Don Knoke celebrated his most recent birthday in the woods, camping and collecting plant specimens for the UW Herbarium along with nearly three dozen other volunteers. The group feted Knoke with a cake, celebrating both his birthday and his long involvement with the Herbarium.  After all, it’s not every day a volunteer turns 91.

Yes, 91.

Don can still out-walk and out-collect many of our participants who are one quarter his age,” marvels Richard Olmstead (PhD, Botany, ‘88), professor of biology and curator of the Herbarium, who has organized the annual five-day collecting trips, or forays, for 16 years.

Thanks in part to the forays and volunteers like Knoke, the Herbarium is now home to more than 600,000 plant specimens, each of which has been pressed, catalogued, and filed.  Administered by the Burke Museum and housed in Hitchcock Hall, the Herbarium serves as a resource for both academics and the general public.

“The collection is a mine of information,” says Suzanne Anderson (PhD, Plant Physiology, ’92), a wetland scientist/ecologist and Herbarium volunteer. “As the data are digitized, they allow complex analyses of how populations, communities, and species change over time”...

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