One hundred acres of beauty

For more than four decades, Steve Carpenter has studied lakes as ecosystems in which all parts — from living organisms like fish and weeds to the mud found on lake bottoms — interact to influence lake health. He’s keenly interested in what contributes to lakes that thrive and what threats to lake ecosystems push them to a tipping point so extreme, the entire system collapses.

Susan Carpenter, on the other hand, has spent most her career focused on the land. As curator of the native plant garden at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Arboretum, she spends her days tending black-eyed Susan and blazing star, while keeping watch over and protecting native bees, including the rare and endangered rusty-patched bumblebee.

Steve retired in 2017, after decades as a professor of limnology (the study of freshwater) and eight years as director of the UW–Madison Center for Limnology. Susan continues her work at the UW Arboretum, where she also conducts public outreach and education. But together, the couple — they married in 1979 after meeting in graduate school at UW–Madison — now also spend their time restoring and conserving 100 acres of prairie, stream and bluff in Wisconsin’s Driftless Area — so called because the glaciers that shaped so much of the state have never touched this region.

Their work on the land sits at the intersection of their professional lives and their personal passions.