♪ There are hundreds of species of plants native to Indiana, forming a complex, living tapestry across the Hoosier state.

And nearly no one explored this rich landscape more thoroughly than naturalist Charles C. Deam.

Between 1896 and 1952, Deam collected and cataloged tens of thousands of plant specimens from every county and every township in Indiana.

>> Deam's choice of focusing on Indiana was a good one.

For one thing, the state has a very long north-south dimension, and that meant that you cover a number of very different ecological regions of the Midwest.

Obviously, his choice was largely because that's where he lived, but it was still a very good one.

>> Today, the bulk of Deam's collection is housed at the Indiana University Herbarium in Bloomington, Indiana, and it's still being put to good use.

♪ >> What is a herbarium?

It is a plant library.

And so it is a research resource for folks like myself.

We can study the specimens in great detail.

You would be amazed at the amount of information that is preserved within that flattened, dried specimen.

Indiana University Herbarium has about 160,000 specimens.

At least 50,000 of those are Charles Deam's specimens.

And then Stella Deam, the wife, contributed another several thousand.

So they are obviously together, you know, represent almost a third of our collection even today.

>> Before he was a legendary scientist, Deam was a successful druggist from the small northeastern town of Bluffton.

>> In an effort to ease work stress, he started taking daily walks with his wife Stella; however, Deam, a noted workaholic, couldn't be entirely idle.

And so he began collecting plants as he and his wife strolled.

It ignited a deep and enduring passion.

>> Once he got started on something, he went the whole way.

Later in life, his motto was, you know, botany is my game, and I play it hard.

Type A personality to the hilt.

>> Deam was largely a self-taught scientist, but his efforts were far from amateur.

>> Deam is very complete in including not only the twig with mature buds, leaves, both -- showing both upper and lower surface and also, though, the nuts of the plant, because those could be very critical for identification or for adequate study of the structure of this particular plant.

Once you've got a specimen preserved and mounted in this fashion, they can last for hundreds of years.

>> Like a rugged weed, Deam's reputation as an ecological expert took hold.

In 1909, he was named Indiana's first state forester.

His chief task was to rehabilitate Indiana's forest lands, which had been ravaged from decades of overaggressive farming.

The steady paycheck and necessary statewide travel supercharged Deam's botanical exploits.

Soon, he was collecting thousands of plant specimens in a single year, from all corners of Indiana.

And this at a time when intrastate travel was a patchwork at best.

>> Initially, he had to travel by interurban railroad or horse, or on your own two feet.

But in 1915, he was able to finally get a Model T Ford and rigged it up to be his weed wagon.

I've been sometimes amazed at how many places he would be within just a single week.

>> Deam's massive collection of specimens formed the scientific bedrock for several influential botanical books, most prominent was "Flora of Indiana."

>> He was aware that we didn't even know what plants existed in the state.

But he also was interested in their distribution in the state.

Trying to understand what was the habitat that they required.

Where were they to be found in the state?

And, of course, what were the rare species of the state?

So he's documented for us the Indiana that was, in order for us to appreciate it and hopefully do a better job of conserving and protecting it going forward.

>> In that spirit of appreciation, in 2014, Indiana University embarked on a five-year effort to digitize the entirety of the herbarium's specimens.

Today, the fruit of Deam's labor is available online to anyone at the press of a button.

>> Yeah, how would Deam feel about this new digital world?

Yeah, I think he would be, you know, quite excited about it, with the caveat that he would still want people to experience nature firsthand.

He became very appreciative of that.

So he'd be, I think, thrilled by the digital world, but not if that's the only way you experienced it.