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Botany

Jul 16 2021
Love1

Plant Awareness Disparity & Our Snap-It Challenge!

By Bellevue Botanical Garden, Botany, Nature, Youth Education No Comments

By Kate Sorensen What is “Plant Awareness Disparity”? Plant Awareness Disparity (PAD) is a term proposed by Kathryn Parsley to replace an older term: “plant blindness.” To summarize her proposal, there is a disparity between how Euro-centric people notice plants in their environment versus how they notice animals. This disparity is based on attention, attitude, knowledge, and relative interest towards plants. She wrote: “The disparity between how often people notice plants compared to how often people notice animals is what…

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Dec 23 2020
Love3

Intro to Botanical Names Part Two: Pronunciation

By Adult Education, Botany, Nature, Resources No Comments

Intro to Botanical Names Part Two: Pronunciation By Cynthia Welte  In the first blog article on botanical names, we looked at how plant names are constructed. Now … time to get brave and say them out loud!  A note on my phonetic spellings: the Æ or æ symbol is an “a” as it is pronounced in cat or Seattle. Accented syllables are in all caps. This isn’t in any way official but is how it makes sense to me. Plant…

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Dec 16 2020
Love3

Intro to Botanical Names Part One: Understanding Names

By Adult Education, Botany, Nature, Resources No Comments

Intro to Botanical Names Part One: Understanding Names By Cynthia Welte  Those of us who work closely with plants are frequently asked why we use the long, hard-to-remember scientific names instead of simpler common names. To illustrate why, what comes to mind when I ask you to picture a cedar tree? You might be thinking of any of a dozen conifers. But if I’m talking about Thuja plicata, there is only plant I could mean: the Western red cedar (also…

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Nov 05 2020
Love1

Ethnobotany at the Garden

By Adult Education, Botany, Nature, Youth Education 2 Comments

Ethnobotany at the Garden By Barb Williams Ethnobotany is the study of how people of a particular culture and region make use of indigenous (native) plants.  The native plants sprinkled throughout the Bellevue Botanical Garden remind us that us that the Coast Salish people lived in this area for thousands of years and skillfully developed a plant technology to support their daily needs. Containers were necessary to hold and carry a multitude of items. Native Americans discovered that the inner…

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