John Curtis Forms a New Institution: UW's Plant Ecology Laboratory
How does a young scholar grow from a youthful focus on orchid seed physiology to documenting the vegetation of Wisconsin? John Curtis did just that, so we should look at how it happened. As a young man growing up in southeastern Wisconsin (see Burgess 1993 for a full biography), John Curtis was fascinated by the unique beauty and remarkable habitat requirements of the many orchids growing in Wisconsin's kettle moraine country. Over the next 15 years he took steps that led to the Plant Ecology Laboratory as a sustainable institution.
An early photo of John Curtis
With a strong problem-solving bent, Curtis wanted to grow and hybridize orchids horticulturally, but knew that their reproductive physiology would have to be worked out carefully for each species. Accordingly, his undergraduate work at Carroll College, and his doctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin focused on the physiology of orchid seeds and reproduction. His first university appointment was in 1937 as a plant physiologist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison (Burgess 1993). Forest Stearns and Grant Cottam came to Wisconsin in 1940 and 1941 for graduate work in botany, but at that time their advisor worked in plant physiology (see Cottam 1993).
Everything changed with the arrival of World War II. Cottam and Stearns were posted to the Pacific. John Curtis became the civilian research director of the Cryptostegia project in Haiti which had as a goal the mass production of latex from a fast-growing milkweed vine (after rubber plantations had been lost to the Japanese in Southeast Asia). The transformation of vegetation that was taking place in Haiti at the time made a huge impression on Curtis. Unique native species were being lost forever, especially the forest orchids, and introduced species were becoming dominants. The balance among species making up the natural communities there was seriously threatened (Curtis 1947).
When Curtis returned to Madison in 1946 he renewed relationships with many great scholars there and in the emerging field of plant ecology across the United States. Aldo Leopold was a thoughtful observer and writer about how biotic communities were organized, particularly those threatened by human activities such as land-use conversions and short-sighted wildlife management. Curtis who had seen serious land-use problems in Haiti came to share Leopold's (1949) broad concerns with how humans were degrading natural landscapes (Curtis 1956). He therefore turned his attention to how these forces were affecting the central United States. These new questions would require new knowledge, built from a very extensive new database.