Deep in the temperate rainforests of Tillamook County, Oregon, Virginia Wells’s mother led her children on mushroom hunts to forage fungi as a food source. “I delighted in, and had respect for, the woods and all the plants and animals which it contained,” Wells reflected decades later in her writing. “Like any child, I had a burning curiosity to learn and to know about the magnificent things around me.”
It wasn’t until later in her adult life, during the 1950s, when she had married and moved to Alaska, that Wells’s interest began to take on a more formally scientific angle. Using books borrowed from her local public library and a brand-new microscope given to her as a Christmas gift from her husband, Wells eagerly embarked on what would become a career documenting the fungal species of Alaska. She joined forces with Phyllis “Flip” Kempton, a friend from the Anchorage Garden Club, who matched Wells’s enthusiasm for mycology.
Wells and Kempton were among the first people to formally document Alaska’s fungal diversity. The two women formed a study group in Anchorage, regularly consulting sources from mycologists around the world. Engaging with the scientific academy led them to work with Alexander H. Smith, U-M’s leading mycologist and a major figure in North American fungal research. Their work would go on to have a lasting impact on the collections at the U-M Herbarium, part of the LSA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
Few women during the midcentury obtained academic training when it came to the sciences, and Kempton and Wells were not exceptions to the rule; in college, Kempton studied speech and Wells majored in art. Despite their unconventional backgrounds, though, they built an extensive research program in their post-college lives. Twice a week, the women would venture out to field sites around Anchorage, gathering specimens and carefully documenting them. Eventually, they produced more than 7,000 fungal collections, along with 13 scientific papers and descriptions of 26 new species of fungi.
Trudy Kempton Dana, Flip Kempton’s daughter, remembers her mother’s frequent field trips and the stories she told about them. Wells and Kempton stumbled upon “a large cache of expensive office equipment that had been stolen in a recent burglary” and various fauna, including moose and their young. And, because it was still Alaska, they had to watch out for their personal safety when deep in the forests.
“Since they were vulnerable walking slowly through the woods, with heads lowered looking for mushrooms,” Kempton Dana writes, “they tied bells on their collection baskets to alert nearby bears to their presence.”
Their collaboration with U-M’s Smith continued over many years. Wells was a talented illustrator and photographer, and the images she produced were published in a booklet she and Kempton co-authored, entitled Know Alaska’s Mushrooms. In 1966, Smith formally appointed Wells and Kempton as research assistants and helped secure a National Science Foundation grant, administered through U-M, to support their fieldwork across Alaska. The two women were able to travel to different parts of the state: Haines, Juneau, Nome, Kodiak Island, Fairbanks, the Seward Peninsula, and the Pribilof Islands.
In appreciation for their long partnership with Smith and U-M, they bequeathed the Wells-Kempton Herbarium—their entire body of Alaskan mushroom specimens—to the U-M Herbarium, where it remains today as part of the Herbarium’s 1.7 million botanical and fungal specimens that are used for teaching and research. Wells and Kempton had dedicated their adult lives to forming the basis of mycological knowledge in the scientific community and could think of no better way to preserve it.
Wells encouraged scientific exploration, both traditional and otherwise, for all. “Any individual anywhere has the opportunity to find species unknown to science,” she wrote. “You, perhaps, have one growing in your own backyard. Why don’t you go and look?”
Learn more about the U-M Herbarium.
Photos courtesy of Trudy Kempton Dana
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