This post was written by Allen Centennial Garden Programs Apprentice Ava Jeffery.
The best place to teach science isn’t a classroom, but a garden full of curious children with hammers! As the Community and Educational Programs Apprentice at ACG, my goal was to infuse approachable science lessons into the pre-existing workshops the Garden was already running. I’m a recent graduate from UW–Madison, and this summer helped cement my desire to work at the intersection of plants, people, and science. I triple majored in Botany, Science Communication, and Environmental Science, and I love teaching the joy of nature and science to people of all ages.
With that goal in mind, I started by learning the ins and outs of two of our popular activities – watercolors and flower pounding. I knew I wanted to engage participants in conversation so the science felt like a discovery rather than a lecture. My confidence grew the more conversations I had, and I wanted to somehow capture what I had learned to both enhance the workshops, and have something to leave behind at the end of the summer. That led me to create one-page science sheets to display on workshop tables. These simple tools were designed to spark interest and encourage questions.
For the watercolor workshop, I focused on a topic that people are always interested in. How could they get more colors beyond what the plants had naturally provided? By introducing pH as a variable, I encouraged participants to mix baking soda or citric acid into their paints to create completely new colors. I had a pair of sports-obsessed young boys in one of my watercolor workshops, and they were determined to make bright blue so they could paint the logo of their little league team. They were definitely more interested in baseball than botany, but I was glad to see them engaging with the workshop in a way that suited their pre-existing interests. They tried for several minutes, and just when frustration was starting to creep in, a different student shouted that they had found the secret recipe to make blue! They had been hard at work with their paint and baking soda, and it had paid off. That student gladly came over and shared how to create the color, and soon, the whole table had more than enough blue watercolor for their flowers, skies, and baseball logos. Making garden watercolors typically turned into more than just an artsy way for people to get hands on with plants, it became a collaborative, joyful experiment.
Expanding upon the flower pounding workshop gave me the chance to draw on my thesis research about stomata. Stomata are a plant’s microscopic “mouths” that open and close to allow gas exchange for photosynthesis. These tiny openings on the underside of leaves also create little escape routes for the pigments inside, which makes one side of the leaf work better for pounding than the other. I loved asking participants to test both sides and then talk through why one came out brighter. This activity is easy to adapt for any age group and often sparked broader conversations about how leaves protect themselves, why some plants have fuzzier textures than others, and the many ways plants vary in nature. These conversations would often serve as merely a jumping off point.
A prime example of adapting our Garden programs for diverse audiences is Grandparents University. For two days, a grandparent comes into the Garden with their grandchild, and we run through our whole list of workshops. Engaging both an elementary age student and an older grandparent in the same lessons could pose a bit of a challenge at times, but conversations about plants are easy to scale up or down, or pivot depending on the group’s questions and interests. One GPU session we spent quite a bit of time discussing phenological timing and nature journaling with a quieter, more thoughtful group, while another week we doubled our flower pounding time to give our more energetic students a longer hands-on work time. Learning to be flexible to allow a group to have the best possible experience was a very important skill to learn.
These science additions gave me the chance to share something I’m passionate about, while also building my confidence in teaching and adapting content for different audiences. While the science sheets and conversations added a lot to each workshop, I knew that after I left, someone else might not always be there to facilitate those lessons. I wanted to expand upon what I had done so far to create something useful, educational, and long-lasting.
That idea blossomed into a new project: a flower pounding banner. People always had so many questions about which plants work best, or how to get better results, so I wanted to create a visual resource to answer those questions and showcase the potential of the craft. It took some trial and error to figure out the right size, shape, and materials, and of course, I had to sharpen my own pounding skills to make sure the final product was display-worthy!
Over the course of several weeks, I created a template for my design, then practiced pounding each plant, before cutting the fabric and finalizing the layout. Each sample was created on its own fabric rectangle, which was pinned to the backing. This allows the samples to be swapped out based on seasonal availability. I also dyed the banner fabric using coreopsis grown right here in the garden, which ties in beautifully with our natural dyeing workshops.
A later addition to the banner was a wash-fastness guide, inspired by the number one question we always got: “So, can I wash this?” After hearing that a few dozen times, I figured a visual answer would be more helpful than my go-to response of “Well… sort of!” Now participants can see for themselves how certain flowers hold up over time and use. I am hopeful that this visual aid can continue to serve the Garden for summers to come.
Looking back, this summer has been all about bringing science to life in a fun, creative, and approachable way. From explaining how pH affects flower pigments to showing curious kids the secret mouths of leaves, I practiced science communication in its most joyful form. I leave Allen Centennial Garden with a deeper love of connecting people and plants and a new confidence in sharing science. I hope that every visitor who hammers a petal, dips a brush, or pauses to read a science sheet leaves with a spark of curiosity about the incredible plants around them.
