"The students, working with a biology professor, Meg Ronsheim, were resurrecting a that was cultivated by botany professors and students in the 1920s, long before native species became a rage, and then forgotten for decades. The garden was the life’s passion of Edith A. Roberts, a professor of plant science who, after being hired by in 1919, set out to document every species of plant in . Over the next three decades, she and colleagues transformed the four-acre plot into what would be called the Dutchess County Outdoor Ecological Laboratory. Dr. Roberts, a farmer’s daughter from New Hampshire who earned a doctorate in botany from the , was in the forefront of a group of women who blazed trails in academia, just as the suffrage movement won them the right to vote."