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Introduction

Kitty: Plants Are Up To Something is a permanent exhibit, in our conservatory for botanical science at the Huntington Botanical Gardens, in southern California. It was conceived as a synthesis between our regular beautiful conservatory, and the focus on process of a science center. So we wanted to take our collections and use them to their fullest, interpretative potential. Get people engaged with those collections in a hands-on, interactive way.

It's 16,000 square feet, and it's a steel and glass building. There are four galleries, and about 56 interactive exhibits. We have three habitat galleries: rain forest, cloud forest, and bog, and the plant lab, which is in one wing, and about half the exhibits are in the plant lab.

We have 500,000 visitors a year, 70% of them come expressly to see the gardens. So they come with this interest in plants. We wanted to use this interest in plants and satisfy their curiosity, and get them engaged in the scientific study of plants.

Who comes to the Huntington Conservatory?

Kitty: Botanical gardens largely have adult visitors, that's the audience: it’s not a children's museum. We have a children's garden, but most of the visitors to our botanical garden and most to botanical gardens are adults. That's a major audience of interest to me.

We designed the conservatory for children in late elementary and early middle school. We designed it as an invitation for them to practice adult science. What we found when we were prototyping, bringing things out to the schools to work with the kids, is they were thrilled to work with real scientific equipment, and they really want to be adults. You forget how desperate you were to be treated as an adult when you were twelve. They want that, they're really eager for it, and I personally want them to be adults. I want them to be scientifically literate adults for the rest of their lives.

All of our exhibits are designed with content at that age level, but the approach and the aesthetic is respectful of their desire to be treated as adults. And we did not aim it at adult visitors; it wasn't even an implicit goal. Implicit goal was that it had to be interesting to do for adults.

How do the younger kids react to these spaces?

Kitty: They're the easiest. Because they're just playing, so they are water tables in their space. Head Start is very organized, and they do a lot of professional development, so they had some of these things in here. The difference with Head Start is that no one had done the “meaning making” and explained the value to them. Now the teachers are more intentional when they do water play, when they bring out little bugs to show the kids. When they read, you know, really paying attention, "Do they really understand the vocabulary in the book?" That's been for the little kids, the little kids are easy to get excited and we're creating the barriers there. Even though they haven't seen a caterpillar, they don't know to be afraid of the caterpillar. We sort of do that as we go along. So they've been the easiest.

Where did the idea for Plants Are Up to Something come from?

Kitty: The director of the gardens, Jim Folsom, went to an ASTC (Association of Science- Technology Centers) workshop on developing science centers. Probably 15 years ago. He's always wanted to use the gardens for educational purposes as well as aesthetic purposes. That was a new idea at the Huntington for a lot of living collections, I think, to really get that full educational potential out of them. So he went to this workshop and decided that he really wanted to build a science center, but with real plants.

What were some of the challenges you encountered in developing the exhibit?

Kitty: When we first started our project, we brought together a group of advisors who said to us, "You know, people will touch the plants." And we said, "Yeah, people touch the plants now and they're not learning anything." And they said, "You know, you're going to have to maintain the plants." I was like, "Well, we maintain plants now, and people aren't learning anything from them." So, in some ways, it's not that different from what we're doing. We're just getting much more value out of these collections.

In other ways, we have enormous amounts of daily upkeep that are less plant-related in the exhibit elements. We made a decision to invest in the experience that the visitors would have, that we would create things that needed daily, and even hourly upkeep. So, using the plants requires getting fresh flowers everyday. We plant the flowers around close by so that we can go pick them easily. It requires, keeping things alive that are on display, but that's well worth it. It was really something we decided to do on purpose for these visitors.

What is plant blindness?

Kitty: Plant blindness is a term coined by two researchers, Wandersee and Schussler, to talk about an actual, physical condition with people where they have a tendency to see things that move, and not things that are still. Which is totally understandable. Things that are still are less likely to bite you than the things that are moving. We have a hard time distinguishing in a field of green, picking out individual objects. So there's a physical aspect of it that's built into our eyes.

There are also cultural aspects, that plants are very often seen as the setting and not the subject. What we wanted to do was move plants from being the setting, the backdrop for something, to being the subject. The exhibits are designed to have people look at, touch, and examine plants so they'll see how their structures and their processes are going on all around them, so it will bring those plants into sharper relief. Hopefully in the rest of their experience with the gardens and that they'll take that home. That's really what we want to do in all of our programs is to bring plants to the forefront.

How is the Huntington different from other botanical gardens?

Kitty: The Huntington is an estate garden. It's a place people go for repose and beauty. They don't go there thinking, "Gosh, I'm going to a science center. So we talked a lot about whether they need some kind of entrance experience that will get them ready for that. Our solution was to have some of the exhibits that are around the entrance are very low-investment introductions, that something's different in this conservatory. This is a place where things are different.

So the first thing you come to in our overlook are kaleidoscopes, and you look through them and it gets you a different view of the room than you would have. This is a very subtle indication that things aren't going to look the same here. The next thing you come to is videos of plants in motion. That's seed dispersal; flowering and growth, there are no signs on it, just the videos. So, plants are doing something, this is the message there.

The next thing is a visitor's voice exhibit that gets to make comments about green. You're invited to look at the plants, find colors of green, make some comments about them, match them with color cards, and clip them on a clothesline. So we just kind of try to ease people into things. Then as you get further into it, the exhibits are more involved. We have found absolutely no hesitation for people to engage with the exhibits. They are totally primed to do it. If they choose not to do it, there are beautiful plants, and they can just walk through and view beautiful plants. To me, I'm very much dedicated to free choice learning. If they want to do the exhibits, I'm delighted. If they don't, that's perfectly fine with me. They know they're there, they'll probably end up inadvertently reading a sign or two, so we'll probably going to get through even to people who are only there for an aesthetic experience.

What have visitors learned? What are the outcomes?

Kitty: The outcomes have been, we've done summative evaluations. We've done one round of summative evaluation. Now, we did a reinterpretation, a refinement of our interpretation, we're adding a few more exhibits, and we'll do another round with summative evaluation.

So, in the first round of summative evaluation, I believe it was 2/3 of visitors could report in engaging scientific practicing and giving concrete examples of things they did. At least 80% of visitors read labels. The visitor's fully engaged, they said they had a wonderful experienced. That it was very educational. They learned things about plants they didn't know; it reinforced their knowledge about plants. Most of our visitors are already quite sympathetic towards plants, so their attitude wasn't really changed, but it was reinforced. They reported learning. Actually they were reluctant, they reported being reminded of things they had previously known.

This is an exhibit aimed to kids ages nine to thirteen. Most of the people in our summative evaluations were adults, they should be familiar with this information because this is basic botany, but that worked for them. Anecdotally, when I find most thrilling is when you see a 14-year-old boy looking through a microscope and calling his mother over because it's "really cool," and he wants her to see this thing. He's looking at stomata. He's looking at the pores in the leaf, and thrilled that this is there and wants his mom to come over and share it with him on the video monitor.

We see parents having conversations with their children about plants. We see adults having conversations about plants. We see people fully engaging with the exhibits, very little misbehavior, except during spring break. I think the kids just really wanted to go to Disneyland, and their parents brought them to a botanical garden, so they get a little crazy.

How has Plants Are Up to Something impacted the field?

Kitty: We just had a meeting of the American Public Gardens Association, the national meeting in southern California. People came to the conservatory, and it was the first big exposure within the field. I've done presentations, and people have inquired. We're doing a cookbook on how to do the exhibits, and I hope to set up an internship program for people at public gardens and nature centers to come and learn how to run the exhibits.

One of the things we did was try to design each exhibit to be as cheap as possible so that, one, we want it to be changeable, and we don't want to be invested in something that was twelve thousand dollars that we'd think, "Oh no, we'd have to keep that," or twenty thousand dollars, or hundred thousand dollars, in any one element. So we wanted it to be cheap so it could portable to other gardens, and so we would say, "You know, this isn't working out. We'll just go, we'll just try something else now." We can do that and it's not that big of an investment. We didn't want to constrain ourselves in the future.

What are the future plans for the exhibit?

Kitty: We're hoping to disseminate a lot of this information to anyone who works with plants through a conservatory cookbook. Which is recipes on how to do the exhibits, and that includes a sketch of the exhibit as we have it, a narrative of what our learning objectives were, our experiential objectives, all the equipment, all the problems that we have, all the maintenance required, some cost estimates for the equipment that we're using. Problem with the cookbook is it keeps changing. The exhibits are changeable. So now, since we wrote it, and it's not done yet, the materials have changed, so I have to go back and change it and, "We're not using that pH meter anymore because it wasn't reliable, so now we have a new one.” So it's a bit fluid, but that's the nature of the exhibit it was designed to be that way. So we're hoping that these can be adopted by other gardens but also adapted at their garden to suit their own collections because nobody has the same collections, nobody has the same educational program or staffing level. Everybody's different, so we wanted to keep it flexible enough so that they could adapt the ideas and the equipment to their own purposes.