The Trail

Student activities Year 4

Education @ Adelaide Botanic Garden

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Taste and Variety It is hard to imagine how boring, tasteless and dangerous food was before the year 1500. The age of exploration changed all that and was considered so important that the year Christopher Columbus went to the Americas is considered by many people to be the beginning of the Modern Age. Newly discovered foods helped people have tastier, safer food and increased variety. One of the claims made about Botanic Gardens is that you can travel the world in any one of them. So follow the Botanical Treasure map on a voyage around the world, through the tropics and the deserts to find the we use in our modern lifestyle. Inquire about the life on a ship in 1490. Why was rum added to the drinking water and why was citrus eaten? Discover where the flavours of and chocolate come from. There is no question as to why they were so valuable! But most of all dispel the myth that the motivation of all early European explorers was swashbuckling adventure and a quest for cities of gold. The more common cause was to break the overland trade route blockade controlling and restricting the flow of spices initially by the Arabs and later the Venetians into Europe. For the first people to open the sea routes the prize was much greater than gold and jewels – it was spices! At one point 1Kg of spice was worth more than 1kg of gold. But think…we can’t make new gold. We can grow new spices and make as many as we want in the end. 2

Map

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Student activities 1. The Economic Garden – citrus and long sea journeys.

Kaffir Lime and citrus

Many food and herb plants grow in this garden. Find the Buddha’s Hand Lemon Look around for ideas keeping with in the circle of the garden. Lack of fresh fruits and vegetables was a major issue, with few sea captains overcoming it until Cook.

What foods would you take on a 3 month voyage with no fridge? List some here.

______

Citrus was used as a way of managing scurvy. Lemons, oranges and of course limes helped. There is a circle of Espaliered plants (Plants grown on wire trellis) around the Economic Garden, with Kaffir Lime several citrus on the North West quadrant.

Why was citrus used to manage scurvy?

______

Water!!!! We can only live for a few days without water and dirty water can become contaminated easily. Remember in 1450 there were few medicines and no antibiotics.

How do you think explorers managed fresh water and kept it fresh? (no ice, chlorine, filters)

______

Herbs

Investigate the herbs. Pinch off a small leaf, crush it and pass it around to smell. Do you have them at home? If so, what are they used for? Many herbs came from Europe and the Mediterranean.

What is the difference between a herb and a spice?

______

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2. The Garden of Health - Vasco De Gama visits

India has provided many of the spices and foods that we enjoy today. In the 1490s there was a race between European countries to be the first to open a sea trade route with India. and curry leaves There is a complete garden bed of plants near the path to the Western Gingko Gate which are from India. Find the Turmeric

Which part of the plant is used in cooking?

Is it in Flower? (big white flowers near the base in Autumn)

______What is it used for other than cooking?

______Curry Leaves

Cardamom: Pinch a curry leaf, crush and smell it. Have you smelled that before? ______Describe the smell. ______

Cardamom is considered the Queen of Spices, because of its exotic flavour used in both food and drinks. Examples include Turkish coffee and Chai. Have you tasted Cardamom? ______

Vasco De Gamma, was the first European to sail around the bottom of Africa and go to India and then return ALIVE. Vasco was from Portugal. The sea at the bottom of Africa is very dangerous. Why did the Portuguese want to risk such a dangerous trip by sea? ______

______The Spanish queen employed an Italian called Columbus to go to India, but he decided to head in the opposite direction across the Atlantic Ocean. Can you explain what he might have been thinking?

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3. The Amazon Waterlily Pavilion - Columbus and Chocolate

Cacao, Vanilla and coffee.

Feel the Climate of the tropics in the Amazon Cacao Waterlily Pavilion. (Most of the plants here are from Guyana in Central America).

Imagine you are an evening news weather reporter, describe the weather in the Glasshouse.

______Vanilla (below) forms a bean when it is mature. Christopher Columbus was heading for India across the Atlantic Ocean however he bumped into the West Indies islands (off the coast of Florida in the USA) before getting to India.

(He made three trips across the Atlantic Ocean but never actually landed on mainland North America. He never made it to India either.)

But he did find some exotic plants in Central America. Cacao, Vanilla and Tomatoes to name a few.

What is made from Cacao? ______

Do you have vanilla essence at home? ______Is it the real stuff? ______

Tomatoes are from South America. What other fruits and vegetables that you eat frequently also come from South and Central America? Make a list in a group.

Research back at school:

Why is vanilla so expensive?

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4. The Museum of Economic Botany – Relics of the past

Explorers and Travellers in the 18th and 19th centuries would bring back exotic plants from their travels and the colonies, then display them to the public in museums like this one.

Find the big Cocoa pods. Find the vanilla beans and the strands of vanilla.

Draw the Coco De Mer seed? (The biggest seed in the world)

On the two long glass covered displays inside the museum you will find many spices.

Find and make a list of at least 5

1. ______

2. ______

3. ______

4. ______

5. ______

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5. Classification Garden – : The Dutch East India Company

Cinnamon

The Dutch were a very strong sea fairing country from the 1600s to the 1800s. They established a company called the Dutch East India Company and travelled across the Indian Ocean to Ceylon and Batavia in search of tropical spices.

Why do you think the Dutch people bothered to do this, when they could have just bought their spices from the Spanish and Portuguese?

______

They then took these spices to the islands just north west of Australia and planted large plantations.

What is this country called now?

______

The Dutch conquered the local people and enslaved them to work the plantations. They took the spices back to Europe and sold them for lots of money. Within 50 years they were the richest company in the world. Cinnamon was one of the spices they grew and traded. At one stage 1 kilo of cinnamon was more valuable than 1 kilo of gold.

Which part of the tree is used to make the cinnamon?

______

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6. Bananas and Sugar – William Dampier

Bananas

Bananas and sugar cane grow best in the tropics. We think they originated in our closest neighbour, New Guinea. They are very important crops to the planet. Sugar is the biggest crop on earth and the banana is the 5th biggest.

William Dampier the English explorer, trader, pirate and buccaneer was perhaps the first world traveller. He circumnavigated the world 3 times in his search for riches and changed the way people thought about trade and travel.

On one venture Dampier transported banana plants to Brazil as a cheap, easy to grow, high energy food for the African slaves working on the spice plantations.

The bananas usually have a frond of bananas all year round. How many can you find? ______

Have you ever found a seed when eating a banana? If bananas don’t have seeds how do we grow new ones? (Hint: look around the base of the plants.)

______

Sugar cane Sugar cane

West of the bananas is the sugar cane. Imagine life without sugar! How do you imagine the early Europeans sweetened their food before the explorers brought back sugar cane?

But where does the actual sugar come from in the plant? • The root • The stem • The leaves • The flowers Research back at school: Dampier was also the first navigator to chart the Bananas ocean currents of the world. What else did he do on his travels?

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HMS Roebuck 1690 – One of Dampiers expedition vessels. Wikepedia

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