Environmentalist Betty Guggolz, plant savant of Sonoma County, dies at 96

Avid and tenacious Sonoma County conservationist Betty Guggolz treasured wildlife, but supercharging her decades of environmental advocacy was a conviction that native plants must be equally valued and protected.

Guggolz declared in a 2002 Press Democrat profile that dubbed her “the acknowledged plant savant of Sonoma County”: “I believe our natural resources are a lot more important, in terms of our own survival, than people believe.” In regard to endangerment and possible extinction, she added, “To me, it’s important that plants be given the same importance as animals.”

Guggolz, founder of the regional chapter of the California Native Plant Society and long a leading voice for assuring growth and development don’t always trump the preservation of nature, died April17 in Tennessee. She had moved there four years ago to be closer to one of her three children.

She was 96.

For many years while she worked a checkstand at the former Thrifty Drug Store in Santa Rosa’s Montgomery Village, Guggolz devoted her free time to painstakingly seeking out, studying, cataloging and championing indigenous flowers, shrubs, grasses, cacti and other flora.

Hers was often a voice of conscience and caution at hearings on proposed large-scale construction projects she determined would jeopardize naturally occurring plants.

“People need to compromise,” she once said. “It can’t be all about making money to the exclusion of everything else.”

Now-retired state Department Fish and Game biologist Allan Buckmann years ago said Guggolz “has done more for native plants in the county than anybody I know of.”

Informed on Monday that Guggolz had died, a saddened Buckmann said the self-taught botanist and her late husband, Jack, were simply “environmentalists to the core,” and a joy to work with.

Jack Guggolz was 87 and had been married to Betty for 17 years when he died in 2001. It was a second marriage for both.

Betty Guggolz was a self-educated botanist who in 2013 was named a Sonoma County Conservation Council environmentalist of the year. It was in 1972 when she created the Santa Rosa-based Milo Baker chapter of the California Native Plant Society. She pushed for greater safeguards for plant life jeopardized by plans for the creation of the Spring Lake reservoir, and she was invigorated in ‘73 by the enactment of the federal Endangered Species Act.

Largely because of exhaustive field studies she conducted, Sonoma County has documented more than 150 rare species of native plants, nearly 100 of them deemed endangered.

Guggolz completed Santa Rosa’s first rare plant study in 1978 and in a decade later she mapped endangered plants for the county. Over the decades, she worked for and in opposition to wineries, as vineyards and winemaking encroached on vast areas of wildlands.

Guggolz worked for years to defend native plants that rely on vernal pools common throughout the Santa Rosa plain. Sometimes her conservation advocacy persuaded public officials to deny or modify construction projects. Sometimes all Guggolz and her colleagues could do was to remove native plants before the bulldozers came in.

Two decades ago, Betty and Jack Guggolz were living in Cloverdale and conducting botanical studies in swaths of central Mendocino County to be impacted by construction of a new Highway 101 bypass around Willits. They discovered a rare, daisy-like specimen that subsequently was named in their honor: Harmonia guggolziorum.

The Guggolzes, said Liz Parsons of Kenwood, for nearly five decades a stalwart of the Milo Baker chapter of the Native Plant Society, “were a dynamic duo for sure.”

The two of them undertook scores of plant surveys, often working as volunteers for the state fish and game department.

“Betty and Jack were incredibly knowledgeable,” said Buckmann, the retired state fish and game department biologist. When researching effects and potential impacts on plant life, he said, “I depended on them for a lot of my information.”

The former Betty Louise Sennett was born Sept. 20, 1923 in Deary, Idaho. She would credit her parents Ezra and Beatrice Sennett, with igniting her love of nature by teaching her the names of wildflowers and setting her free in the family’s 21-acre fruit farm.

The Sennetts moved to Sonoma County in 1949. Betty Sennett married and started a family and went to work at Thrifty Drug Store, and through it made of herself a botanist and advocate for the environment.

“She was one of the smartest people I ever met. She was MENSA smart,” granddaughter Brenda Mooney of Vallejo said.

As a conservationist, Parsons said her friend Guggolz “was single-minded.”

“She was a citizen scientist, but she realized the power in a group. She was what we now call a citizen scientist,” Parsons said. “Betty was always a hero of mine, certainly. Conservation was her big thing.”

Speaking of herself, Guggolz said in the 2002 Press Democrat profile, “I’m just an idiot who has to learn something every day or I’m not happy. And there is something about the beauty of the Earth that means a great deal to me.”

Guggolz told of spending decades “trying to turn people’s ideas around and make government officials aware of what they do if they make crazy decisions.

“When it’s my time to go, I want to have accomplished something for the benefit of others, and this is my way of doing that,” she said.

Guggolz is survived by her children, Dennis Lovell of Santa Rosa; Judith Luckow of New Freedom, Pennsylvania; and Victoria Moore of Cleveland, Tennessee; 10 grandchildren; and 42 great-grandchildren.

Her family suggests memorial contributions the Milo Baker Chapter of the California Native Plant Society, milobaker.cnps.org; St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, stjude.org, or the American Macular Degeneration Foundation, macular.org