Yesterday, by some incredible stroke of luck, every single kid in my Kids Crew class found a four leaf clover in the Garden.

It had been a pretty unstructured day — they’d weeded and fertilized their vegetable patches, planted watermelon and pumpkin seeds, kicked aside a rock and then watched as the ants underneath scurried to tug their blobby larvae back into their underground tunnels. We were all heading back into the Greenhouse when one kid spotted the first one. “I FOUND A FOUR LEAF CLOVER!” The rest of the kids all dropped to the ground to look, then just as quickly popped up again with a chorus of “me too!”s.

There must be some mutation in the patch. Is it any less special to find a lucky totem in a clover patch that’s genetically predisposed to growing one? In a children’s garden, where the purpose is to convince children of the wonder of plants, to hope that they’ll feel a visceral connection to nature when they’re young so they’ll want to preserve it when they’re older, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with spreading a little magic. I’m going to start propagating. 

No, it’s just a giant earthworm that the kids found in the digging bins today. Fun worm facts:

*  Earthworms have tiny bristles called “setae” that they use to grab onto things. When they slurp quickly back into the soil, they’re pulling with their setae.

* Earthworms like this one mostly eat soil, and they live in soil. Red Wigglers are smaller and redder, and they eat and live in piles of food scraps, so they’re great for compost bins. I think of the bigger nightcrawlers as “finishing worms” who move in once the red wigglers have taken care of the scraps. 

Most temperate plants need a winter rest. So did this blog, it would seem. Today I got our tiny Venus Fly Traps out of the fridge, where they’d spent the past 4 months wrapped in sphagnum moss inside a sealed Ziploc bag. The plants need the winter months to slow down their metabolism and wait out the chill, otherwise they won’t come back as robustly the next year. The traps are gone, all that’s left is one tiny leaf just starting to emerge. 

I’ve also had to take some time away from the blog as I’ve moved into a new position here at the Museum, from teaching and gardening to managing science ed and horticulture. I’ll continue to post as much as I can, but for now there are lots of other ways to keep up with us — the Museum has a new Education Blog which many of us educators and curators are writing for, and I’ve been posting photos from programs and pinning inspiring shots on the Museum’s Pinterest page. This past week we’ve packed in the programs for our week-long Celebrate Earth festival during the kids’ spring break, and we’ve posted pictures from 50 separate programs during that week alone.

What I’m saying is, our metabolism is speeding up again, even if you wouldn’t know it from the one tiny leaf breaking through the surface.

Mind Your Beeswax!

Yesterday’s program had a little bit of everything. Beekeeper Emily Vaughn joined us for a Q and A session and brought lots of beekeeping equipment for the kids to try on. Tiffany dressed up as a bee, led the kids in the pollination waggle dance, and had the kids throw velcro pollen balls until her sweater was covered with them. Between the beeswax candles that the kids rolled and Emily’s smoke bellows, the greenhouse smelled like a waxy, woodsy campfire. 

One kid knew all about bees and nectar and pollen, so I assumed he was a bug guy. “Do you like bees?” An emphatic no. “Bugs?” “No.” “What do you like?” “Monster trucks.” So we talked about our favorite (Gravedigger, obviously) and he went on his way. What a job this is some days.

Let’s make candles, dudes.

We’ve raced snails before. Today Marcos Stafne, the Museum’s awesome new Education Director, suggested that we up the ante.

I hate leaf rubbings. Am I allowed to say that as a garden educator? They’re so lame. I mean they can be great for showing leaf texture — rub a crayon over a piece of paper on top of a leaf and you reveal all those tiny leaf veins that can be hard for kids to see. But in the fall, it’s all about that brassy explosion of color, so why approximate that fall color with crayons when you can extract the leaf pigments themselves and make art with those?

The Process

Last year we tried folding leaves inside construction paper and pounding the red anthocyanin pigments from our fiery red Japanese Maple tree into the paper with a stone. It worked fairly well, but the paper got chewed up between the rock and the asphalt. This year, we improved upon the design, giving each kid a clipboard as a pounding surface and a protective envelope of card stock to take the blows. We found that cheap white muslin absorbs the color much more readily than paper, so each kid got a bandana-sized square of fabric for a canvas. Fold the leaf inside the fabric, fold the fabric inside the card stock, hold that all in place under the clip of the clipboard, and let the kids pound away, lifting a corner to peek in on their progress every so often. The results will fade over time, but you can set the color by running the fabric under a warm iron for a minute or two.

5 Reasons Why Leaf Pounding is Better Than Leaf Rubbing:

1) The results are just so beautiful. Leaf rubbings look like crafts, pounded leaf prints look like art. Even the leaves themselves look great afterwards.

2) It is noisy. It lets kids, who are shushed twenty times a day, make loud, raucous noise and channel their energy into something that feels productive. In our class of 15 kids, the pounding started chaotically, then all the kids started pounding in the same steady rhythm, then we built a whole complex percussive beat, then the security guard came down to check to make sure someone wasn’t trying to break into the building. 

3) It is a little dangerous. Kids know that they could easily smash their fingers, so they learn not to smash their fingers. Not smashing ones fingers is an important life skill.

4) It is a powerful tool for teaching about the chemical processes behind the color change in leaves. Kids can take a magnifying glass to their work and see how the pounded splotches of green pigments are clustered near the base of the leaves. They can visualize how the green chlorophyll is draining out and uncovering the red pigments underneath. 

5) Capturing pigments feels like winning. “I got some chlorophyll! Check out my anthocyanins!” 

Pretty surreal moment yesterday: Eli and his grandfather came into the lobby. Eli, all of 2 or 3 years old, was carrying a small bird in his right hand. Eli was gentle as could be, and the bird sat there, alive, but perfectly still. I assumed it was stunned or sick, that maybe it had flown into the windows or fallen from a tree, so my first thought was to get it back outside, find a cozy bush, wish it luck, and wash Eli’s hands. 

Eli’s grandfather said he’d really like to put the bird in the museum garden instead, where a stray cat might be less likely to get it. I really should have insisted. To get to the garden, you have to walk at least 100 feet through the museum, and walking through a museum with a wild bird in a two year old’s hand is not a good idea. It could have flown away, getting lost in this cavernous museum, leaving no trace but bird droppings all over our nice exhibits.

But Eli charmed me like he charmed that bird, and I took his other hand and we walked down the rainbow tunnel to the garden.

Minutes after the video was shot, Grover (we named him Grover, after Eli’s t-shirt) flew out of the greenhouse and into the garden, healthy as could be. I think he’s a winter wren. Any birders out there want to corroborate that?

First things first, we were extremely lucky in the storm. A few branches came down, but otherwise the Museum and the garden made it through unharmed. Some of our museum staff and many of our visitors weren’t so lucky. Please donate or volunteer if you can.

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When it’s your job to convince kids that plants are cool, Mimosa pudica is your secret weapon. This unassuming little guy responds dramatically to the slightest touch. It folds up at night, and you can blow it out like a birthday candle. 

That’s pretty complicated for a third grader to wrap his/her mind around, so when I teach a Gardening with Greta program about these dancing plants on Monday November 12th, I think I’ll use a water balloon as a prop, squeezing the bottom to show how pressure on top would force the stem downward, then letting it equalize to show how the plant rights itself again.

The mystery is why Mimosa pudica acts the way it does. Reaction to insects? Herbivores? I’ll collect hypotheses from the kids next week. 

These plants are totally showstoppers, but they’re not perfect as classroom plants. The tough seed coat makes germination a bit unreliable, so some kids will get sprouts before others. Mine often get whiteflies, which can be controlled by having a fan blow on them all the time, but then the leaflets stay folded up, which defeats the purpose. In my experience, plants that are touched constantly won’t survive more than a few weeks. I’m going to try this year to stagger plantings every few weeks so I always have reinforcements.

* The more complicated answer is that when the plant is stimulated, electrical signals zap tiny gates in the membranes of pulvini cells (cells at the base of a plant stem), opening some gates so that potassium ions flow in, closing others. Potassium ions are normally surrounded by water, and when they squeeze through the tiny gate in the cell membrane, they leave those water molecules outside of the cell. Water wants to be equal across a membrane, so water rushes into the cell through osmosis, making that cell swell with the added pressure. The reverse process happens on the underside of the stem, and all the water inside those cells drains out. When the top side of the stem has swollen and the underside has wilted, the stem swings downward.

At least that’s as far as I understand it. Biochemists, correct me if I’m wrong!

One thing I think this blog is missing is a real sense of the broader spaces of the garden. The garden is all tight corners and dappled shade, so we’re always climbing on top of raised beds and hoisting the camera high to get the shot, and the camera angle just never seems wide enough to take it all in. Enter Tiffany today and her magic PhotoSynth app on her phone. The app stitches photos together into panoramas, and for the first time, I think these pictures actually capture the spaces I work in everyday.

Here’s the west side of the garden, facing south, with the museum at your back, and the greenhouse to the left. The white cylinder is where we’ve been watching caterpillars morph into butterflies.

Here’s the east side facing north:

Here’s the tunnel that connects the two spaces, facing east (this was shot in April, when the wisteria was in bloom):

And here’s the space I have my eye on next. It’s an unused storage space, about 2,000 square feet, just to the north of the east side garden. Talk about a blank canvas!