Funds were appropriated for a temporary greenhouse structure to house them while a permanent u. S. Botanic garden could be built. We still have a couple of plants that are direct descendents of those plants. The plants we just looked at the one on the left is one of the original wilts plants. Wilkes plants. It has become a relatively important tree species in terms of ornamental tree in the tropical parts of the United States, specifically in southern florida. Im going to use some terms about how we grow plants and maintain plant lines. Some are more technical and less technical. Vegetative proper jewels are proper gules of plants that can be coaxed into growing into a full plant without having to go through a sea generation. Psych heads look a lot like true palms but they are a different family and order of plants altogether. They are conifers whereas palms are more close the related to grasses. They are different even know they look similar. Botanists will say they have morphological similarities. One of the big differences is the way in which they grow. You can take a cutting or a section of its trunk and you can let that go dormant and that is the most likely how these plants were originally transported from the pacific to the part of the United States in the mid1800s early 1800s actually. You can take that dormant peace and coax it into growing leaves and turning into a full plant. The palm, right here we have the classic coconut palm. It has a special growth characteristic in that it has a tip of growth that the botanists call a meristem. Once the plant uses that he said growth, it cannot survive. You cannot take a cutting from the contrary in the same way that you could from that palm tree from the same with that you could a psych had an generate a tree. Iconic plants that people who come to visit washington, d. C. May not have seen and living plant form. People are familiar with them as products. One of the most wonderful is this tree here. This is the chocolate tree. The latin name is a oprah mica cow. Theyll grow much how cow now grown all over the tropics for commercial chocolate production. The plant is not have any of the fruit or cocoa pods on it, which are what are harvested and processed make chocolate. This tree produces flowers out of the trunk of the plant. There are they are quite interesting because it is a different presentation in terms of location for the flower. We love to pollinate this plant so it can produce chocolate pods unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, we dont have are gardeners act as the little insects and they will take plants off of the other flowers. Typically, we do that are on the fall of the come in the late spring or so. Many other iconic plants that people would recognize from their everyday uses. Maybe even more exciting and useful to people and chocolate although its hard to imagine his coffee. Is coffee. The two species of coffee that are typically grown for commercial production. The a replica coffee the ar abica coffee. The plants need to be grown in full shade. You see them grown in a best their grown with other plants to provide the shade to provide the right conditions this plant needs to produce coffee beans. In contrast, even though the plant look similar the robusta coffee plant can be grown in plantation under full sun conditions, no shade required. It has a higher yield. Because human beings are so discerning in what tastes be prefer for coffee, even though this coffee produces a higher yield than the arabica coffee, 80 of world production is still in arabica coffee because that is what the market demands. We grow mostly tropical plants. Everybody has had bananas. Very few have seen what they look like growing on a banana plant. Here, we have a sweet edible banana and you see that it is the tree itself is not a true tree. The large stem coming out is a group of oppressed stalks that are holding these leaves in the air. It is what we would call a herb asias plant. A herbacious plant. It has no would. It has no wood. They dont need pollination to produce these edible fruits. They would open and behind them the clusters of bananas would form. One of the most important functions of a Botanic Garden is to provide a safe environment for rare and endangered plants that need to be maintained outside of the Natural Environment because they may be under threat or stress. We call these plants that are out of their Natural Environment. Because of challenges through Human Development or changes in climate or whatever else is happening to change the stability of the ecosystem there are plants that need help in order to survive. We can tell the stories of these plants and help the public learned what they can do to protect them and what we are all doing to protect these kinds of plants by telling their stories here. What of my favorite stories of these plants is the plant behind me. This is called the wall me pine. It is a positive story of a plants that we think are lost are not actually lost. The genus was known only from the fossil record. It was thought that all species were extinct. In fact, in the 1990s, there was a hiker in australia named david noble, who found the plant will strange looked strange. Experts realized it was a living version of most thought to be a fossil species. They named the plantw wollemi noblus. Now that weve realized that they are alive and they are here on earth, we are working hard to preserve them. We are disseminating them by propagating them throughout the Botanic Garden and other conservation communities to make sure this species is known to people and is not lost. It is exciting for us to prevent plant present plants to the public that have a long history of human use and have become indispensable for human beings to survive. One of this plants thats in this that illustrates that is sugarcane. We associate it with big goods and confectionery and if youre into biofuels associate with ethanol. It is the best it is an old plant used in ancient times. Originally, we believe it was found the Southeast Asian archipelagoes. It was able to find its way overland to europe by around the middle ages. Anecdotally, we believe that Christopher Columbus brought it from the azores to the new world on his second voyage to the new world. It ended up being an important plant economically implantations in plantations. Grown primarily by slave laborers. It is fascinating and reflective to think about the history of this plant and the resource in terms of sugar is capable of providing us, but also dark and sordid history of how human beings chose to cultivate this plant, in terms of utilizing it as one of the main pillars of the slave trade and really having it be a resource that drove what we would call today and negative aspect of human history. It is important and sobering to recognize how the lamps history how the plants history affected the new world, and how we have moved past some of these negative practices to knew better practices in the growing of plants as we still require the resources these plans provide us. These plants provide us. People are been interested in the use of plants. People have always been interested in the curative operatives. Curative properties. We have been investigating all kinds of substance does that can help us deal with problems. This particular bed, there are several plants that have importance today or in the past. My favorite stories is this plant here that looks kind of like a gardenvariety periwinkle. This is a special and where periwinkle that grows only in madagascar are. It is given us important chemotherapeutic drugs. It is also a decimating conservation story. This plant was found only in madagascar and in order to safeguard this, we also had to learn how to care for these plants. The process of plant person plant conservation has a dual purpose. Another fascinating plant in this bed is this tree. For those who like gin and comic, this plant brings you the tonic. Its important in history for being the first well functioning antimalarial medicine. It comes from south america specifically ecuador. The local people knew the bark of this plant could be used to create a potent antifever compound. Colonials are interested in looking for antifevers. This plant has an important history in that it was adopted colonial powers like the british and the dutch and then they learned how to grow this plant implantations halfway around the world to provide medicines for their folks. There are many other antimalarial drugs that exist today. Quinine is still used in it is still an important and relatively cheap drug available for protection against malaria. We would like to think of us of a big tenet as a museum of living plants. One of the operations is maintaining these living collections. We have collections that are essentially two large to be displayed to the public at any time. We occasionally put on shows that allow us to highlight aspect of our collection to the public understand the diversity and usage of the various parts of the plant kingdom. In this room, we change the display to highlight exciting and unique parts of our collection. We have a display of plant in a specific genus. In addition to the genus, we also have plants from the family. We are pleased to show them in all of their strange diversity and fun form. We are going to make our way into the u. S. Botanic garden house of world we have wonderful collection of desert plant. These are wonderful plants to show people because they showcase how plants have adapted to live in a specific and are meant. The plants environment. Weve all seen cacti and other kinds of succulent plants, but we do not always think about why they look the way they do. One of the prime goals of the sciences of botany is to explain the childish question of why do plants look the way they do . Here looking at the old man cactus, we can see fascinating and common features of desert plants. We see that there are, in many cases, small leaves. The stems have become large and swollen and are green. What is going on there is that the plant is trying to operate and live in an environment with very little water of the very little water availability. The cacti have reduced or eliminated those leaves and transferred all this all the photosynthesis to the green stem to conserve on water. In addition, you see this land has horns and hairs. In many cases, the phones are protective and the hairs are creating a entry layer of air a boundary layer of air. That reduces the evaporation potential of water from leaving the plant. Youll see all of these common themes in a plans of the desert so theyre able to live in the tough conditions of the desert and thrive. At the u. S. Botanic garden, we have a few of these plants left from the original 1842 collection. One were looking at here is the blue psych at. Blue blue cycad. It is not very commonly used in many places as it is so painful to walk up against. This is a plant that was brought here 1842. They are closely related to kinds. What you see here is a cone of this plant species having formed from the base of the top of the plant. It is beginning to split open, revealing the seeds that would be within the cone. It is exciting to show people the exotic nature of location and how plants often serve to define space for the Human Understanding of that environment. Animals or other organisms are found only in restricted ranges of geography. When that happens, we refer to that as and it was him. Those become rare and important plans to conserve because of their qualities and their evolutionary relationship to the environments in which they live. Hawaii has a high degree of and him is him because it is an island a series of islands that are very isolated. It is hard for new plants and animals to get there so an plants and animals have arrived in the hawaiian islands, they have also set a part on their own unique trajectories in isolation from plants on the mainland and it has created this wonderful radiation of adaptations and need types of neat types of plants. The room we are coming into now we call the garden primeval. We call it that because the plants represent ancient lineages. Plants that are similar to plant that existed before the earth became dominated by lowering plants. Flowering plants. This can be thought of as a type of environment we couldve seen during the time of the dinosaurs. The plants back then were different from the plants of today. It was a different climate. It was wetter. The plants that live here all have a part of their lifestyle that require us to african amount of moisture to complete the part of a significant amount of moisture to complete that part of the cycle. In the past, when the earth was more wet, they were plants that were dominant. One of the things we love pointing out about these plants is that they do not reproduce flowers. The do not have them. Pollination, with insects and birds is not something that wouldve been a part of lance in this group. You see in some of the lower plants like ferns, they are not pollinated at all. They produced something called spores. The spores often glow on the bottoms row on the bottoms of the leaves and you can see them. If we lift up this firm and look underneath, you will see a row of two branch trips. Brown strips. Dust like particles will fall to the ground beverages growths. Those girls will grow into the full plant we see here those growths will grow into into a very verbal and that is only found in one section of florida. Sometime the plant is called the florida to write a. There is a teraya state park where you can visit these types of plants. We are in a courtyard space we call southern exposure. We are taking advantage of the microclimate created by being in this courtyard surrounded by shiny greenhouse that create a warmer environment relative to the natural climate of washington, d. C. Area. With that allows us to do is grow a host of plant that are native to the southern United States that under most conditions would not be to survive out doors in the washington dc area. Ashes magnolia. It has got huge leaves and large magnolia flowers. It is a bit of rare plant that is found herself in the currently are. That is found further south than we currently are. Native carnivorous plant. We find Young Audiences get excited about plants that eat insects. I think we are all excited about the aspect of lance that he and set. Thats plants that eat insects. Not Many Americans exit understand the venus fly trap is native only to north and south carolina. Keeping them in Botanic Garden settings is an important part of what we do. We are in the u. S. Botanic garden jungle. The tallest room in a conservatory was called upon house upon house. Called a palm house. More recently, in order to reflect a growing understanding of ecology, we are recast this room to showcase not only interesting tropical tall things but show them in a way that is indicative of the ecosystem of a tropical rain forest. As you look throughout this room, you will see multiple layers of plants. This is meant to mimic the structure of a tropical rain forest. You will see a shrub layer, a higher layer, as well as plants growing up. Youll see a talk a canopy layer. As with most things in life its quite instructive to change ones perspective. We have made sure to include a canopy walk in a higher levels of the jungle house. It is wonderful to get up amongst the top of the trees into the canopy and see the interesting plants that grow at this level and also see a different perspective, looks down on the trunks or straight ahead at the leaves and the flowers provides an interesting environment that is different what youd see at the ground levels. I want to thank you for taking time to visit with us. The u. S. Botanic garden is a wonderful resource. Her open demanded 65 days he year. Always free from 10 00 to 5 00 every day. If you come to washington, d. C. , it is a wonderful place to step in. There is always something in bloom. Hopefully, only something to see that you have not seen before. Up next, pastors, historians, Church Choirs and an actor portraying Frederick Douglass reflect on the passage of the 13th amendment which abolished slavery. The event is held at the north new york avenue presbyterian church. This Lincoln Group of d. C. Event , martin wondered 50th anniversary of the 13th amendment, is about two hours. As roger started to allude, this is lincolns home church. We tried to keep the Current Ministry and legacy of the lincolns participation alive. He would sit in this view. This is not the original lincoln church. His was torn down and replaced by this church in the exact spot. The pew was preserved. He would be listening to the pastor who would be speaking from this pulpit. This was the original pulpit. Preserved his memory through the lincoln window. The stained glass windows were dedicated in 1968. You can look at the second the last. Lincoln standing in prayer which was his custom when sitting in this pew during the services. You probably past the hitching post. There was a sign that wouldve been used by the president when he attended. You may have heard the bells. The lincoln chimes. They were a gift of the robert litan family. When composites son lincolns son. It is the only memorial to the president given by the president s family. Were plaid to have that here we are proud to have that here. We have those items preserved along with numeral personal items to the president and first lady. Link imposter death that on display downstairs. Lincolns death bed on display downstairs. A document written and signed by him 1862, right after he wouldve signed d. C. Emancipation
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