Biography

American botanist. Annetta Carter was born, and is now buried, in the town of Sierra Madre, which was founded just outside of Los Angeles, California, by her grandfather. From her widowed father, who worked in the summers as a fire guard in the San Gabriel Mountains, she inherited a love of nature and the outdoors. Her lifelong association with the herbarium of the University of California, Berkeley, began in the senior year of her botany studies when she was hired as a plant mounter, and continued long after her retirement in 1968 as Principal Herbarium Botanist.

In 1932 she received an MA degree from Berkeley for an experimental morphological study of the aquatic liverwort Riccia fluitans L. During her early years at the herbarium, she collected intensively throughout California, in all nearly 1,850 specimens. Then, in 1947, she was invited to accompany the sugar heiress Annie Alexander, who had a strong interest in natural history, and her long-time travelling companion Louise Kellogg on a three-month expedition to Baja California. Deeply impressed by what she had seen, Carter made a vow to return at least once a year.

By the time she made her last collection in 1986, she had accumulated over 5,000 specimens, mainly in Sierra de la Giganta, the volcanic range between La Paz and Loreto, but excluding occasional bulk samples for pharmaceutical analysis. She also made some collections in Sonora, Sinaloa, Jalisco, and the Yucatán. Carter, who eventually became an authority on the history, biogeography, ethnobotany, and economic botany of Sierra de la Giganta, kept detailed logs of her itineraries, with maps, photographs, and commentaries on happenings, and recorded interviews with ranchers and other residents. Franco Murillo, Carlos Rubio, Pancho Romero, Marcos Fuerte O., and Juan Mesa were her guides; Louise Kellogg, Roxana Ferris, Helen Sharsmith, Reid Moran, and Mario Sousa S. were her main field companions.

In anticipation of her retirement she leased and built a one-room bungalow on a plot of land near Loredo as a base for her explorations. But this and the small nature park she designed were bulldozed by the government in 1978 to make way for a tourism development that never materialized.

As a taxonomist, Carter published several new species from her collections. She had a special interest in Acacia and other legumes and in the genus Alvordia, and worked with R.Thorne on a list of additions to I.L. Wiggins's Flora of Baja California (1980). She was a member of the California Botanical Society, the California Native Plant Society, the Society of Women Geographers, the Sociedad Botanica de Mexico, the American Society of Plant Taxonomy, and the American Bryological and Lichenological Society, and in 1957 was elected a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences. She is commemorated botanically in Carterella alexanderae (A.M. Carter) Terrell, with six species, by the Eupatorium segregate Carterothamnus anomalochaeta R.M. King, Abronia carterae Ferris, Abutilon carterae Kearney, Galium carterae Dempster, Amauria carterae A.M. Powell, and Viguiera carterae E.E. Schill. The herbarium of the Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas del Noroeste (HCIB), which she helped develop in La Paz, Baja California Sur, was named the Anneta Mary Carter Herbarium in 1992.

Sources:
B. Ertter, 1992, “Obituary: Annetta Mary Carter (1907-1991)”, Madrono, 39(3): 245-250.