Las Cruces

The Wilson Botanical Garden has about 3000 planted species, and another 100 that have spread in from the adjacent forest preserve. They also supposedly have the 2^nd largest collection of palms in the world. I was not overly impressed with their labelling, however, as it seemed that none of the trees I was interested in (I think I found a Psidium cattleianum. hiss…) nor any of the tree ferns were labelled. I found a Coffea sp., which was familiar, as well as a Podocarpus sp. That looked nothing like the ones I have in my yard. We were also all impressed with the morphological diversity of Euphorbia.

There were a few interesting bird species in the garden, especially visible from the porch outside of the dining hall. We saw Fiery-billed Araçaris, mot-mots, honeycreepers and several species of tanager.

On out second-to-last day Matt put us through a practicum of identifying the plants in the garden to family (or a few to genus). I wasn’t worried at first, got worried as it got closer, then ended up doing pretty well on the test, only misspelling a few things. I think it ended up being good that we had the practicum, as it pushed us to get out and explore the garden, although we spent probably a bit too much time inside compiling study guides.

One of the most appreciated aspects of this station was the laundry service. Many of us were down to our last outfit and has worn shirts for multiple days sweating like pig iron, so the opportunity to wash all of our clothes and have loads of fresh, clean laundry was heavenly.

One evening, before the 'What is Science?' discussion, Lars and I walked in to town, a few kilometres along the ridge. We managed to bring back two tubs of ice cream and several chocolate bars.