In 1920, a New York botanist took over four acres of poison ivy; her outdoor laboratory eventually held more than 675 native plant species

When Edith A. Roberts arrived at Vassar College in 1919, she was entering a field in which ecology was still emerging as a distinct scientific discipline. In the following year, Roberts convinced Vassar College to give her roughly four acres of difficult land along the Fonteyn Kill, a stream running through the Poughkeepsie campus. The starting point of this journey was anything but conventional, as Vassar’s records describe the given plot as 4 acres of poison ivy with few oak trees. However, Roberts and her students converted the land into an outdoor ecological laboratory where native plants could be studied not merely as individual specimens, but as communities growing under the environmental conditions in which they naturally occurred. Notably, by the time the botanist retired in 1949, the outdoor lab contained more than 675 plant species.

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