From Plant Press, Vol. 22, No. 4, October 2019.
On July 24 and 31, a cohort of scientists from the National Museum of Natural History, Liz Zimmer, W. Carl Taylor, Steven Canty, Julia Steier, Erika Gardner, Shruti Dube, and Gabriel Johnson led classes of local high school students who were working at the museum this summer as Q?rius teen ambassadors and YES! interns. Here, groups of 2 or 3 students were paired with a botanist-mentor and then visited the museum's pollinator and bird gardens to learn to properly collect voucher specimens, log their observations in a field notebook, and use a dichotomous key to determine species identification. Each student was tasked with collecting a different species in the Lamiaceae. Once they returned to the Q?rius lab, the students pressed their collected materials and then mounted pre-pressed specimens on herbarium sheets and completed a herbarium sheet label.
SEM images of Monarda fistulosa (left) and Pycnanthemum muticum (Lamiaceae) (right) taken by Juan Pablo Hurtado Padilla for the summer botany class.
The students made observations of glandular trichomes and floral organs under the dissecting microscopes and compared them to SEM images prepared for the same plants by microscopy educator Juan Pablo Hurtado Padilla (Note, these SEM specimens were prepared using the methanol fixation method described by Talbot & White (2013) Plant Methods 9(36): 1-7 and it is highly recommended). By comparing trichome and pollen ultrastructure, they could begin to understand the range of morphological variation in the microanatomy of plants within the same family. This concept of taxonomic relatedness was explored further by mapping morphological features onto a phylogenetic tree of the mint family. On this phylogeny, the students identified several common herbs in the mint family such as basil, oregano, sage, thyme, spearmint, savory, rosemary, and lavender. Here we discussed what the "officinalis" species epithet means in the context of classical medicine, and students could compare their specimens with renderings printed in herbals by William Turner and Leonhart Fuchs and an Anglo-Saxon codex. The student groups were then given sets of numbered vials containing essential oils from these plants and they were asked to assign the correct name to the different oils based on their smell.
Many of these students will continue to volunteer as members of the Q-Crew and serve as teen ambassadors to museum visitors. It is our hope that this brief introduction to botany will enable them to better orient visitors exploring the various herbarium sheets and plant curiosities on display in Q?rius.
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