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The botanical illustrations of native West Coast flowers come from The Wild Flowers of California: Their Names, Haunts, and Habits (1897) by Mary Elizabeth Parsons. Mary was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1859. She studied art in San Francisco in the 1890s.
Parsons hiked around California with the botanical artist Margaret Warriner Buck, with a view to publishing a book about California flora. The result was the very successful The Wild Flowers of California, written by Parsons with over 100 illustrations engraved from Buck's pen-and-ink drawings. It went through many printings and several editions and was still being reprinted into the 1950s.
For the 1906 edition, a replacement set of printing plates had to be made when the existing set was destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake. This edition was printed in several versions, one of which had the illustrations printed very lightly so that they could be hand-colored afterwards by the buyer.
Parsons died in Kentfield, California, in 1947.