Fran Mara

By Dave Jones

Every Monday night Fran Mara would lay out out her clothes — perfectly matched — in preparation for going to the UC Davis Botanical Conservatory for her volunteer shift the next morning. As excited as she was, she would have trouble falling asleep.

One night she got so little rest that she couldn't make it to the conservatory on Tuesday. It was one of the few times she missed her weekly shift in seven years of volunteering, from 2005 until a month before her death from heart disease last November. The retired teacher, a breast cancer survivor, was 83.

The Botanical Conservatory crew — staff, students and other volunteers — had become Mara's second family.

People like Eva Bayon, a volunteer and former employee. "She was always waiting until Tuesday so she could come back," Bayon recalled.

When Mara's health began to decline, and she insisted on coming, Bayon switched her volunteer shift to work alongside her friend, "so I could make sure she was OK."

Bayon worked at the conservatory as a curator — labeling and organizing plants. She wasn't familiar with the propagating and transplanting that Mara did. So, true to form, Mara became the teacher, showing Bayon how to help nurture cuttings into plants.

"She was very good at it," Bayon said.

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Paula Mara said her mother felt she "had arrived" when she achieved 100 percent success in a propagation project with a "ZZ" plant. She removed about 100 leaves, her daughter recalled, and every one of them grew into a plant.

The "ZZ" (Zamioculcas zamiifolia) is a durable plant well suited for dorm rooms, and therefore a big seller at the conservatory's fundraising events.

Ernesto Sandoval, conservatory director, recalled Mara's goal of propagating $100 worth of plants in each of her volunteer shifts. "She did at least that," he said.

But Mara wanted to do more. So she decided to put in some money of her own: $100,000, as specified in her will, with the money to be used to improve the greenhouse facilities.

Earlier this week, Sandoval and Dean James E.K. Hildreth of the College of Biological Sciences accepted the gift, presented by Mara's children, Paula Mara and Steve Mara, both of Davis.

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Fran Mara loved nature, as a bird watcher and a gardener — tending roses and other flowers in her yard.

And she loved being at UC Davis. She was impressed by the number of students who benefitted from the conservatory, on tours or as undergraduate interns.

Her daughter said she suspects her mother liked being back in academia, due in part to her own experience. She received a degree in Spanish literature from the University of New Mexico in 1950 and was accepted for graduate study at Stanford — although her daughter did not know about the Stanford opportunity until late in her mother's life.

Instead of going to Stanford, she was a stay-at-home wife and mother in Davis. Now, with her bequest to the university, she becomes a lasting part of academia.

During a small ceremony June 18 at the conservatory, Hildreth expressed thanks for Mara's effort as a volunteer and for her generosity. "Her gift will have a profound effect on our ability to touch the lives of the hundreds of students who come through here every year," he said.

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In 1970, while still living in Davis, Mara began her teaching career, working with learning disabled students at Waggoner Elementary School in Winters.

She returned to her native Napa upon her retirement, then came back to Davis to be near her children. By that time, Paula had returned to UC Davis as a Ph.D. student in wine microbiology. She already holds two UC Davis degrees: a Bachelor of Science in agricultural and managerial economics, 1984; and a Master of Science in agricultural economics, 1990. And now her thesis is almost done.

Her brother, Steve, studied civil engineering at UC Davis and taught bicycle frame building at the Craft Center.

While Paula Mara worked toward her doctorate, her husband, Kurt Kabica, worked in viticulture and enology professor Andy Walker's lab, which at that time included a greenhouse in the conservatory complex. As a result, Kabica had a casual acquaintance with Sandoval and one day asked him about volunteer opportunities for Mara, an enthusiastic gardener and propagator.

And thus began UC Davis' "Tuesdays with Mara."

"She really enjoyed being here," said Steve Mara, noting how his mother had touched many lives as a teacher and then found renewed joy in working with student interns at the conservatory, teaching them about propagation and plants — "wonderful plants," as Steve put it.

Sandoval recalled Mara's independence. "We would give her a project, and she would just get going on it."

Marlene Simon, another of Mara's friends at the conservatory, recalled Mara's stories and her humor, "and the fact that even when she was very frail, she refused help." Mara would slowly make her own way to a cabinet to get more pots, rather than let Simon do it for her.

Simon, a nursery technician, also recalled Mara's outfits, a purple theme one day, a pink theme another, with matching earrings and bracelet and maybe a ribbon in her hair. She had impeccable style, "especially among people like us who work in dirt," Simon laughed.

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Sandoval outlined the plans for about $40,000 of Mara's gift. This portion would be used primarily to improve the quality of the conservatory's irrigation water — rather than drawing off the campus's distilled water distribution system, the conservatory will filter regular tap water by reverse osmosis, which will benefit the plants, cost less and waste less water.

Some of the $40,000 will pay for other one-time improvements, such as rebuilding and redesigning the layouts of the plant benches in the indoor and outdoor growing areas to provide better display spaces and better flow for staff and visitors.

Addressing Mara's children, Dean Hildreth said: "There are going to be whole generations of students and faculty members who will benefit from your mother's generosity, enabling us to continue our mission and inspiring us to do our best work."

Paula Mara thanked the conservatory "for the wonderful gift that you gave to my family."

Added her brother: "We are really grateful she could come here and find a second family."