Maria, California, in 1880, where she became a schoolteacher and was married to Lazar Blochman in 1888.

Twitchell maintained a lifelong interest in botany and published a number of papers on the subject of Californian plants. She gathered a herbarium of 600 plants from northern Santa Barbara County, which was exhibited at the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893 and was later deposited at Northwestern University. Senecio blochmanae Greene was named for her.

Sources:
E.K. Crum, 1931, "Biographical Notice of Ida May Blochman", Madroño, 2: 30-31.