Elzada Clover

Elzada Clover (1896–1980) was an American botanist who was the first to catalog plant life in the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River. Clover and Lois Jotter became the first two women to raft the entire length of the Grand Canyon.

Early life and education Elzada Urseba Clover was born in Auburn, Nebraska in 1896, the seventh of nine children of Maynard French Clover and Sarah Gates Clover.

Clover began her career as a public school teacher in 1919, working first in Nebraska and later in Texas; she was the principal of the South Mission School in Mission in the latter state. This was an elementary school for Mexican American children only. She could speak English and Spanish. She also taught at the university's Biological Station in Pellston.

Dr. Elzada Clover at Bright Angel Creek in Grand Canyon, July 1938

Clover was instrumental in establishing the cactus and succulent areas of the botanical gardens. She made numerous expeditions throughout the Southwest in search of native plant species for the university collection, focusing initially on cacti of the Colorado Plateau in Utah. Part way through the trip, due to tensions among expedition members, Atkinson left and was replaced by photographer Emery Kolb.

Clover's next expedition was on the San Juan River and in Texas, where she gathered fossil plant specimens, which was followed by a 1939 trip to Havasupai Canyon in Arizona. She published the findings from these trips in a 1941 article co-authored with Jotter entitled "Cacti of the Colorado River and Tributaries". In the years afterward, Clover focused her research on the deserts of Mexico and Guatemala and also did some work in Haiti.

In popular culture Elzada Clover appears as a character investigating a murder in the 2009 mystery novel The Butterflies of the Grand Canyon by Margaret Erhart.

Poet Jessy Randall included a tribute to Clover in her 2025 collection of poems about women scientists, The Path of Most Resistance.