Nicole Font is the Shelby White & Leon Levy Processing Archivist in the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden.

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As part of our ongoing Leon Levy Foundation grant to provide access to the New York Botanical Garden’s institutional archives, I recently finished reprocessing the Otto and Isa Degener records. This collection includes correspondence, research materials, subject files, personal papers, and photographs documenting the personal and professional lives of Drs. Otto and Isa Degener.

Reprocessing is the act of rearranging, redescribing, or rehousing previously processed archival collections. An archivist may choose to reprocess a collection for a variety of reasons, such as improving accessibility, incorporating additional material, updating harmful language in descriptions, or addressing preservation issues.

Working on this collection taught me a great deal about Hawaiian flora, particularly how endemic and native species are decimated as a result of government inefficiencies, deforestation projects, and the introduction of invasive plants and animals (looking at you, blackberries and axis deer). But as I processed these records, I found myself increasingly interested in the life and work of Dr. Isa Degener.

Irmgard (Isa) Degener (née Hansen) was a taxonomic botanist who specialized in agrostology and pharmacognosy. Early in her career, she worked as a botanical assistant at the Berlin Botanical Garden and studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin, earning her doctorate in 1949 under Dr. Hermann Sleumer. Afterward, she taught pharmacognosy to pharmacy and medical students at the Freie Universität Berlin until 1953.

In 1952, Dr. Otto Degener entered the picture. Otto was a systematic botanist and conservationist best known as a leading authority on the flora of the Hawaiian Islands. After collecting grass on Canton Atoll that he suspected might be a new species, he sent the specimen to Berlin-Dahlem, where it landed on the desk of “Dr. I. Hansen” for identification. A correspondence began soon after. When Otto traveled to Berlin that same year, he hoped to visit his colleague, only to discover that Dr. Hansen was in the hospital recovering from pleurisy. When directed to his colleague’s room, he was surprised to find a young woman standing there, mortified, in a hospital gown. Otto assumed he’d been corresponding with a man this whole time!

The two married in January 1953. Together they traveled the world, collected specimens, and studied the flora of the Hawaiian Islands, which resulted in a combined 10 books and over 400 journal articles. In addition to their botanical work, the Degeners dedicated much of their time to advocating for the conservation of endemic and native plant species of the Hawaiian Islands, largely through writing “poison pen” letters to their local politicians.

One of the most exciting parts of reprocessing this collection was getting to incorporate the additional material NYBG received from the estate of Isa Degener in 2021. Despite her extensive collaboration with Otto, Isa previously appeared in the finding aid only twice in folder titles, and once in Otto’s biographical note, described merely as “her husband’s lifelong collaborator.” This accrual provided an opportunity to both learn more about Isa’s life prior to her marriage to Otto, and also create a fuller historical picture of the Degeners’ life and research.

This new material consisted of papers related to Isa’s parents, notebooks and documents from her graduate studies and early career, research materials on Hawaiian flora, and many photographs. From these sources—and some outside research—I learned more about Isa’s personal and professional life, including that she taught pharmacognosy, which was not a well-known fact. I also learned that her Ph.D. was on the morphology and systematics of the genus Erica L., and that she spent much of her time describing Lepturus pilgerianus with her colleague Eva Potztal in Berlin-Dahlem (a specimen of which is preserved in the William & Lynda Steere Herbarium).

In 2014, when Isa was 90 years old, a fire ripped through her Waialua home, completely destroying it. While we don’t know exactly what was lost, based on my research it seems that the material we have (aside from some restricted files at the Humboldt University of Berlin), might be all we have left of Isa, so while most of it doesn’t directly relate to her scientific work, I felt it was important to preserve.

Too often, women botanists working alongside their husbands are left out of the historical record, or relegated to the role of “the woman behind the great man.” Reprocessing this collection provided an opportunity to counter that erasure and address the persistent undervaluation of women’s work and history, both in the sciences and beyond.

The New York Botanical Garden Institutional Archives project is generously funded by the Leon Levy Foundation.

View the finding aid for the Otto and Isa Degener records here, or browse other archival collections available for research.

For access to archival materials, please email us at archives@nybg.org.