American botanist. Born in Dayton, Ohio, Wendell Holmes Camp originally intended a career in music, but having become interested in palaeontology in his junior year at Otterbein College, he graduated with a degree in geology. Not long into his graduate studies at Ohio State University, he switched to botany, which had been his summer hobby at the family homestead throughout high school and college. He made his first botanical field trip after receiving his MA in 1932, a journey along the timberline of the westernmost mountains of North America, following the snow melt from the Mexican border into British Columbia. He taught in the Department of Botany at Columbus and then in 1936 joined the staff of the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) as assistant curator, advancing to associate curator ten years later. He also served on the graduate faculty at Columbia. One of his major contributions during his early years at NYBG was to initiate and edit the Taxonomic Index for members of the newly formed American Society of Plant Taxonomists (ASPT).

The Ericales, especially Vaccinium, were the focus of his research, and during his career he made extensive experiments with blueberry hybridization. Although a taxonomist, he was never interested in purely descriptive work, but looked for answers to larger questions of relationship and evolution, most notably in the paper "Structure and Origin of Species" (co-written with Charles Louis Gilly). In 1959 the Botanical Society of the British Isles invited him to take part in the Darwin centennial celebration in London, at which he delivered a hotly debated paper presenting his newest ideas on the classification of vascular plants. Camp was also known for his work on beeches and oaks. He published close to a hundred papers for expert and lay readers, but no monographs. One of his last publications was a popular book for National Geographic entitled The World in Your Garden (1957).

His first collections come from the southern Appalachians, and were made the summer before he started at NYBG. That winter, in 1936, he accompanied Thomas Baillie MacDougall on a collecting expedition to Oaxaca, and had his first contact with subtropical plants. He spent most of the Second World War in Central and South America working on economic botany programs for the U.S. government, starting with a mission to Haiti to establish war crops for drug, fibre, and latex production. In 1943 he travelled through Central America (Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala), as an agent for the American Sponge and Chamois Company, purchasing loofahs for use as oil filters by the U.S. Navy. In 1944 the U.S. Foreign Economic Administration's Misión de Cinchona del Ecuador, which was searching for alternative sources of quinine for US troops, engaged him to harvest Cinchona from the cloud forests of southern Ecuador. After working that spring and summer with the mission leader, William C. Steere, in the Baños and Puyo regions, Camp hired three assistants - Francisco Prieto, Manuel Giler, and Henning Jorgensen – to journey with him into the mountains around Loja and Cuenca. Their 9-month expedition, recorded in Camp's meticulous field notes, took them into previously unmapped areas controlled by the Jivaro tribe. When the war ended, Camp stayed behind for nearly a year, collecting for NYBG. Among the 5828 numbers he brought back were many new taxa.

Back in New York, he collaborated with H.W. Rickett and C.A. Weatherby on the so-called Brittonia edition of the International Rules for Botanical Nomenclature. Following its enactment at the International Botanical Congress in Stockholm in 1950, he chaired international committees on the naming of hybrids and cultivated plants. In 1949, the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia created the position of Curator of Experimental Botany and Horticulture especially for him. He worked on projects in cooperation with industry, including research on Vaccinium, Veratrum, Hedera, and Quebec forestry, and designed the Taylor Memorial Arboretum. In 1952, wanting to return to teaching, he left to become Head of the Department of Botany of the University of Connecticut. Camp served as Vice President of the Torrey Botanical Club and as President of the American Society of Plant Taxonomists and of the American Horticultural Council. In 1962 he received a Distinguished Service Award from the New York Botanical Garden for outstanding contributions to the advancement of horticulture and botany. Cavendishia campii A.C. Sm., Fuschia campii P.E. Berry and Themistoclesia campii A.C. Sm. are named after him.

Sources:
H. Balslev and E. Joyal, "Plant Collectors in Ecuador: Camp, Prieto, Jorgensen, and Giler", Brittonia, 32(4): 437-451
M.M. Hubbard, 1963, "Wendell Holmes Camp", Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club, 90(4): 258-260
H.W. Rickett, 1964, "Wendell Holmes Camp", Brittonia, 16(1): 1-10.