The American Orchid Society, headquartered at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables, Florida, is a nearly 100-year-old nonprofit organization committed to promoting and supporting passion for orchids through education, conservation and research.

Lawrence Zettler, Hitchcock Professor of Biology, leads the Orchid Recovery Program at Illinois College. Zettler said the gift will open a lot of doors for student research in the lab for the next three to five years. Dedicated to putting the generous gift to effective use, he plans to connect with landowners and state and federal agencies to learn where the conservation need is greatest and how IC students and partner institutions can get involved.

"I think one of the things that we'd like to do with the gift is to try to expand the net a little bit to try to include the number of orchids in Illinois that really need attention,” Zettler said.

The Orchid Recovery Program and collaborating institutions are leading efforts to conserve orchids in the Midwest and around the world, through research in places that include Palau, Madagascar, Ecuador and Cuba. More than 100 undergraduate students have contributed to the program’s work over the course of more than two decades. The American Orchid Society gift has already funded a summer student position. Fegor Imieye, an international student majoring in biology, was unable to return to her home country of Nigeria for the summer and will assist Zettler with orchid research.

In addition to possibly broadening the scope of the program’s work on native orchid species, Zettler said the program will continue studying the eastern prairie fringed orchid. The species, which has been studied at IC for more than 20 years, is featured on the 2020 U.S. Postal Service Wild Orchids Forever stamp series. Zettler spoke about the need for conservation at the stamp unveiling event held at the American Orchid Society headquarters in February. 

Zettler said a recent paper published in the journal Botanical Studies reflects the decades of work studying the eastern prairie fringed orchid leading up to the American Orchid Society gift. The paper’s senior author, Hana Thixton ’15 is an alumna pursuing her doctorate at West Virginia University. Zettler and Laura Corey, dean of faculty and instructional excellence and associate professor of biology, were co-authors with Elizabeth Esselman, a professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

"It's kind of like a chapter in a book or two chapters, now,” he said. “It's the work we've done prior to the gift and now we're ready to do the next phase. And this gift helps us to do that."

Zettler expressed gratitude for the American Orchid Society’s support and all IC donors who give to student-faculty research and "have been exceptionally wonderful with their generosity."

"One reason I'm in orchid conservation today — 30 years after I began — is because I was awarded a grant from the American Orchid Society when I first started graduate school,” he said. “They funded my work in grad school and that gave me the jump start I needed professionally.”

For more information about the Orchid Recovery Program at Illinois College and a link to Zettler's lab website, visit ic.edu/biology/orchidrecovery.