 We're sitting in the Herbarium at the University of California. It's a place where we store plant specimens. We have 2.2 million specimens. We are the largest public university Herbarium in the world. I started working at the Herbarium in 2005. And on my very first day at work, they were showing me around the Herbarium. And the collections manager opened up this closet that was stacked floor to ceiling with the field journals. And he handed me one. And it fell open to a sketch of the prison at Andersonville, Georgia, which was a Civil War prisoner of war camp. And so to have this piece of history here in the University of California, my questions were, how did it get here? And who is this guy? John Lemon was born in 1835 in Michigan. He was an ardent abolitionist himself. And when the Civil War broke out, he signed up. He was captured by Texas mercenaries. And they put him on a train and they sent him to Andersonville. Some people have called it the deadliest piece of ground in the Civil War. And the conditions inside were appalling. When Lemon walked out of the gates of the Confederate prison, he probably weighed less than 100 pounds. His family back in Michigan was convinced that he would never survive the winter back there. And so they decided to send him to California to be with his brothers. I think John Lemon was redeemed by botany. It probably saved his life. Today we would probably say this was a man who was suffering from extreme PTSD. He was very weak. He supported himself on the fence railing next to his brother's cabin. And every day tried to walk a little bit farther. And he would look down and see plants that were curious to him. And he would pick up these plants and wonder, what is this? These plants growing out in California were not only unknown to science. They represented a different evolutionary trajectory. Some of John Lemon's most important collections formed the beginning of the collection here at the University of California. These are some of the examples of the botanical specimens collected by John Gil Lemon. This one here in particular is actually a genera that was named for Lemon. So it's Lemonia California. So he collected so many plants that many were actually named after him and after his wife, Sarah Plummer Lemon. When he did collect with his wife, Sarah, instead of putting her name on the label, he just put Anne Wife, which kind of frustrates all of us. But it's nice to know that she did get a little bit of credit. While he was on one of his trips up and down the coast of California, he met Sarah Plummer. And very soon they were married. Sarah Lemon supported her husband in every way. She painted the specimens. She helped curate the collection in their home, which they kept at their house on Telegraph Avenue. The united efforts of John and Sarah made a contribution that would be recognized as the first couple of botany of California. Without the lemons and their citizen science efforts, I think formal science would never have known about the importance and uniqueness of the California floral. Their efforts at collecting these unusual plants throughout the American West would become sort of the cornerstone of what we know about botany in the United States.