Can't throw a stone without hitting catnip

Monday, 7/10/06

What a great class! Our first full session started out with going over the basics: basic plant anatomy, structures and functions. Now, I realize that one may be thinking, "This is a college class, why go over these basic concepts?" First off, even though I've been essentially been through several Botany 101 type classes, there were things that I learned about leaf margins and thorns and spines and flowers that I hadn't learned before. Secondly, if this class is here to give us a foundation of information that we can take to the classroom and teach our kids, we have to be able to start from scratch if necessary. We had teachers from middle school up through high school.

We also spent the morning wandering Gibraltar Island and learning how to use a dichotomous key. I dicovered that there's a LOT of catnip in the island. It is invasive by the way. Thank God cats won't swim. (Lisa calls it Gibraltar Gold. Her cats won't accept any other.)



We also collected a few things and were shown how to press them properly. It'd be a few days till they were ready though. Only one needed to be mounted on herbarium paper.

In the afternoon we checked out the Butterfly house which is right by Perry's Cave. It's a gift shop that has a lovely greenhouse in the back where they bring in cocoons and hatch butterflies and release them into the greenhouse. They fly around and dive bomb you while they seek out new plants to drink from. It's very cool. None of these butterflies are native, by the way, and they aren't allowed out. Here's a beautiful photo by my classmate, Georgia, of a butterfly.

While there, we talked about vectors for pollination. Everything from bees to beetles to birds and people and how the plants have structural adaptations to entice specific pollinators. For example, some flowers like violets have a bottom leaf that acts like a landing strip for bees or other bugs. Or plants that has a horrible fragrance to attract flies to pollinate them like skunk cabbage.

Once we were home and fed and cleaned up, we regrouped to finish pressing our collective plants for the day and called it a wrap.