It’s a lovely bit of fortune to spot a wild orchid while exploring a Wisconsin wetland or bog in late spring or summer. Ken Cameron knows that delight, but unlike most hikers, he’s built a career investigating the flowers.
“Orchids are fascinating biologically,” he says. “They really illustrate the web of life.”
While many are captivated by the beauty, delicacy and rarity of orchids, Cameron, chair of the Department of Botany, finds it interesting that the flowers require connections to other species.
“All orchids form partnerships with fungi in order for their seeds to germinate and seedlings to survive, all of them depend on intimate relationships with animals, especially insects, to pollinate their elaborate flowers and most of them in the tropics associate with other plants often growing on trees as epiphytes,” he says.
“If any of those links in web get broken, the orchids are lost. Their increasing rarity may be telling us something about the fate of biodiversity — they are not unlike a canary in a coal mine.”
A Budding Interest
Cameron grew up in Detroit, but it was on trips to his family’s cabin in northern Michigan where he first fell in love with the natural world. After his parents bought him a simple 35mm camera from Sears, the always-curious boy started taking photos of orchids — mistakenly thinking they were carnivorous — and has been hooked ever since.
As a botanist, Cameron was one of the first scientists to use modern DNA sequencing methods to study orchid evolution and classification, and he worked as a curator and director of the New York Botanical Gardens’ molecular systematics laboratory for a decade before joining UW-Madison in 2008.
Cameron, who teaches both large lecture courses and smaller lab-based classes, also heads a research lab and serves as director of the Wisconsin State Herbarium.
And as botany chair, his top priority is to maintain the reputation of the unit.
“We really are recognized around the world as one of the best botany departments,” he says.
Plants of the Past
Just steps from Cameron’s office in Birge Hall are rows upon rows of metal cabinets housing the state herbarium, a collection of 1.3 million specimens of dried plants. It includes hundreds of specimens of the same species, labeled with the date, location and other details that allow scientists to track a plant across time and space, and understand its natural variation.
“Every year that passes, these specimens become more valuable,” Cameron says. “They’re our window into the past. They’re a time machine.”
The herbarium’s roots are deep: In 1849, the Board of Regents deemed it “expedient and important” to create a “cabinet of natural history.”
Since then, staff, scientists and volunteers have continued to collect, document and store plant samples, and Cameron is leading a UW2020-funded project to digitally database the collections of the herbarium, as well as collections from the departments of anthropology, geoscience, zoology and entomology. The goal is to make the more than 11 million natural history specimens available to researchers and the public worldwide.
“We have to bring it from a 19th-century Victorian collection to a 21st-century collection in the digital age,” he says.
Promoting Biodiversity
In Cameron’s namesake lab, he and graduate and undergraduate students explore plant evolution, conservation and biodiversity. They typically focus on orchids, and have significantly furthered knowledge of orchid biology.
And while orchids are one of the largest plant families on earth, totaling over 25,000 species, only one of its members — Vanilla — is economically important as a crop, providing one of the world’s most popular flavors and fragrance. Cameron is a leading expert on Vanilla and often called upon internationally to offer insights and recommendations.
More than 100 types of Vanilla grow in the wild, but the crop is grown as a monoculture, so it’s especially vulnerable to diseases and natural disasters. Cameron suggests that farmers and scientists experiment with bringing some wild-growing types of Vanilla into breeding, which could lead to stronger, more tolerant plants.
Growing Appreciation
Through all of Cameron’s efforts runs a desire to help others find the same passion for nature that fuels him. That’s always in the back of his mind when he’s with students. “Nature is so wonderful and inspirational and I want to make sure it’s appreciated, preserved and protected by the next generation.”
It’s also guided him in outreach work, such as advising the U.S. Postal Service on a new stamp series on orchids. He suggested native orchids be featured, and if plans continue, his idea will soon wind up on letters and parcels criss-crossing the country.
And up next is a project that’s been a long time coming. “Almost every state has a book on flora of the state,” he says, adding that Wisconsin is missing from that group. “It’s been talked about here for over 100 years.”
Cameron is determined to write a book about the plant life of the state, including those wild orchids that appear each May and June, and hopes to publish within the next few years.
“Wisconsin needs its own,” he says. “I think it’s time.”