Mary Elizabeth Parsons

Mary Elizabeth Parsons (1859 – December 22, 1947) was the writer of an early comprehensive guide to California wildflowers.

She studied art in San Francisco in the 1890s, where Alice Brown Chittenden was her sketching partner.

The result was the very successful The Wild Flowers of California: Their Names, Haunts, and Habits (1897), written by Parsons with over 100 illustrations engraved from Buck's pen-and-ink drawings.

[3][4] Parsons intended her book to complement Mrs. William Starr Dana's very successful How to Know the Wild Flowers (1893) by emphasizing plants that were unknown in the eastern United States where Mrs. Dana lived.

[5][6] The botanist Alice Eastwood and the nurseryman Carl Purdy served as advisers on the project.