… the sedges and grasses along side the trail. (This was when my hearing was still acute enough to detect such high-frequency sounds.) It took me a while, but based on the emphatic commotion, I … are technically known as insectivorous mammals. Insectivores are critters that depend, to a large extent, on invertebrates, mostly insects, for their survival. I wasn’t sure which … in length, with the tail being about a quarter of the length of the body and head combined. It is by far the largest of the shrews we will see here. They are generally a velvety, dark gray …
Type: Blog
… Chicago Botanic Garden turns its educational programming attention—as well as its decorations—to the only plants that stay green through the season: the evergreens. We teach class after class of school children how to identify different kinds of evergreens by their needles and cones. It’s a lesson in … the words “evergreen” and “conifer” —they are not the same thing!—and every year, someone is confused. I blame Christmas trees. The “Christmas Tree” intersects both of the sets …
Type: Blog
… ever before, and discover vital information. “One of the problems we have with soil science is that you can’t see into it so you really depend on a lot of techniques and methods to work out what’s happening,” explained Dr. Egerton-Warburton, associate conservation scientist … ecology. She has used high-throughput sequencing (also termed Next Generation Sequencing) to identify more than 120 species of mycorrhizal fungi in a single plant community. In …
Type: Blog
… a fair bit of brewing myself. Despite seemingly endless beer varieties, beer making boils down to just a few basic ingredients. So what’s really happening during the major steps in the brewing … process? And what do all those colorful beer-making terms mean? Malted (germinated) barley is used as a base in beer and scotch. Photo via Finlay McWalter, Wikimedia Commons. GFDL A … carbohydrates will feed the yeasts during fermentation. The brewer doesn’t want the grain seed to completely germinate, though—if it did, the embryo would “eat” all of the food reserves, …
Type: Blog
… architect. The Chinese Garden of Perfect Brightness. Tie them together and the result is part of the intriguing back story of the Chicago Botanic Garden—which starts long before the … of the wetlands and, with another landscape architect, Geoffrey Rausch, produced a master plan to transform the land into island gardens and a series of lakes. Unlike some of his peers who … Garden began construction, Rausch recalled, “I have never seen anything quite as bad as that site. Literally, it was burning.” He was referring to the trash, raw sewage, weeds, and abandoned …
Type: Blog
… flower. The corm of an Amorphophallus titanum : after a dozen or so years, it’s large enough to produce a bloom! Spike just keeps on growing at the Semitropical Greenhouse, and visitors are … about the coming bloom from the docents posted there, one of the most frequently ask questions is, “How could you tell this time that Spike was a flower?” How could we tell that Spike was going to be a flower? It’s tricky. Even the most experienced botanists have a hard time determining …
Type: Blog
… at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Following the illuminated trail, perhaps you stood to admire the distant and beautiful Elizabeth Hubert Malott Japanese Garden. You likely saw a … in the lake, and if you looked closely, you might have noticed that there’s actually no way to get to that island. Did you wonder why that is? Horaijima, or the Island of Everlasting Happiness, represents paradise—a place inaccessible …
Type: Blog
… awe walk , when I’m looking for unexpected beauty, those bits of color bring my attention to the bigger world around me. My work with Budburst , the Chicago Botanic Garden’s community … science project, has made me appreciate these moments even more. Budburst encourages everyone to observe and record how plants change with the seasons. The spots of green usually come from … exposed branch structure of a deciduous tree, naked of its leaves. The ingenuity of leaf loss is protection, preventing branches from bearing too much weight and breaking when it snows. All I …
Type: Blog
… The flowers are gone, the trees are bare, now what to photograph? Birds, of course! Winter is a great time to get some fabulous shots of winter birds. One huge bonus is that there are no leaves on the …
Type: Blog
… My daughters love fresh grapefruit—and birds. So we decided to keep the rind and make a bird feeder. This is a fun, easy project. The grapefruit sections have been cut and eaten; the rind is ready to become our bird feeder. To make a grapefruit bird feeder, you will need the following: Half a …
Type: Blog
