Touring with the Naples Botanical Garden Interns

The week of July 1, the Corkscrew Interns have had the pleasure meeting the wonderful and very bright interns at Naples Botanical Gardens. On July 2 Brian, Alex, and I lead a tour around Corkscrew showing the backcountry and the boardwalk. We were able to make connections with the interns, and we learned a lot about them as individuals. It was a very fun experience and we hope they had just as good of a time taking the tour as we had at giving it. The following day we headed out to the Naples Botanical Gardens to receive a tour from four of the seven spectacular interns we had the pleasure of meeting.

On our tour with them, I was fascinated by their internship programs! Each intern at the Botanical Gardens comes up with their own research project, even the land management interns. Some of the projects were creating a type of basket-like catcher to obtain seeds from the Florida Scrub Roseling (Callisia ornate) that drops its seeds as soon as it opens. The purpose of this is to catch the seeds that would disappear into the scrub forest ground otherwise in order to propagate them.

There was also a dual project involving ecohydrology principles. This tested if quantity of fish in a lake had a direct effect on the water quality of that lake. One other project involved growing different genetic propagules of Persea palustris that tends to  develop a fungal disease called Laurel Wilt disease due to an invasive burrowing beetle. These propagules are grown in a controlled environment so that they do not get afflicted.

We had also taken a tour of the gardens which were absolutely gorgeous! From the amazingly kept up succulent garden to the diverse array of water lilies, and especially the lotus pond! Alex especially was very enthusiastic about the ''Lotus Effect''. This is where the leaves of the lotus being hydrophobic (and dirt repellant) would repel the water so well that you could toss droplets in the air and catch them and have them still skimming across the leaf as if it were made of plastic.

Our final experience was going into the herbarium to have the one and only George Wilder show us some pressed files he made and talk about the herbarium. George Wilder was one of the main botanists who first came to Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary to create a database for all of our species here.

So Thank you very much for that divine tour Naples Botanical Garden! Especially to Emily, Julie, Will, and Fred. We had such a fantastic time there, and will most certainly be back if not to see the exquisite gardens, but to see you devoted intelligent and truly amazing people!