Dorothy Jean Gleason Witt was a botany student at Washington State College (now Washington State University) from 1938-1948. Born in Ellensburg, Washington, in 1921, Jean and her family moved to Spokane during the Great Depression, where her father, Jay Gleason, served as a chaplain with the Civilian Conservation Corps. Jean developed an interest in botany as a young teen, making plant specimens as early as 1934 (many of her early specimens are deposited at WSU). She graduated from WSU with a bachelor’s degree in botany in 1943 and then went to work as an army munitions inspector at the Mukilteo depot. After World War II, she married fellow WSU student Joseph Witt and both returned to Pullman to complete Masters Degrees. Jean worked under Marion Ownbey to catalog a large portion of the Wilhelm Suksdorf collection (acquired by WSU after his death) and compiled keys to the Rosaceae and related families in Washington for her thesis. During this time she spent summers working at fire lookout towers on National Forests in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming and making hundreds of collections for the WSU herbarium.
Jean was also an artist who often made watercolor portraits of wildflowers. A few of these, such as the example shown here, are accessioned within the Ownbey Herbarium collections. There is a long history of botanical art being used in herbaria (even including some type specimens), though drawings and paintings are less useful than physical specimens for seeing fine details (and can’t be used to extract DNA!). This can be especially problematic for taxonomically difficult species, like Castilleja, where minute differences in flower structure are important for identifying species and varieties. The example here, Scarlet paintbrush (C. miniata) is one of the easier species to recognize with its red-orange to scarlet-tipped floral bracts and calyces, long-beaked tubular green corollas, and mostly entire leaves. Henry Landis discussed taxonomic problems in paintbrushes in more detail in Speaking of Specimens # 37 (November 2025).
After graduating with her Masters degree in 1948, Jean and Joseph Witt spent their remaining years in the Seattle area. Jean became a self-taught expert on growing and hybridizing Iris plants and won several awards for her horticultural contributions. She also continued producing botanical art, including beautiful portraits of native and cultivated Iris (samples of her work can be found here: GalleryOfWittArt < Hist < Iris Wiki). Jean passed away in 2016, at age 95. – © Walter Fertig 27 July 2026
