Some Biogeographers, Evolutionists and Ecologists:
Chrono-Biographical Sketches

Camp, Wendell Holmes "Red" (United States 1904-1963)
botany, horticulture, field biology

Camp's scientific work straddled botany and horticulture, and though he was a renowned field biologist (and landscape photographer) he is most remembered for his studies on oaks, beeches and blueberries, interest in the theory of systematics and nomenclature, and research on hybridization. Camp was a generalist who disparaged narrowness of attention. As a youth he took an initial interest in geology, but this soon was replaced by botany. Much experience in the field in the 1930s led to World War II assignments in Central America, Haiti, and Ecuador searching for drugs and other products supporting the war effort. After the war, he settled in at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, and then several years later was made chair of the botany department at the University of Connecticut. In these later years he turned increasingly to horticultural and economic botany studies, including taking a central role in developing the "International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants" in 1952. True to his free-thinking nature, Camp was a pre-plate tectonics advocate of continental drift theory; he also produced a good number of lively writings on distribution and phytogeography.

--born in Dayton, Ohio, on 22 February 1904.
--1925: B.S., Otterbein College
--1926: M.S., Ohio State University
--1926-1936: instructor in botany, Ohio State University
--1932: Ph.D., Ohio State University
--1936: collecting expedition to Kentucky and Virginia
--1936-1937: collecting expedition to Mexico
--1936-1946: assistant curator, New York Botanical Garden
--1939-1948: editor, Taxonomic Index
--World War II: fieldwork in Latin America
--1945: publishes "The North American Blueberries with Notes on Other Groups of Vacciniaceae" in Brittonia
--1946-1949: associate curator, New York Botanical Garden
--1949-1954: curator of experimental botany and horticulture, Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia
--1949: president, American Society of Plant Taxonomists
--1950-1954: lecturer in botany, University of Pennsylvania
--1951: honorary D.Sc., Otterbein College
--1951-1954: director, Taylor Memorial Arboretum, Wallingford, Pennsylvania
--1952: president, American Horticultural Council
--1953-1963: chair of the botany department, University of Connecticut
--1957: publishes his The World in Your Garden
--1962: receives the New York Botanical Garden's Distinguished Service Award
--dies at Storrs, Connecticut, on 4 February 1963.

--Who Was Who in America, Vol. 4 (1968).
--Taxonomic Literature Supplement III (1995).
--Brittonia, Vol. 16(1) (1964): 1-10.
--Brittonia, Vol. 32(4) (1980): 437-451.
--Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club, Vol. 90(4) (1963): 258-260.