A museum of plants
 New York City has long been called an urban jungle, so it actually makes some sense that there’s also a real jungle within its borders. Yes, the hot, humid rainforest kind. It doesn’t grow wild on our city streets, but behind glass in the New York Botanical Gardens, as young scientists in Class 4 discovered yesterday.
Their trip to the Botanical Gardens was the culmination of a recent study of botany. “They’ve been learning the differences between vascular and non-vascular plants and about the classification of plants, and they’ve looked at onion cells under a microscope,” teacher Christy Glynn said.
That’s all well and good. But does it compare to seeing an actual cacao tree, the plant responsible for something 4th graders seem to study anyway — chocolate? Or to turning over a fern and feeling its spores? Visiting a rainforest can bring botany to life in a way that nothing else can.
Beyond their local exploration of the rainforest, the young botanists spent some of their time at the gardens doing hands-on activities — in this case, dissecting lima bean seeds. “We all love lima beans, don’t we?” teased one of the Botanical Gardens instructors. “Nooooo!” was the predictable response, and yet the girls befriended the beans enough to have a close look at seed coats; the cotyledon, or food for the plant; and the embryo. One student even voiced a theory whose validity you may have to test yourself: “Lima beans smell like cucumbers and uncooked pancakes.”
The girls also completed leaf rubbings to examine the leaves’ veins and then dissected flower blossoms to look at stamens, sepals, petals and pistils, recording everything they saw in a field guide. They then retired to the staunchly green grounds of the Botanical Gardens for lunch and some postprandial sketching of plants. With a rainforest behind them, the girls could devote the sunny afternoon to that most scientific of tasks: close observation of the wonderful world they live in.
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