Winona: A Biographical Essay

Author(s): Jeanne Goode

Source: Brittonia , Apr. - Jun., 1988, Vol. 40, No. 2, Winona H. Welch Festschrift (Apr.
- Jun., 1988), pp. 117-128
Published by: Springer on behalf of the New York Botanical Garden Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2806997

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Brittonia, 40(2), 1988, pp. 117-134.
? 1988, by the New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, NY 10458-5126

WINONA: A BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

Dr. Winona Welch at nearly 92 impresses all who meet her with her strength,
her intellectual vitality, and her unaffected joy in life. It is not given to all of us
to live so long; it is given to even fewer of us to have lived so well. A Hoosier
from the heartland of America, hers has been a very American kind of life, full
of such old-fashioned virtues as integrity, thrift, diligence, dedication. In such a
life the Protestant work ethic, once so much respected and lately too much scorned,
is seen at its best-productive, generous, and wholly admirable.
Winona Hazel Welch was born in 1896 on a farm in Jasper County, Indiana,
three miles northeast of the town of Goodland. It is flat country-long ago it was
prairie, part of the vast sea of grass that covered the middle of the continent
before the long line of pioneers and the moldboard plow transformed it forever.
Her paternal grandfather, George Welch, was one of those pioneers. Born in
England, he was brought up in New York State and bought his Indiana land just
before going off to serve the Union cause in the Civil War for four long years.
Winona cherishes a history of the Seventeenth Indiana, her grandfather's regiment.
There is a poignant report of one defeat (the Munfordsville Affair) before the final
victory:

The march through Kentucky from Bowling Green to Brandenburg was a very severe one, the
men suffering very much for food and making hard marches; but as soon as Indiana was reached,
the people all along their route turned out to see them and bring them food, and not only this,
but followed the command in wagons hauling the sick and tired.

Sergeant Major George Welch was among the wounded. The war was a bitter
experience that he never spoke about, but Winona and her younger sister, Helen,
were proud of his record. Some mementos survive -a little tatting shuttle that he
carved from the root of a tree while a soldier (it is now in the Indiana Museum)
and his sword, given to Winona as the oldest grandchild.
The girls' maternal grandfather, David Merritt Johnson, moved westward from
New York State also. His farm adjoined the Welch farm and eventually, when
George Welch's son Charles married "Met" Johnson's daughter Carrie, the farms
were combined. Winona and her sister still own that farm today, and, although
she is not now and never will be the sort of person who lives in the past, it pleases
her to have that visible reminder of her childhood. Thinking of it can still quicken
scenes in her memory: "When we finished planting corn we could go fishing up
at the Iroquois River" she recalls, "and then when the corn was husked and all
in the crib, then we could have an oyster stew."
Since there were no boys in the family, the two girls did their share of chores
and more, but certain jobs were special and earned special payment. Winona
always had a pet lamb to raise and one birthday her grandfather gave her a calf
to feed from a baby's bottle-money earned when the animals were sold was hers
to save. Feeding and caring for the hens and chickens earned the girls the proceeds
from the 12th egg box and one-third of the money gained when any chickens were
sold. On the 4th of July, each child was given 25 cents for fireworks, great riches
in those days. Winona always saved 15 cents of hers-the habit of thrift, if not
inborn, was learned early and well on a working farm in Indiana in the first years
of this century.
Life on the farm was simple and plain, centered on work and worship. The
parents were strict but loving, the family devoted. School was a one-room country
school a quarter of a mile north-Winona has a vivid memory of her first day
there, bravely dressed in a favorite little red jacket, the youngest and smallest of

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 118 BRITONIA [VOL. 40

Fios. 3 and 4. 3. Winona H. Welch as a child four years old. 4. Dr. Welch's grandparents. Left
to right: George Welch, Jane Moulton Welch, Sarah Helen Sawyer Johnson, David Merritt Johnson.
(Courtesy of DePauw University Archives.)

all. It was a good school where children were expected to and did learn what they
were taught, minus such frills as computers and visual aids. Winona thinks they
learned better than children today to whom so much is given but from whom so
little is expected. From the first, she loved it-loved learning-loved teaching so
much that at home it was a favorite game to conduct lessons with the family cat
or her dolls as pupils.

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 1988] WELCH FESTSCHRIFT 119

In grade school Winona had already decided that she would like to go on to
college and she picked out DePauw because she had friends who had gone there
and also because the name delighted her. She would need to earn money for
college by teaching, however, so she went for teacher training to Indiana State
Normal at Terre Haute and the college at Winona Lake, Indiana. Because the
school superintendent asked the girls to stay on as teachers while the boys went
to war, she taught for four years-at the Wildasin, the Hancock, and the Brook
public schools. Some of the students were a lot bigger and tougher than their 90-
pound teacher. When two of them thought they could give her a hard time she
applied a little psychology by making two enormous wooden paddles. The trou-
blemakers knew what the paddles were meant for and she never had to use them.
After the Armistice, Winona was able to get on with her own education. She
had $1000 saved by then-from her teacher's salary of $45 to $75 a month, from
the pet lambs, the calf, the eggs and the chickens, from fireworks denied, and
from driving the hay-fork horse. Her father thought she was making a mistake,
that she should settle down and get married. But she was determined. "Dad," she
declared, "I earned my money and I'm going to college!" Her grandmother, who
encouraged her, promised help and she was more than willing to work her way
for the rest. In 1919 she entered the freshman class of 1923 at DePauw University.
Here, for the first time, she became aware of the difference in opportunity for
men and women-a problem she had never even thought about before. Drawn
to the study of science, she hoped to major in chemistry but was discouraged
from doing so by Dr. William Blanchard who told her that there was no future
for women in his particular science. She turned to biology and, finding that she
was completely unaware of the passage of time in botany lab, settled down to
becoming a botanist-a choice she has never regretted for a moment. As far as
equal opportunity goes, Winona Welch solved that particular problem early in a
characteristic fashion. She didn't become aggressive, she simply became the best.
In the future, her commitment to excellence would open many doors-she would
prove to be the best "man" for the job.
Truman G. Yuncker, her major professor at DePauw, encouraged her to go on
to graduate school. She had an undergraduate assistantship and he had set her
the task of identifying all the ferns in the DePauw Herbarium, so he knew she
was well able to do graduate work. "Don't B sharp, don't B flat, B natural," Dr.
Yuncker advised when she applied to the University of Illinois with his glowing
recommendations. It was good advice-she was accepted for a graduate assis-
tantship and was able to study plant taxonomy with William Trelease and plant
ecology with W. B. McDougall. She was already more or less started on what was
to become her master's thesis. While at DePauw she had helped to mount 4000
specimens collected by Earl Grimes from an area around Russellville, Indiana.
"I wonder how many of these plants grow on Dad's farm?" she said to Dr. Yuncker.
"Why don't you find out?" he replied. She promptly started collecting plants from
along the fence rows and pastures around home. For the thesis, an ecological
study, she expanded her collecting to Fountain Park, a wooded area with a creek
and some sandstone rock. Eventually, she would collect all the flora of Jasper
County, borrowing her Dad's car, so interested in the work that she hardly took
time to eat.
Winona likes to say that she began to specialize in bryophytes because she felt
sorry for them-the higher plants were being seriously studied but hardly anyone
knew anything about the lowly mosses and liverworts. That was certainly true
enough in the 1920s and 30s but change was not long in coming. Winona's first
major research project in the mosses came by way of the noted Indiana botanist,

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120 BRITTONIA [VOL. 40

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 1988] WELCH FESTSCHRIFT 121

Charles Deam. She met him at her father's farm while she was still an under-
graduate, already fascinated by plant taxonomy and ecology but not yet decided
on a specialty. Deam was completing his great Flora of Indiana for the Indiana
Department of Conservation. He was not particularly interested in mosses, him-
self- "To me there are only two kinds of mosses," he once wrote to Winona, "big
ones and small ones"-but he felt that they should be included in the flora. "Plain
ol' Charlie Deam" (always Dr. Deam to Winona, even to this day) knew a good
thing when he saw it and in this young, enthusiastic, and hardworking botanist
he saw a promising future. He suggested that she work on the mosses of Indiana
as a companion volume to his own series of books on Indiana plants. Winona
and Dr. Deam worked very closely together and, when she was completing her
master's thesis, she lived with the Deams while he checked her specimens. They
were close friends from then on.
Although she never lost interest in the higher plants, Winona's involvement
with bryophytes developed rapidly. "I just went on," she said, "I didn't plan it,
I just grew in it." Her thesis subject did not reflect it but she was well into bryology
when she went on to Indiana University for her doctorate. Here she studied with
David Mottier and Paul Weatherwax. During this period she was teaching biology
at the Central Normal College and, for her dissertation, received a graduate re-
search fellowship at Indiana University to find out why huckleberries and blue-
berries, acid-loving plants, were growing on the ridge of a limestone area in Monroe
County. She received her Ph.D. in 1928 (Fig. 7) and continued as a highly regarded
instructor in botany at Indiana University for two years.
In 1930 she was invited to return to DePauw as assistant professor of botany.
T. G. Yuncker was head of the department and they were already close. TG, as
he was known to most people, came to DePauw as a professor at about the same
time that Winona came as a student and she was his first major. Winona, always
deferential to those she admired and respected, never called him anything but
Dr. Yuncker-in spite of the fact that she became, in effect, a member of the
Yuncker family, frequent baby-sitter and honorary aunt to the Yuncker girls,
Betty-Jane and Barbara. Yuncker was mainly interested in the flowering plants.
Winona's own interest in bryology complemented perfectly and they often col-
lected in the same general areas. Barbara Yuncker recalls collecting trips in a car
without enough storage space-Betty-Jane, Barbara, and Winona in the back seat,
perched painfully and precariously on top of plant presses and other equipment.
She remembers special Indiana Sundays, too-church in the morning, dinner in
the afternoon, and-does everyone in Indiana have popcorn on Sunday night?
The Yunckers did. "In the evening Dad made popcorn-we had popcorn and
apples every Sunday night," she says. Winona was with them more often than
not. In the summer, she sometimes joined them at a vacation cottage in Michigan
where she was an enthusiastic if not very skillful fisherman. Dr. and Mrs. Yuncker
are both gone now but Winona, Betty-Jane, and Barbara are still "family," still
part of each other's lives, still sharing and enjoying memories.
At DePauw, with a teaching load that would depress most young teachers,
Winona threw herself wholeheartedly into research and fieldwork as well. Starting

FIGS. 5-7. Winona H. Welch. 5 (upper left). High school graduation, Goodland, Indiana, 22 May
1914. 6 (lower half). With her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Charles A. Welch, just before graduation services
for A.M. degree, University of Illinois, June 1925. 7 (upper right). On the day she received her Ph.D.
degree, Indiana University, 11 June 1928. (5 and 6, courtesy of DePauw University Archives; 7,
courtesy of W. H. Welch.)

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 122 BRITTONIA [VOL. 40

with her own Jasper County, she had already begun the long-term task of collecting
mosses from each of Indiana's 92 counties for her projected book on Indiana
mosses. Membership in the Sullivant Moss Society (now the American Bryological
and Lichenological Society) fueled her growing interest-especially the forays.
How she enjoyed them! There seems to be a special closeness shared by those
who study cryptogamic plants. That closeness probably stems from repeated for-
ays-climbing up the steep hills, wading the streams, walking the many miles,
stumbling triumphantly back to camp with a prize. Friendships that last a life-
time are formed on forays, formed in mutual help, mutual delight in discovery,
and, no doubt, mutual discomfort- since good weather for bryologists is tradi-
tionally soggy and wet. Winona recalls one such foray. It was raining, of course,
and she remembers the adventure of sleeping under a tarp in her clothes with
boots on, and, in the morning, the irresistible smell of oranges, bacon, and eggs.
She described another foray in The Bryologist [39: 122-123. 1936], on which 20
members of the Torrey Botanical Club and the Sullivant Moss Society forayed
near Linville, North Carolina, often waist deep in mud and water. They were
happy enough, thank you. Lichens and mushrooms were abundant and there were
so many mosses that "the bryologists rejoiced."
On forays she met Howard Crum as well as Bill and Dorothy Steere, George
Nichols, Margaret Fulford, Fay and William Daily, Lewis Anderson, and dozens
more, all friends as well as colleagues. And many a summer was spent in Iowa
at the annual moss clinics conducted by Henry S. Conard at the University of
Iowa's Lakeside Laboratory. (She finished her Mosses of Indiana there.)
Young Dr. Welch could hardly have become a bryologist at a better time. She
knew and corresponded with most of the major figures who were then raising the
study of mosses and liverworts to a position of respect and importance. A. J.
Grout, one of the great moss authorities in the United States, was a deeply admired
mentor and a dear friend. He asked her to monograph a group of mosses for his
Moss Flora of North America North of Mexico and invited her to work with him
in his laboratory near Newfane, Vermont, where A. J. Sharp was a fellow student.
She chose to work on the Fontinalaceae, a difficult but interesting group of water
mosses. This group, together with work on the mosses of Indiana, would occupy
much of her research time for 30 years. It was work that she loved but it was
never easy. Conscientious in the extreme, a perfectionist and a worrier, she insisted
on pushing herself to the limit and she was often discouraged, even depressed.
Letters from friends routinely contained affectionate admonitions to take it easy.
Her fear of making mistakes was such that they probably often wanted to shake
her, but they couldn't change her- she was the way she was and is. It would be
easier to persuade water to run uphill or a rolling stone to gather moss than to
persuade Winona Welch to take it easy. Charles Deam, for one, recognized that.
As far as he was concerned, it was all to the good. "Well be a good girl and please
do kill yourself working," he wrote. "We need a goodly lot of enthusiastic botanists
like yourself."
Like Deam, she was a glutton for work-she had to be to accomplish all that
she did. A steady stream of scientific papers began to come from her painstaking
researches, not only on mosses but on the taxonomy and ecology of flowering
plants as well. And the record of her travels grew apace. She has collected in all
the 50 states, in almost all of the provinces of Canada, in Panama, in the West
Indies, and in the South Pacific. She set money aside for her "travel fund" every
month from her modest salary as a teacher and tried to supplement that whenever
possible by applying for grants-in-aid, at first without much hope of success. She
had soon been made painfully aware that men were chosen for grants every time
if there were men available. But, to her own surprise, she managed to get a share

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 1988] WELCH FESTSCHRIFT 123

and is still "grateful to the nth degree" to the National Science Foundation, the
American Philosophical Society, the Indiana Academy of Science, and the Grad-
uate Council of DePauw University for the grants she received. They proved to
her that women did have a chance, after all. Meanwhile, her reputation as a
scientist continued to grow. Her Fontinalaceae was published in 1934 in Grout's
Moss Flora of North America North of Mexico. When she had first started working
on the Fontinalaceae, her friend George Nichols made the far from encouraging
comment that she was a fool to start monographing that group. There were times
when she thought he was right! The Fontinalaceae, all of which live under water,
are extremely difficult to understand and nothing of importance had been written
on them for over 40 years. In spite of the problems involved, she never gave up
and through her earnest, conscientious effort made a major contribution to tax-
onomy. Based on extended study and fieldwork, Winona's important monograph
was the first of its kind ever to appear in the English language and established her
as an authority.
In 1938, on a grant from the American Philosophical Society (50 years later,
she is still overwhelmed at the thought of receiving it), she was able to spend six
months in Europe (France, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Finland,
Sweden, Norway, England, Scotland, and Wales) for further study for a world
monograph on the Fontinalaceae. It was the eve of World War II and the signs
of its coming were clear and frightening, especially in Germany where even a
visiting scientist was expected to say "Heil Hitler." Some of the herbaria she
visited were to be completely destroyed when the war came-fortunately not the
one in Helsinki, a "real center of bryology," that she remembers so vividly with
its hand-carved wooden cabinets. In England she made a lasting friendship with
the dean of British bryologists, H. N. Dixon, who was then head of the British
Bryological Society. Dixon and his wife were kindred spirits and she continued
to correspond until his death.
Always an active, never a passive member of the professional societies she
joined, she was a charter member of the American Society of Plant Taxonomists.
Vice-president of the American Bryological Society from 1936 to 1938, she was
secretary-treasurer from 1942 to 1953 and president from 1954 to 1956. A mem-
ber of the Indiana Academy of Science since 1924, she was secretary of that
prestigious organization from 1941 to 1947 and in 1948 president, the first woman
to be so honored in the Academy's history.
In 1957, Dr. Welch's Mosses of Indianac, an Illustrated Manual was published
by the Indiana Department of Conservation. Treating all 261 species and varieties
of mosses known to occur in the state, it was the result of many years of study,
designed for both beginning and advanced students in moss taxonomy. Still the
definitive work on Indiana mosses, it provides complete descriptions as well as
diagnostic summaries, illustrations for each species, and an illustrated glossary.
Keys to families, genera, and species, based primarily on vegetative characteristics,
permit identification of the mosses with or without fruiting structures. In sim-
plifying the determination of moss species occurring in Indiana it assisted such
determinations over a much wider area, since mosses found in Indiana are widely
distributed throughout eastern North America.
By 1949 the manuscript for her world monograph on the maddening Fontin-
alaceae was ready for publication, only to run into more than a decade of frustrating
delay. Finally in 1960 the National Science Foundation supplied enough money
to subsidize the Martinus Nijhoff printers in The Hague to publish the 357-page
Fontinalaceae manuscript. Admiration for this work was universal. Personal let-
ters from friends were full of generous praise. "Your very helpful monograph is
so nearly foolproof that it would now be difficult to misinterpret anything in the

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 124 BRITTONIA [VOL. 40

genus," wrote Fred Hermann; Herman Poussin called it "one of the absolutely
best monographs ever written in the world in bryology." Such comments were
echoed in the scientific press throughout the world and gave great satisfaction to
the author but, never one to rest on her laurels, she was already deep in research
on the Hookeriaceae, concentrating on the different species and their distribution.
She traveled widely for this study-to Panama, Mexico, Australia and many
islands in the South Seas, and to the West Indies-contributing at least a dozen
publications on the subject before failing eyesight made such effort impossible.
Dr. Welch's achievement as a scientist would be impressive in anyone. It is
especially impressive when one remembers that through all those years as a sci-
entific investigator, she was carrying a full teaching load-not just one or two
students, not just one or two courses. At DePauw, Winona taught general botany,
ecology, morphology, anatomy, mycology, plant pathology, landscaping, spring
flora, and methods of teaching biology in high schools. Her pursuit of knowledge
as a scientist was an important part of her life but it was never separated from
her vocation as a teacher. If in science she found her intellectual satisfaction, in
teaching she found her purpose and direction. The many awards and honors she
received in the course of a long, distinguished career as a scientist pleased her
mightily but somehow one suspects that the honor that touched her heart most
deeply was to be considered one of the outstanding teachers at DePauw University.
She was a born teacher, a natural teacher, efficient and conscientious but also
enthusiastic, sympathetic, and beloved.
Winona started her teaching career at DePauw in 1930 as assistant professor
of botany at the munificent salary of $2500 a year and was more than happy to
be there. Her early experience in finding that men were usually preferred over
women in the scientific world was merely confirmation of experience she had
already had as a teacher. While a graduate student and teaching assistant at the
University of Illinois, she had applied for a teaching position at a university in
Ohio. When the reply came back that they wanted not just a man but "a man
with a moustache," it was a real blow as well as a revelation. She tells the story
today and laughs heartily but she was stunned at the time and her expectations
were definitely diminished. This, added to her genuine humility, has made for a
life full of delightful surprises. When she was made an associate professor after
being at DePauw only a few years, she felt that she had reached the climax as far
as rank was concerned and when she was made full professor in 1939, it was a
title she had "never even dreamed of having." In 1956 when Dr. Yuncker retired
and she was made head of the Department of Botany and Bacteriology at DePauw,
she tells us that she almost went into shock, so astonished that she could not talk.
Of course the honorary degree that DePauw conferred on her in 1982 sent her
into shock again, such a state of shock that she "broke out in pimples, turned
cold, and finally cried."
This modesty is both sincere and endearing but her friends and her students
have never been surprised at the honors she has accumulated. As a scientist she
was content to confine herself to basic research, the steady, deliberate, painstaking
labor that is the foundation of science. What she attempted, she performed,
working always to the best of her considerable ability. It was work that she
enjoyed-she was happy to be able to do it-but it was in the classroom, her
natural habitat, that Winona Welch was 100 percent happy-"the happiest girl
in the United States" as she puts it herself. In conversation it is obvious that the
response of students has been her greatest joy. She was an excellent scientist-
she has been a great teacher. Scores of former students speak of her vitality, her
contagious enthusiasm, her love for her subject, and her affection and respect for
them as individuals. "Now we're going to travel a road together," she would say

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 1988] WrELCH FESrSCHIiF 125

* 7:

*~~~~~~~~~ ;'

Fios. 8-11. Winona H. Welch. 8 (upper left). 13 November 1931. 9 (upper nght). 1951. 10 (lower
left). Gainesville, Florida, 1954. 11 (lower right). 15 May 1961. (8 and 11, courtesy of DePauw
University Archives; 9, courtesy of Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Carnegie Mellon
University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; 10, courtesy of Howard Crum.)

on the first day of class. "We'll consider this course a journey through the plant
kingdom. Don't think of me as a teacher because I have been afraid of my teachers
and I don't want you to be afraid of me. Think of me as your elder sister." On
the last day of class she would say "Ain't nature grand!" Students privileged to
make that journey through the plant kingdom with Winona Welch have never
forgotten the experience. She taught them to love nature, whether they went on

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 126 BRITTONIA [VOL. 40

to become botanists or not (many of them did, of course) and she taught them
to love and appreciate Indiana. Listen as she talks about her home state:

I have thanked the heavens that I was a botanist in Indiana. We have the northern plants and
some glacial relicts. We have the southern plants, with the bald cypress in the swamp in south-
western Indiana. We have sand dunes in the north, we have sandstone and we have limestone.
What better substratum can you have than that range? Also, I have been thankful that I was
born in a state that was not completely covered by the glacier-the central part of the southern
one-third of Indiana was not glaciated. So I have benefited by studying the plants the glacier left
here and those that have come up from the south. A perfect state in which to teach botany!

Her love for nature and her love for Indiana have made her militant about
conservation in a way that she never was about equal rights for women. As a
member of the Indiana Academy of Science, as its first woman president, as a
member of its committee on natural resources, she has been in a position to fight
and she is still fighting. Fern Cliff, the richest site in Indiana for ferns and mosses,
is about seven miles outside of Greencastle. Winona regularly took students and
visiting "moss people" to this incomparably beautiful area and was instrumental
in its purchase as a nature preserve by the Nature Conservancy. She fought for
the Hoosier Highlands, too-one section was named "Winona Welch Botanical
Area" for her by Alton A. Lindsey. She is still fighting for Sword Moss Gorge, a
small but special sandstone area that Winona calls a "miniature Turkey Run."
"As long as I live, I'll try to have Sword Moss Gorge preserved," she declared
recently. Such places are a priceless part of our natural heritage, she feels, important
to the country, important to the state, and important to botany. Lucien M. Un-
derwood, a world renowned botanist who taught at DePauw in the 1890s, went by
horseback to Fern Cliff and probably knew Sword Moss Gorge and Fallen Rock
as well. "He sent specimens of Bryoxiphium norvegicum from these areas to
herbaria around the world," she said. "I followed in his footsteps." World traveler
though she has been, it is her Indiana homeland that calls forth her deepest love
and all her fighting spirit.
Dr. Welch retired from full time teaching in 1961, and from teaching altogether
in 1968, in order to devote herself to research and also to care for the Truman
G. Yuncker Herbarium that has lately been deposited here at the New York
Botanical Garden. That it is no ordinary herbarium was evidenced by the exu-
berance on the part of a scientific staff-normally fairly composed and usually
even quite rational-when the news came that it was actually to be ours. Such
tears of joy! Such happiness! Why? Because this is the combined Truman G.
Yuncker and Winona Welch herbaria of DePauw University and represents the
most significant single acquisition made by the Garden since 1945. Its value to
the scientific community is enormous-Winona calls it her life's savings (some
of the Welch treasures are described in the papers that follow). The herbarium is
believed to have been started around 1870 and organized in 1895 under Lucien
Underwood. Winona tells us that it reached its greatest period of growth and
excellence under Truman G. Yuncker, who joined the faculty in 1919 and re-
mained affiliated with DePauw until his death in 1964. Winona was his able
assistant from her days as an undergraduate when she earned money for books
and graduate school by working there before breakfast and after laboratory closed,
as well as on Saturdays. By the time she graduated in 1923, Dr. Yuncker and
Winona had organized an herbarium of approximately 4000 specimens. When
she returned to teach at DePauw, Winona was made assistant curator in charge
of the cryptogamic plants and after Yuncker's death she became curator, holding
that position until 1981 when she turned over an herbarium consisting of 133,500
collections to Dr. Richard Mayes. Both Winona and TG collected plants in various

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 1988] WELCH FESTSCHRIFT 127

Fia. 12. Winona H. Welch in the Truman G. Yuncker Herbarium, DePauw University, 1978.
Photograph appeared in DePauw Alumnus, October 1978. (Courtesy of DePauw University Archives.)

parts of the world and exchanged duplicates with botanists and herbaria through-
out the world. All Winona's Indiana collections for her Mosses of Indiana are
here, the collections and fragments of Fontinalaceae studied for her world mono-
graph on the Fontinalaceae, and the collections and fragments she used for the
Hookeriaceae monographic work. In addition, there are the notes on Fontinalaceae
that she made in European herbaria and her copies of original descriptions and
illustrations for the Hookeriaceae. Life's savings, indeed! But she let go of it with
grace and generosity. When the eleven from NYBG reached DePauw in Septem-

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 128 BRITTONIA [VOL. 40

ber, last year, she was ready to receive them, fascinated by the whole process,
eager to help in any way, and to make sure that nothing was forgotten. Any sadness
she felt at the leave-taking-and there must have been some sadness in seeing
that the gift she and Dr. Yuncker had given so gladly to DePauw could not remain
there-was eased by her joy in knowing that it would come to a place where it
will be cared for and used. She is gratified that it will be appreciated and pleased
that the money received for it will be going back into DePauw's Department of
Biological Sciences.
To leave out religion in any discussion of Winona Welch is to leave out what
she herself might call the substratum, the source of her strength. It is her love of
God that nourishes and informs her love of life. She tells us simply that she has
been a member of her church since age 11, that she has been active in church-
related activities ever since. When she first went away to college she was warned
by an evangelist friend that her faith might be shaken but it never was. She
questioned everything fearlessly and found in evolution no contradiction to her
belief in God, no threat to her deepest convictions. Evolution is a phenomenon
that the trained scientific mind can observe but a phenomenon is not an expla-
nation. "The work that I have done has revealed to me that God is the creator
of our earth," she says. Science has been for her not an obstacle to belief but an
affirmation-a way to know this created world, the better to worship the Creator.
And teaching has been for her a responsibility and a privilege, eagerly and joyously
accepted-her way of sharing this knowledge with others.
If you look for God's purpose in a life, you will find it in hers. She is neither
rich nor famous; those who live lives of service seldom are. But the lives of the
rich and famous regularly dissolve under scrutiny. Hers does not. "I am become
unto many a wonder, but Thou art a strong helper" she could sing with the
Psalmist. For she is indeed a wonder. She lives today in a retirement home but,
in spite of three attempts she never did get the hang of retiring. At 72, six years
after her first retirement, she was collecting in the West Indies, undeterred by
jungle, swamps, or snakes. "You'll just have to change your mind about what
people this age can do," she said at the time. Meeting her today, you would have
to change your mind about what people aged 92 can do, also. The gradual loss
of her eyesight could have defeated an ordinary person. To her it has been a
challenge and she glories in her visual aid that permits her to read and to write
letters. Recorded books have been another blessing. She has managed to read
over 700 books by means of tape recordings, especially pleased because she can
sort stamps, make pillows, or create colorful hangers to benefit her many charities,
while she is listening. She says that she is thankful to have lived. She is still very
much alive. Students come back to see her regularly, even bringing children and
grandchildren, and she is as busy as ever giving talks to the Greencastle Womens
Club, serving on committees, meeting with the Church Circle, conducting Bible
classes, providing programs-and, not the least of her activities, attending ex-
ercise class where she gleefully rides a stationary bicycle. Charming, gracious,
beautiful in her old age, she is above all visibly happy. Those of us at the New
York Botanical Garden who have come to know her only lately have been de-
lighted and enriched. "She's one strong lady," said an old friend not long ago-
and that she is; firm of voice, clear of mind, large of spirit and active as all get
out. It does the heart good to hear her; it does the soul good to know her; it is
an honor to present this tribute to her. "Oh, mercy," she will probably exclaim,
amazed that we should find extraordinary what she considers ordinary, but we
know she will enjoy it. It is presented with respect, with gratitude, with admiration.
More than that-it is presented with affection.-JEANNE GOODE, New York Bo-
tanical Garden.

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