Feb 26 2021
While digitizing specimens for the Texas and Oklahoma Regional Consortium of Herbaria, I repeatedly stumbled across the same name: Sister Mary Clare Metz. At first I smiled and moved on, but as I continued to encounter her specimens, my curiosity only grew. Why had a Catholic nun in Texas collected hundreds of herbarium specimens in the 1930s? There had to be more to the story, and I dove in eagerly.
Not much is known of Metz’s early years before entering the religious life. Metz was born in 1907 in the Cherokee Outlet of the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). She joined the Sisters of the Divine Providence in San Antonio, Texas, taking her first vows at 18 years old. The order opened doors to opportunities Metz likely never could have accessed otherwise. Nevertheless, from that moment on, her fate was in the hands of her superiors.
Of her many varied assignments with the Sisters of the Divine Providence (ranging from teaching to accounting), one in particular has left a lasting mark on Texan botany. The order sent Metz to college, where, although naturally inclined towards math, she was instructed to study botany: “[A superior] explained to me that, among the sisters, there were none that had concentrated on the biological sciences.”
Metz attended graduate school at Catholic University from 1930 to 1934. The order hoped that by enabling Metz to earn a PhD, she could function as a biology professor at Our Lady of the Lake University (OLLU) upon her return. These four years were characterized by fruitful research and thrilling interpersonal connections. Metz was lucky enough to learn from the renowned botanists A.S. Hitchcock and Mary Agnes Chase at the Smithsonian.
Metz’s fieldwork during this period took on a unique character thanks to her religious affiliation. While collecting over 1,000 species of plants from across Bexar County, Texas, Metz was driven by the convent’s chauffeur. She dried her specimens not via conventional means, but in the college kitchen warming ovens, dodging past other nuns busy at work preparing meals. Metz suffered a setback when a fire broke out at Catholic University, destroying her specimens and the wooden cabinet that housed them. “All the work of one year had literally gone up in smoke,” Metz lamented, though luckily her foresight in storing duplicates elsewhere salvaged the work.
Metz earned her PhD with her dissertation, A Flora of Bexar County, Texas, the first authoritative flora of the region. Armed with a degree and a head full of research ideas, Metz went to her Mother Superior as a formality before diving deeper into research. What follows broke Metz’s heart and shattered her plans for a future in botany:
“[Reverend Mother] said, ‘Sister, you don’t need to do any of that. That’s all.’ She dropped her eyes and continued her work. All I could do was say ‘Thank you, Reverend Mother,’ and leave the room. I was stunned... My Superior General had spoken, and I was a vowed religious. In the next half hour before the Blessed Sacrament I matured much beyond my then twenty-seven years.”
Just like that, Metz’s collecting career ended abruptly, but her legacy in the field lives on. No longer allowed to spend time on botanical research, she was instructed instead to serve as a biology teacher and later as the academic dean of OLLU. In those roles, she established the university's herbarium and supported other collectors, most notably Mr. Burg, who provided many of the specimens for the university's collection. At the time, the herbarium “was the only fairly complete collection of plants from the local area in existence with completed classifications and data.”
OLLU’s herbarium still stands today, boasting a collection of 10,000 specimens. Thanks to her exchange program, NYBG houses at least 577 specimens collected by Metz herself. Although it was the Reverend Mother that ended Metz’s career in botany, it was also the religious order that enabled her career to flourish initially. Among the Sisters of the Divine Providence, Metz found herself immersed in a world where education was deeply valued. In their quest to earn accreditation for OLLU, the order sent 42 sisters, including Metz, on to earn doctorate degrees. In the 1930s, certainly, this was no small feat.
