Celebrate July 4th Holiday Weekend with Family Fun
Posted in Exhibitions, Programs and Events, The Edible Garden on July 2 2010, by Plant Talk
Children Learn How Pollinators Turn Flowers to Fruits
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Noelle V. Dor is Museum Education Intern in the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden. |
As the school year winds to a close and summer settles in, The New York Botanical Garden invites us to delight our senses and our bellies with The Edible Garden: Growing and Preparing Good Food. Visitors are exposed to a wide variety of edible roots, shoots, and fruits and also experience the many ways our favorite foods go from plant to plate.
In its Flowers-to-Fruits program, the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden highlights one essential part of this transformative process: pollination. Here families explore the diversity of flower colors, shapes, and scents as well as the mutually beneficial relationships between flowers and the animals they attract.
The word pollination probably conjures up in most people the classic image of a bee buzzing from flower to flower. While this visual is definitely appropriate, many other animals—butterflies, moths, hummingbirds, bats, ants—act as important pollinators as well. They gain nourishment from the sweet nectar of flowers and, in turn, the flowers are able to change into fruits. Seeing pollination in action throughout the Garden makes me wonder how many of the fruits we eat result from this intricate plant–animal exchange.
In the Adventure Garden, children become card-carrying “pollination experts.” They craft paper pollinator puppets and hunt for flowers that their pollinators would be attracted to. A larger-than-life flower model helps to demonstrate just how pollination works. As the children explore the garden, they get up close to flowering and fruiting plants to make observational drawings.
Children and adults alike can also appreciate the wide array of edible plants growing in the Adventure Garden (and throughout the rest of the Garden) and then start or build upon their own home-based edible garden by potting up a vegetable transplant. In addition, the specially featured Farm-to-Table “play station” (see photo) inspires children to try the roles of farmer and chef.
A field notebook to be filled out by each young visitor serves as a “ticket” to an exciting exploration of Flowers-to-Fruits. Follow the map to find activities, collect stamps to track your journey, and relish the bounty of nature.
