Noelle V. Dor is Museum Education Intern in the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden.
The delicate unfurling of fresh leaves…
The kaleidoscopic flowering of plants small and large…
The courtship dances of birds and bees…
The cycling of sunshine and rain to nourish new life…
There is hardly a more poetic season than spring. All of nature is waking up and bursting forth in variously colored, scented, textured, and melodic ways. It’s no wonder that we, too, are moved to find refreshment for our own lives. When immersed in a space of natural beauty and vitality, some of us are even motivated to translate those experiences into artistic expressions. Inspired by well-versed poet and gardener Emily Dickinson, the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden has seamlessly blended nature and art to spark this dynamically creative process among visitors to the exhibition Emily Dickinson’s Garden: The Poetry of Flowers.
Noelle V. Dor is Museum Education Intern in the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden.
As the days grow longer and the first signs of spring emerge throughout the landscape, the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden is heating up with Chocolate and Vanilla Adventures. While this flavorful exploration focuses on the botanical origins of these two popular food ingredients, it also offers a taste of cultural history.
From ice cream and milkshakes to candy and cakes, we learn early on to identify chocolate and vanilla as standards of deliciousness. But there’s much more beneath that sweet surface. Before the rise of dark chocolate as a healthier alternative to common milk chocolate, few people knew that pure cacao (chocolate) is actually bitter. As well, the taste of real vanilla is just as obscure, due to its high cost and limited usage in mainstream food products.
Considering how chocolate and vanilla have been modified, added to, and substituted, it’s no wonder many of us have no clue about their plant origins! As both an educator and a learner at the Children’s Adventure Garden, I’m thrilled this program can bring everyone back to the “root” of the matter, so to speak.
Noelle V. Dor is Museum Education Intern in the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden.
The holiday season is here, and the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden has cooked up a celebration of sugar, spice, and everything nice with its annual Gingerbread Adventures. While mostly everyone is familiar with the story of the Gingerbread Man and has seen (if not decorated and eaten) gingerbread cookies, many may not know the botanical and historical background of this favorite winter treat. I certainly didn’t.
As an intern in the Children’s Adventure Garden, not only do I get to work behind the scenes of this wildly popular program, I also get to join in on the adventure! Believe it or not, my previous experience with gingerbread was limited to enjoying the follies of Gingy, the gingerbread cookie character in the movie Shrek, and to helping create the “Gingerbread City” scene for a Candyland-themed high school play.
Japanese Autumn Adventures Offers “Passport” of Fun
Noelle V. Dor is Museum Education Intern in the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden.
As the Northern Hemisphere inches away from the sun and life turns inward, The New York Botanical Garden is under way with Kiku in the Japanese Autumn Garden, a celebration of autumn and Japanese culture. While Kiku pays homage to Japan’s annual Festival of Happiness, which honors the fall bloom and seemingly perfect beauty of the chrysanthemum flower, the Everett Children Adventure Garden’s Japanese Autumn Adventures highlights an equally important plant in East Asian cultures: Camellia sinensis, commonly known as tea.
Of course, tea is immensely popular in the United States, too. Many people, however, know very little about tea such as the fact that “herbal teas” are not truly tea at all, or that white, green, black, and oolong teas are all derived from a single plant species.
Delving into the world of tea during my research and preparation for this program has deepened my fascination for the myriad ways in which plants and society intertwine over time. My interest in traditional Japanese culture—inspired and nurtured by various school projects and courses—made me even more excited to have this amazing opportunity to help others explore and enjoy a unique mixture of nature, art, and social customs.
During Japanese Autumn Adventures, in addition to learning all about tea and participating in a simulated tea ceremony, young visitors and their families get to do classic Japanese crafts such as fish printing (gyotaku) and paper-folding (origami) to create maple samaras that really spin!
At the beginning of their adventure, children will make their own field notebook, or “passport,” granting them access to different “cities” (activity stations) and allowing them to keep a record of their experiences as they “travel” through Japan. Before departing, everyone should stop by the wishing shrine and leave an ema (Japanese for “wish”).
My wish is for all hearts to be filled with love and joy. What’s yours?
Kevin Peterson, Assistant Manager of the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden, is responsible for the design and fabrication of exhibits in the Adventure Garden.
When the Garden began planning The Edible Garden exhibit, I immediately began thinking of doing something with the farm-to-table movement for the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden.
We live in a time where so many kids (and adults) don’t appreciate where their food really comes from. We simply aren’t conscious of it. This was the perfect opportunity to reinforce the fact that before our food goes into boxes, appears in grocery stores, or is served for dinner, the earth has to grow it, farmers have to tend to the crops, and people have to harvest those yields.
The Farm to Table exhibit aims to bring that background into the foreground so kids can develop a more complete understanding of what they take part in every time they eat.
Cafe Terra is a joyful place where kids learn by being, doing, and having fun. Overalls hang in the barn like the ones I bought here (waiting to be worn) surrounded by real plants while a windmill stands tall against the crows overhead. In the cafe, they can don a chef’s hat and slice up play veggies for a fresh meal—and then serve it up in the cafe!
Katie Bronson is Gardener in the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden.
Horticulture staff on the Outdoor Gardens crew welcome spring in the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden by dressing the five animal topiaries—three caterpillars, a ladybug, and a frog—in colorful Viola coats. The topiaries delight visitors year round but seem to bring a special joy after a long winter and before the spring bulb and flowering tree season gets into full swing.
What exactly does it take to make a caterpillar bloom? Many hands, many plants, and a lot of time.
Although it takes about seven days to plant all five forms, the process starts months in advance. During the summer, we drew designs and selected the varieties of violas to use. The staff at the Nolen Greenhouses for Living Collections started growing the plants in late fall to be in flower and ready to plant by mid-March. Turning a drawn design into a planting involves a little bit of math and a lot of eyeballing. As we do the installation, we keep track of how many plants of each variety we have and how many we have used to ensure there are enough to complete the design as planned.
Before planting, the topiaries look like soil-filled wire cages in the shape of an animal. Planting in the steel structure is pretty much like planting in the ground except that sometimes we are standing on ladders and sometimes we have to lie on our backs to plant. To achieve an instant effect, the plants are planted much closer together than they would be in the ground.
Soil knives are our tool of choice, because they are flat and narrow and cause less soil to fall out of the structure as we dig. We don’t usually need to replace the soil that falls out, because the new plants take up that space—as the plants grow, they root into the structure. Many plants are planted practically upside down in the structure. When gravity wants to pull our plants out of place, we use landscape staples to pin the root balls.
After planting is completed, areas that have lost soil are stuffed with damp sphagnum moss to keep the roots from drying out. Irrigation systems are installed inside each structure, but we water by hand right after planting and then usually on a schedule of once or twice a week to supplement the daily irrigation.
Can you guess how many violas it takes to make a caterpillar bloom? To find out the answer…
Gardening and Crafts Welcome the New Season Annie Novak is coordinator of the Children’s Gardening Program in the Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden.
Spring is a waking season. Several days ago the staff and volunteers of the Howell Family Garden gathered for breakfast to welcome the start of 2009 and swap stories of our winters. Our true “new year” starts in March. Fueled by a little food and conversation, we set to work hauling compost, trimming back leaves, and assisting Dave Vetter, our head gardener, in his mighty task of starting several hundred vegetable seedlings.
Although in nature it’s usually the fall we think of as a time of great transformation, spring surprised us this year by giving the Family Garden a bit of a facelift. Three years ago we built a Lenape wigwam, last year we built a green-roofed rabbit hutch, and this year Dave Vetter, Family Garden Assistant, and Han Yu Hung, Children’s Gardening Program Garden Coordinator, are humming happily inside our new greenhouse. The Family Garden’s newly built “hoop house” was designed over the winter by Toby Adams, Family Garden Manager. Admiring it for the first time, staff and volunteers ooh’d and aah’d and promised not to accidentally tear open its double-plastic sidewalls with a careless pass of a garden fork. As the day grew cooler with sharp winds, we huddled inside, where the air was warm and soil-scented. Maybe next spring our new building will be an apiary, where thousands of friendly bees can pollinate our vegetables, as they do all over the cities of Chicago, Toronto, and Seattle.
Watching the garden awaken is, to me, the best part of a temperate climate. I admire the flourish of a season like the fall, which gives way to winter with dramatic color. But I’m happier in the springtime when the warmth sneaks up on you, with delicate splashes of color in our green garlic shoots or the swollen buds of tulips and magnolia trees. We have robins all over the garden now, too, as the worms begin to move again through the gradually warming soil. And hurrah: Last Saturday, our visitors and families were back! The Children’s Gardening Program begins with new lessons on green living and healthy eating and old favorites celebrating the harvest and learning more about springtime birds and bulbs. Our afternoon programming, Family Garden Adventures, begins tomorrow, April 4, with the aptly named theme “Wake up, Garden!” Families are welcome to join us for gardening and craft activities from 1:30 to 5:30 p.m.
Recently, we read that the White House is building an organic vegetable garden on its South Lawn. Several of our staff and volunteers had clipped the article from the newspaper, and over our breakfast at our garden cleanup, we studied the garden plans. Would it be possible, I asked, to dedicate one of the children’s plots to mirror that of the Obama family’s? Toby agreed. (Although wouldn’t it be great if Michelle Obama’s plans emulated ours?) But truthfully, the best part of the Family Garden is how many hands go into helping us grow. Even a full White House staff can’t hope to compete with that!
There is hardly a more poetic season than spring. All of nature is waking up and bursting forth in variously colored, scented, textured, and melodic ways. It’s no wonder that we, too, are moved to find refreshment for our own lives. When immersed in a space of natural beauty and vitality, some of us are even motivated to translate those experiences into artistic expressions. Inspired by well-versed poet and gardener Emily Dickinson, the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden has seamlessly blended nature and art to spark this dynamically creative process among visitors to the exhibition Emily Dickinson’s Garden: The Poetry of Flowers. 
