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Lilla Irvin Leach was a field botanist who specialized in Oregon flora. She collected plants all over the Northwest, increasing her private collection and furnishing specimens to many colleagues. Her main area of interest was the Siskiyou Mountains. Between 1928 and 1938 she and her husband, John Roy Leach, spent nine summers there. Most often they walked with their two burros, Pansy and Violet, carrying the gear. The local residents called them the "Mule People" and considered them a bit odd.
Lilla was born on March 13, 1886, on a stock farm in Barlow, Oregon, a 640-acre donation land claim settled by her pioneer grandparents. It is said Lilla made her first botany expedition at the age of 6 with the family dog in tow. Throughout her childhood, she wandered the surrounding acreage, both on horseback and on foot, nurturing her interest in plants. She attended grade school in Barlow and Aurora before entering Tualatin Academy, a preparatory school in Forest Grove. At the Academy she took her first formal botany class and met John Leach. She received a B.A. from the University of Oregon in 1908 where she studied under Professor A. R. Sweetser who considered her his ". . . most distinguished student."
For the next 5 years, she taught science and botany at Eugene High School, and was responsible for establishing a botany department in the Eugene public school system. Lilla and John were married in a meadow, on the Irvin property, September 13, 1913. The alter was a moss-covered tree stump. John said he finally convinced Lilla to marry him by promising to take her places the "cake-eating botanists" could never go. Lilla was not directly affiliated with a university nor did she receive monetary compensation for any of her botanical work. She and John worked as a team, organizing and paying for their own expeditions. Louis F. Henderson, Curator of the University of Oregon Herbarium, and Morton E. Peck of Willamette University described and named most of her discoveries.
On their first trip to the Siskiyous, they started down the Rogue River Trail, then struck off into the wilderness. There Lilla discovered Cotyledon glandulifera, Cryptantha fragilis, Iris innominata, and Bensonia oregana, her first new genus. She also picked up what she described as a very interesting pea vine, but was unable to find its seed pods. They returned to this area the following year to look for pods without results. Ten years later, June 16, 1938, they again returned and this time succeeded. The plant was named Sophora leachiana, the only member of its genus found on the Pacific coast.
Lilla did not keep a journal, but made personal notes in the margins of her pressing papers that reveal a woman with unshakable fortitude, a deep love of natural beauty, and a wry wit: "August 11, 1928. Pansy went over a grade and rolled about 40 feet over and over landing at the brink of a 60-foot creek bank against a log and small log on top of her. I was a few minutes getting her unpacked as her heels were up and all knots down. She began to eat as soon as she was on her feet." And: "June 25, 1930. A few nights ago we slept on a grave. Last night at the home of a crazy man. We liked the dead man better."
Lilla discovered Kalmiopsis leachiana, on June 14, 1930. She describes the incident this way, "I was in the lead where I usually walk in order to get the first chance over the burros to anything of interest that might be growing when suddenly I beheld a small patch of beautiful low-growing deep rose colored plants and because of its beauty I started running toward it and dropped to my knees . . . I had never seen anything so beautiful before." She sent a specimen to Louis Henderson who published it as a new species, Rhododendron leachianum, in 1931. He also sent a specimen to Alfred Rehder at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University. Rehder recognized it as a new genus and, in 1932, the plant was republished as Kalmiopsis leachiana. Lilla considered it her best find, "the thrill of a botanists lifetime."
The Leaches bought a piece of land along Johnson Creek in southeast Portland in 1931 and built a home. They named the property Sleepy Hollow, and turned the surrounding hillside into a botanical garden where they welcomed anyone interested in plants. The property was willed to the City of Portland and is now known as Leach Botanical Garden. Lilla's herbarium of approximately 3,000 specimens was donated to the University of Oregon. Her sheets are now part of the OSU collection. On October 3, 1992, in honor of their wish, the cremated remains of Lilla and John Leach were scattered in the Kalmiopsis Wilderness.