Second Class: Basic Botany and Horticulture

That beauty is Echinacea Tennesseensis -- Tennessee's state wildflower.  We learned all about it at Wednesday night's class.  It was our second class overall and the first where we really dug into the material.

The lesson was all about botany and horticulture.  (Sidebar: Botanists have jokes.  Bad jokes.  Worse than dad jokes.)  I remember getting a significant amount of botany in Tricky Liz's biology class sophomore year of high school and then again in honors biology at MTSU, so a lot of the class was "man, I haven't thought about cambium in 20 years!", but a lot of the information was still floating around in my brain.

We reviewed all the parts of a flower (more bad jokes), delineated the difference between xylem and phloem (phloem takes the products of photosynthesis to the plant, xylem brings water and nutrients up into the plant), and we breezed through the wildly varied characteristics of leaves.  We also talked about how buds form (did you know every plant has its own finger print-- a unique bud scar), tropisms, and plant cell structures.

But the part that I really enjoyed gets back to the Tennessee purple coneflower.  And my boy Karl Linnaeus.

You remember Karl and binomial nomenclature.  He began the ever changing process of taxonomy that allows scientific types to precisely identify organisms.  For our state wildflower, the genus Echinacea comes from the Greek word for hedgehog (echinos), and the species Tennesseensis is a curiously spelled transliteration of Tennessee into Latin.  Neat!

One more thing about Wednesday's class-- they split us into teams of 6 for our service project.  Each team will get a 6'x3' plot to plant a demonstration garden, and we can spend no more than $20.  We broke into groups for the last 30ish minutes, and my group had some good discussion.  Getting in a small group like this is a really good reminder of the varied backgrounds of master gardener interns.  One lady was all about coleus, another guy was super passionate about crepe myrtles, others were just interested in generally growing things, and surprisingly I was the only one who mentioned a passion for vegetable gardening.

Next week is an off week, and then the week after that, I won't be in attendance.  So I guess I'm going to have to do some make up blogging!

One final fun fact-- how can you tell the Tennessee purple coneflower from all the rest?  Evidently, it always faces east!