Gilmanii from Calflora.net: Named after Marshall French Gilman (1871-1944), a California naturalist, botanist and ornithologist. He was born in Banning, Riverside County, California, and grew up on the Gilman family ranch which was a stage station before the advent of the railroad and is now a Riverside County historical park. He took field trips with the noted naturalist Edmund Jaeger. He received his early education at Banning but did research and field work in ornithology and botany in many areas of California, Arizona and New Mexico. After graduating from high school he was appointed principal of Upland Elementary School but then returned to Banning as editor of the Banning Herald. Subsequent to that, positions he held included horticultural inspector, deputy quarantine officer and forest ranger in western Riverside County. When the U.S. Forest Service came into being he moved to Palm Springs as Postmaster. He met Sarah Morris, a teacher on the Morongo Indian Reservation, and they were married in 1899. He worked as an administrator for the U.S. Indian Service at Ft. Lewis, Colorado, Shiprock, New Mexico and Sacaton, Arizona. He also served as Mayor of Banning for a term, and was a Deacon there in the First Baptist Church. He did significant work with propagation of desert plant life in Death Valley. From 1901 until his death he was a member of the Cooper Ornithological Society of Los Angeles, for which based upon his field research he wrote about California condors. When he became interested in Death Valley, he worked with Frederick Coville, a botanist with the Bureau of Plant Industry of the USDA. As a result of that work, he was appointed Acting Custodian of the new Death Valley National Monument when it was first established in 1933. Some years later a checklist of Death Valley plants was published including a memo from the Park Naturalist who said that the number of plants in the Monument was between 600 and 700, and he noted that ?all but a very few of the specimens were collected by Mr. M. French Gilman?who undoubtedly knew the flora of Death Valley more thoroughly than any other person.? The number of activities he was involved in are almost too numerous to list, but include experimental work on the grafting of walnuts, peaches, persimmons and oranges, studies on birds such as the poor-will, Gambel?s quail, mountain quail and California quail, and the saguaro screech owl, supervision of cotton experimentation near Palm Springs, studies of native American ethnobotany at the Papago Reservation in Arizona, field research on sand dunes with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and superintendency of the school on the Pima Indian Reservation. At almost seventy he climbed 11,000? Telescope Peak, a hike of some 15 miles. He died in hospital in San Bernardino after suffering from severe sunstroke in the Valley.