By Luke Sparreo

Jul 31 2025

Geraldine Watson, born in Louisiana in 1925, never planned to become a botanist. Instead, her innate fascination for the natural world and commitment to defending the areas she loved led to her career as a prolific plant collector, respected ecologist, and tireless activist. On one of Geraldine’s many noteworthy escapades, she voyaged down the 416-mile Neches River on a raft at the age of 63. In her book documenting this trip, Geraldine reflected that “… still another reason for my trip was to show women of all ages that they can still have adventures” (Watson, 2003). Geraldine’s life was certainly an adventure; one that serves as an inspiration to not just naturalists, but anyone with a concern for their community.

While Geraldine was growing up in Texas’s Big Thicket, it was still a 3.5-million-acre forest in southeast Texas known for its high biodiversity. There, she learned about medicinal and dye plants from her mother and fishing from her father (Kabele, 2012). Yet, while Geraldine always held a fondness for the natural world, her first pursuit was in art, in which she excelled in teaching and creating oil paintings (Clark, 2021). Quite the Renaissance woman, however, Geraldine’s career shifted after she was called to action in the early 1960s. At this time, a group called the Big Thicket Association formed near Geraldine’s hometown. The Association had a mission to protect what remained of the Big Thicket, which was declining in area due to Texas’s burgeoning lumber and oil industries. While Geraldine could remember when most of the Big Thicket was still virgin forest, by 1964, over 90% of the forest had been cut. 

To do her part, Geraldine began writing The Pine Needle, a weekly column published in the Hardin County newspaper, to support the Association and its mission. Geraldine’s five herbarium collections housed at NYBG were also collected during this tumultuous period, as she rushed to document the area’s biodiversity before it might disappear. Geraldine collected many more specimens now housed in herbaria across the country. Of her floristic work, she stated: “How are we going to save the world if we don’t understand what makes it what it is?” (Kabele, 2012). Geraldine knew her collections could successfully refute the lumber industry’s claims that there was nothing worth protecting in the Big Thicket.

At the time, the Association was largely derided as “little old ladies in tennis shoes” (Kabele, 2012), and their road to success was a rocky one. Two years after Geraldine began her column, one of the paper’s founders was assaulted by a local businessman who feared the economic implications of expanding protections for the Big Thicket. A few months later, The Pine Needle’s office received an arson attack (Coody, 2024). While the Association did begin to attract national political support, it was often sabotaged. When Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas visited the Big Thicket to view a thousand-year-old magnolia, he and others found it recently poisoned by lead. For years, Geraldine and other activists carried on despite the undermining and threatening behaviors of their opponents. 

In 1974, Geraldine testified before Congress to speak on the economic and ecological value of the proposed protected forest; her floristic inventories and herbarium collections served as evidence. Later that year, the Association prevailed when the Big Thicket National Preserve was finally created as the nation’s first national preserve. But, Geraldine’s work in the Big Thicket was just getting started. Shortly after the preserve’s creation, she got a job as a park ranger and ecologist, delineating vegetation zones and documenting the local flora, which culminated in her book, Big Thicket Plant Ecology: An Introduction. After publishing this critical tool, Geraldine continued to traverse the Big Thicket on foot, collecting plants and documenting their frequency across many areas that lacked extensive surveying (Watson, 1999). 

One of Geraldine’s later accomplishments was founding what is now the Watson Rare Native Plant Preserve. Geraldine had her eyes on the land since the 1970s when she was stunned by the biological diversity of the particular plot (Dembling, 2017). Over 25 years, Geraldine gradually saved funds to acquire the land. She built a home on the site by hand, living on the preserve and carefully managing the native biodiversity. While Geraldine passed away in 2012, this land remains open to the public. Pauline Singleton, the president of the nonprofit, now maintains the preserve along with a team of volunteers. Anyone with an interest in the unique flora of the Big Thicket and Geraldine Watson’s legacy can pay a visit to her former home and the 10 acres that she meticulously tended to.

While Geraldine Watson may never have set out to become a botanist, she has become legendary in the Big Thicket region for her ecological knowledge and her passionate conviction in defending the natural world. Geraldine’s final words in an interview about her accomplishments? “Just simply make your stand.”