The Plant Custodian

You might not be able to tell today, but the land around Santa Clara University was once marked by sprawling orchards and farms nestled between rolling hills and forested mountains.

Growing up, Justen Whittall ’96 witnessed the area’s evolution from the Blossom Valley to the Silicon Valley firsthand, skateboarding down new highways as they were built and exploring the trails around South San Jose as a cross-country runner.

But it wasn’t until he was a biology student at Santa Clara University that John Mooring’s upper-division course in field botany gave Whittall a deeper appreciation for the delicate ecosystems changing around him.

“I was absolutely enamored with the idea that you could learn outside of the classroom,” says Whittall, now a biology professor at Santa Clara University. “And while I couldn’t keep track of birds—there were too many, and they were too fast—I could stare at the ground for hours on end.”

Around that time, he often went on hikes and runs in nearby Santa Teresa County Park and one fateful day, he encountered a beautiful, jade-blue succulent he’d never seen before. After checking his identification guide and sharing his findings with Mooring, he learned he’d found Dudleya setchellii, a very rare succulent.

“They were planning on building a golf course in the area I found that succulent, and I remember thinking ‘this rare plant is going to get decimated,’” says Whittall, noting that this plant’s extinction would impact the whole ecosystem, from the pollinating bees and herbivores including long-eared hares and black-tailed deer that eat its pale cream flowers. “That’s when I first got passionate about trying to save things before they go extinct, or at least, make sure everybody knows what’s out there before they disappear.”

Decades later, Whittall, now a conservation geneticist, has come full circle. Not only does he teach at the school that gave him his passion for botany, but he is midway through a three-year, federally funded project to rescue that same rare succulent he encountered all those years ago.