A Visit to Brooklyn Botanical Gardens- Autumn is Coming!

We've all felt the shift. It's coming! Autumn. 

It dropped down to 60 degrees Sunday night! 

Ehhh-  I wasn't ready for that. I've been a bit anxious about the shift. To me it just means soon winter will be here and I am very far from ready for that. 

But! This week has been beautiful. So, I have come to terms with accepting Autumn's arrival. After all, it is the most beautiful(maybe tied with Spring, in my opinion) and definitely the best smelling season. This week really was like someone hit a switch and boom the season changed. Last week was a crazy, muggy, heat wave. Monday brought cool nights, fresh drier air, clear skies and that smell! You can smell the leaves! I could be making that up but I feel like it's the leaves I'm smelling. 

I want to get the most of this season change so I decided to visit the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens for a stroll through their Native Flora Garden. I am ashamed to say that this was my first visit (and I live very close by)! But I wanted to get in there and check everything out now so I can see how everything changes in the next few weeks. 

On Sunday, I went and took a guided walk with Uli Lorimer, the curator of the new section of the Native Flora Garden. It was a great informative intro to the garden. Here is some of what I saw:

Jewelweed

 Jewelweed, Impatiens capensis, also goes by the name 'touch-me-not' because of it's awesome seedpods that when touched uncoil like a spring and shoot out their seeds. Very cool. 

End of season blooms in the understory of the old section of the Native Flora Garden. The bees are busy gathering as much as they can before the cold comes. 

Entering the meadow

The meadow is the newer expanded section of the Native Flora Garden. On the walk, I learned that most of the plants in this new area were started from seeds collected in the wild from the surrounding NY- NJ area.

The grasses! Autumn is the time for ornamental grasses to shine. They are dramatic wispy rays of sunshine. The meadow has so many different species such as Little Bluestem, Schizachyrium scoparium, which turns reddish and then bronze later in the fall. 

I spent twenty minutes chasing around some monarch butterflies trying to get a photo but this is as close as one would let me. It's there! That small sliver in the upper middle of the photo on the white flowers. 

I did find a monarch chrysalis though on some Tall Boneset, Eupatorium altissimum. It was near the swamp milkweed, which is the monarch caterpillar's food source. 

Some Milkweed bugs going to town on the milkweed.

The Eupatorium plants smelled sooo good that ALL the insects had to visit. I took a video to show how active it was but I'm not sure it'll work here. 

Let's see:

Here are a few other random facts I learned on my walk:

• Spicebush is the sole larval host of the spicebush swallowtail. That means no spicebush, no swallowtail.
• Native Americans used the resin of the Sweetgum tree medicinally.
• May Apples, which are dormant now but bloom in the spring, have little low hanging fruits that box turtles eat and then spread the seed.
• Cherry birch is actually what they used to make root beer from, not sassafrass like I always thought,
• The pond in the Native Flora Garden is no longer covered in algae but now is covered with the smallest flowering plant on Earth, Wolffia.

Scientist Spotlight: George Washington Carver

Earlier this year, I attended Making Brooklyn Bloom at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. I had the pleasure of getting to hear Onika Abraham’s powerful talk. The talk was in the spirit of Sankofa, to memorialize Kristopher Morgan Powell, local Bronx historian who passed away last winter. He was the creator and writer for Bronx River Sankofa. Sankofa is an Akan word used in Ghana that translates to “go back and fetch it”. She explained that this word is from a proverb stating “It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten” which is to represent the importance from learning from the past.

In our first edition of Scientist Spotlight, I'd like to highlight an important scientist from the past whom Ms. Abraham also spoke about in her talk: George Washington Carver.

George Washington Carver 

George Washington Carver was born in 1864 in Missouri. His mother was a slave owned by Susan and Moses Carver. When George was just a baby, his mother was kidnapped by slave raiders. Around this same time that he became an orphan, slavery was abolished with the 13th amendment. The Carver’s raised George and his brother James. As George got older and wanted an education, he had to travel in order to find it because there were no schools for black children where they lived.

He eventually became the first African-American to study at Iowa State Agricultural College in 1891. He combined his love for art and science to study botany. He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1894 and a graduate degree in 1896. His bachelor’s thesis was “Plants as Modified by Man”. His graduate studies included in depth work on plant pathology.

George working in his lab.

Carver excelled in his studies and became the first African-American expert in his field. He was contacted by Booker T. Washington to head the agricultural department at the all-black Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Here, Carver conducted agricultural research and also conducted “some of his most significant work–seeking solutions to the burden of debt and poverty that enmeshed landless black farmers.” (1) His goal was to fix the relentless cycle of debt and poverty experienced by black farmers dependent upon sharecropping and cotton.

In the effort to create more economically sustainable lives for poor farmers, Carver pioneered a mobile classroom to bring lessons on better farming practices to the farms.

He “gave demonstrations on such topics as using native clays for paints, increasing soil fertility without commercial fertilizers, and growing alternative crops along with the ubiquitous cotton. To enhance the attractiveness of such crops as cow peas, sweet potatoes, and peanuts, Carver developed a variety of uses for each. Peanuts especially appealed to him as an inexpensive source of protein that did not deplete the soil as much as cotton did”. (1)

Mobile Classroom

As he became more widely known, he used his fame to travel through the South to promote racial equality.Carver later became more famous for his work with peanuts and peanut oil, which became widely used in massage for people with medical issues, such as polio. He was thought to ‘have the cure’ and people from all over sought him out.

During the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, “people from all over the world asked Carver for agricultural advice because he was able to show farmers how to maximize plant production and improve the soil at very little cost”. (2)

George Washington Carver, born into the most unfortunate circumstances, lived a frugal life dedicated to helping improve the lives of others. On his grave was written, He could have added fortune to fame, but caring for neither, he found happiness and honor in being helpful to the world.

In the spirit of Sankofa, I think George Washington Carver represents an important part of the past which we should look back and learn from.

A painting by Betsy Graves Reyneau of Carver cross pollinating flowers.

1- http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/george-washington-carver

2- http://shs.umsystem.edu/historicmissourians/name/c/carver/

More info from : 

http://www.biography.com/people/george-washington-carver-9240299#tuskegee-institute

http://www.nps.gov/museum/exhibits/tuskegee/gwcwagon.htm