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Helen also played a large part in Mill’s botanical life. A description of a botanical collecting trip, to the Pyrenees in 1860, illustrates not only Helen’s strength of character but her devotion to Mill. “Helen had a wearying time, trundling along doggedly in her awkward clothes, travelling sometimes four hours on foot and eight on horseback in a day, in scorching sun, on rocky mountain trails; sinking knee deep in snow over the passes, splashing through the thaw, stopping at desolate little inns where no lady traveller had ever been seen before”.

Upon Mill’s death in 1873, as the executor of his will, Helen wrote to Dr Joseph Dalton Hooker, the then Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, asking Hooker if he “would be willing to look over his catalogue Herbarii and to select from it the names of such specimens you would like to have”. Hooker took Helen Taylor up on her offer and given the extent of the collection, approximately 12,000 specimens, the Mill Herbarium was divided, with Helen’s consent, between herbaria in the UK, USA and Australia, the receipt of the portion of Mill's Herbarium at Melbourne being reported in the paper of the time, The Argus. . A letter to Helen Taylor from Baron Ferdinand von Mueller, the then Government Botanist at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne, Australia, thanking her for her generosity, describes the receipt of a portion of the Mill Herbarium as “one of the greatest triumphs of my life”. The approximately 4000 specimens, believed to comprise the Australian portion of the Mill Herbarium, are still housed within the National Herbarium of Victoria (MEL), a large percentage of these still awaiting cataloguing. The handwritten labels accompanying these specimens are written in both Mill’s and what’s believed to be, Helen Taylor’s hand.