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Tag: introduction

  • Introduction

    Hello everyone. My name is Isabella, and I’m a recent high school graduate from South Central Alaska. I’m an ethnobotany student and an enthusiastic plant lover, so I’m thoroughly excited to delve deeper into botany with an emphasis on Alaskan flora! I’ve been exploring my love of plants through various modalities since my interested first sparked. Foraging for berries, wildcrafting medicinal plants, and eventually studying herbalism and ethnobotany were the paths I ended up following. Currently, I’m finishing an herbalism certification program that I’ll soon graduate from after six months of intensive learning and studying. Beyond wildcrafting, I also enjoy making my own plant medicines, where I’m beginning to dabble in formulations.

    I have already had some exposure to botany while studying ethnobotany and herbalism, however, I find that unless I use and recall botanical terms daily, they slip through the cracks of my memory. In taking this course, I hope to revitalize my knowledge and solidify it. In the future, I’d like to incorporate more technical botanical terms into my plant identifications and learn more about plant family patterns.

    I have many favorite plants, but perhaps one of my most loved is devil’s club (Oplopanax horridus). During last summer’s ethnobotany class, I became familiar with this plant and recognized why it is so revered in many Alaska Native cultures. It’s a very formidable and imposing plant with its sharp and pervasive thorns, but they protect the potent medicine in its roots and stems. I enjoy making salves from it, and have witnessed its healing abilities.

    I’m looking forward to expanding my knowledge and learning more about plants!

  • Delayed Introduction

    Hi Everyone! My name is Jayce Bjelland. I am originally from San Diego, CA but moved up to Fairbanks with my 3-year-old German shepherd Arlo in 2022 after transferring to UAF from my previous college. I am currently majoring in Wildlife Biology. I have a huge passion for waterfowl and am currently fostering that passion in my current job at Creamers Field working for Alaska Fish & Game.

    I’ll admit I have never had much particular interest in plants but have enjoyed the plant-focused courses I have taken at UAF so far and would love to continue building that foundation of knowledge, especially as I have become more interested in foraging and gardening since moving to Alaska. I don’t know that I have a specific favorite plant but I tend to most enjoy plants that are “odd” or have unusual, unique features either in the way they look or function. Lately, I’ve been particularly captivated by the tall bluebells I’ve been finding around town, I really love the way the flowers hang so delicately!

    Me and my dog Arlo.
    Tall Bluebells (Mertensia paniculata)

  • Karolyn Introduction

    Hello everyone! My name is Karolyn, and I am Suqpiag from Kodiak. My journey with plants up to this point is that nature has always been my happy place, forests and beaches in particular. My family did not have any interest in plants, so I was the only one. I can recall many days as a child being outside and sitting with a plant for a long time, getting to know it and observing it, often coming back throughout the year and seeing how it has changed over the seasons. Plants have always made me feel peaceful and deeply appreciative for their presence. As an adult, I love attaching names and quantifiable information to these plants that I know by my senses, and it has been wonderful so far. I am taking this class for my personal fulfillment and joy.

    My favorite plant currently is sour dock as I have been craving it in the last few weeks. I love when they are juicy and sour; that tart taste is better than any candy to me! I want to harvest some this year, blend it, and freeze it to enjoy throughout the winter. There are a few spots where I know it grows on the island, and I hope to find some soon!

  • Greetings!

    Hey everyone. My name is Juanita Magnetek. I am taking Intro to Flora for my ethnobotany minor but also for my own gratification. I try to get out often and explore what is sprouting, blooming or fruiting in my environment and to keep tabs on the stages of growth during the season. I do a lot of planting, maintenance and watering on the UAF campus. We have just mostly finished planting for summer. Now comes the fun of watching it grow to maturity and harvesting. While I am an art major, botany is perhaps just as interesting to me, if not more so. It is very wonderful to be studying and interacting with the Flora of Alaska interior, as this summer is brief and fleeting if we do not take notice. I believe I will be using my iPhone for the dissections, however, I will very much like to use a magnifying device to perform the task. I am thinking seriously about the visor, so I will most likely make that purchase today.

    I am unable to pick a favorite plant or flower. There are too many variations and qualities. I will show a few wild things I have snapped photos of this spring and summer so far…

  • Intro: Dorothy Sherer

    Hello! My name is Dorothy and I will be starting my third year at UAF studying wildlife biology this fall. I am originally from southern Indiana and am there this summer interning at a national wildlife refuge – I am overwhelmed with greenness, flowers, and fruit down here! I have been interested and have learned a lot about the trees, native plants, and crops of the midwest since childhood, but I will never forget the awe I felt when stepping onto the tundra for the first time and seeing all of the variety of life that can grow up there, as well. I’ve learned so much from friends about plants in Alaska since moving up here and I am excited to learn even more in this class. I have a vegetable garden and lots of landscaping (soooo much weeding to be done…) and love nothing more than berry stains on my fingers from collecting various Rubus around the woods edge. My favorite plant is the Ginkgo biloba. The maidenhair – there is something so magical about seeing its leaves twist in the wind and knowing it is such an ancient plant. I am excited to learn with you all this summer!

  • Introduction! Hi !

    Hi everyone,

    my name is Jaheili (Jai). I’m 19 years old and an online student at UAF currently living in Houston. I’m in my second year pursuing a degree in Biological Sciences. Some things about me are that I love reading, and have recently gotten into audiobooks! I’m also a fan of podcasts, especially true crime but I’ve found some science podcasts lately that are very informative and interesting. I own 3 dogs but currently have 4 as we have a rescue with us right now! I love being outside and in nature and I wish I could do it more often. I hope to get into hiking as well as foraging. I’ve never been hunting but do enjoy archery recreationally and would like to do it more often as well. As for gardening, it has never been my strong suit but I’ve been learning and doing better, I’d like to keep working on it and hope to have my own herb garden as well as some veggies. I had never considered botany as an interest until I started at UAF and I’m so glad I did. Since I was little, I had always loved collecting plants and leaves and flowers and learning about them, especially edible and medicinal plants and researching about plant identification. It’s been one year since I truly started my botanical journey and took my first ethnobotany course, EBOT 100, and even though I have much to learn I’m very passionate about the details and information. Some of my favorite plants are the Chinese Blue Wisteria tree and also the group of trees known as Weeping Willows. I also love pines and spruces, something you don’t see or get to appreciate too often here. I also love the groups of plants; water lilies, and jasmine. I hope to be able to tell the individual species of my favorite groups apart one day. I had a USB microscope and am looking for it now because I have no idea where it is. If I can’t find it I will be using my phone for the coursework.

    I’m looking forward to learning with you all this summer! 😀

    Buddy

  • Hello from Alison Staudinger

    Hi colleagues! Although I spend some time here in my late teens and early twenties, I just moved to Alaska in January for a job at UA Southeast in Juneau. The plants are one of the things I love about it here– both the ones that remind me of where I grew up in Oregon and Washington, and the ones which are new. I am slowly going to take the Ethnobotany certificate, which this course is part of, and I thought it would be fun this first summer to spend time poking around flowers, while waiting for the berries to ripen! I have very little formal knowledge in botany or really science in general, but have some informal knowledge and enjoy foraging. I will likely be in SE for the duration of this course, with a trip planned to Glacier Bay next week– but I may end up a few days in Karaburun peninsula in Turkey, where I visit most summers when I can. I’ve started learning some of the local harvesting practices from the women in the village there; there seem to be hundreds of local plants with uses. We don’t share too many here in Alaska with the Aegean region, except that they also have a type of samphre (Salicornia something), and of course purslane which seems to grow everywhere.

    .

    a silver pot full of harvested caper berries and flowers with some feet in birkenstock sandals in the background.

    Pictured is a plant I really enjoyed harvesting last year in Turkey; caper vines (Capparis spinosa L.) grow all over the hillside, and have beautiful white flowers with purple (what I think are) stamens. You can pick the tiny buds of the plant early and then preserve them in salt to make the capers we buy at the store, you can use the flower petals in teas which are supposedly good for digestive issues– and then the plant forms a little seed pod (I’m sure I’ll learn the right name for it!) that you can also preserve in salt, and is commonly called caper berry. The bees and other pollinators love the plants, which can grow in terrible soil and even the cracks of stone walls.

    Looking forward to learning with all of you!

  • Introducing…Emma Snodgrass!

    Hello Everyone! My name is Emma. I moved to Fairbanks a little over 2 years ago, after earning my B.S. in Chemistry (with a concentration in Biochemistry) and French from the University of Portland. I am currently a non-degree seeking student with UAF but hope to be enrolled in a Master’s program this Spring. For employment, I work with a permafrost researcher at UAF as a student assistant, processing permafrost cores from all over Alaska and collecting water samples from Poker Flat Research Range. I also have three fluffs that I love dearly (2 dogs, 1 cat) and photograph constantly.

    Myself at the Fox Permafrost Tunnel
    Left to right: Soot, Mila (Red Heeler), Mae (Golden Retriever)

    My botany experience is…limited. I would not characterize myself as a forager or as one who has a “green thumb” (I have killed plants before…). However, I have picked blackberries, blueberries, and even cloud berries, which I was able to taste for the first time last summer thanks to my colleagues and now I can’t wait for picking season. Our household is also trying a small garden for the summer and hopefully we will manage to get some produce out of it. During fieldwork, or even just walking around, I encounter interesting plants/fungi and wonder what they are but haven’t really take the time to identify them. Case in point, the following image is of an unidentified plant I noticed after moving to Alaska:

    What really piqued my interest in botany was the Elementary SEM (Scanning Electron Microscopy) course last Spring. For my final project, I decided to image some of the ingredients in a family recipe, which includes fruits like pineapple and banana. (Please click here to see the PDF of the presentation and images taken on the SEM. The file was too large to upload…I also think there is also a poster hanging on the first floor of Reichardt). The SEM images revealed some interesting structures I had never seen before or knew existed! Thanks to a certain amazing professor, I was able to label some of these structures but I wanted to learn more and gain confidence in identifying plant morphology. Thus, I was inspired to take this class. 🙂

    I plan to use a combination of my smartphone and a USB microscope for the microscope set-up but all the pieces have not arrived yet (and thus do not have a picture of it).

    The more I learn and think about plants, the cooler they become and the harder it is to pick just one favorite. I like Irises for their bold purple colors. Snapdragons have a unique shape, cool colors and “dragon” in their (common) name. Fireweed is cool for its striking red color and its link to the duration of summer in Alaska. I think the coloring and pattern of birch bark is gorgeous and I want to make so many crafts out of it. I like Asian lilies for the same reason my mom does–they smell amazing! But I think I have to highlight the pineapple and the banana because they are the most recent impetus for my interest in botany. Plus, discovering how pineapples grew just looks…not even close to how I thought it would grow and I find it a tad ridiculous:

    “A pineapple plant growing in the middle of a field. Pineapple tropical fruit.”

    Image credit: Pixabay

    link: https://garystockbridge617.getarchive.net/amp/media/pineapple-tropical-fruit-food-drink-b612e8

    If you ever have any questions for me about either myself or class, please don’t hesitate to reach out! (My email: esnodgrass@alaska.edu)

    I look forward to learning with y’all this summer!

  • Nivedita Menon: Introduction

    Hi all, my name is Nivedita Menon, and I am a current Wildlife Biology student at UAF. I am currently taking this class from California, so I am excited to share some of the native flora I grew up with you all. As my major may imply, I am more interested in fauna than flora, but I do have a healthy appreciation for all living things. I am not a hunter or forager, but I have some experience with gardening, and I enjoy spending time in nature and taking in all of the unique species that exist around me. Honestly, my interest in plants is more through association, since my sister is currently in the process of getting a PhD in genetics, with a focus on plant genetics. Seeing her interest in plants has made me more curious about them, and I am looking forward to telling her about the things I will be learning in this class.

    My favorite plant is the coastal redwood (Sequoia sempervirens). It is native to the area of California that I grew up in, and I spent a lot of my childhood climbing these trees, much to the terror of my poor mom, considering that they are the tallest living trees in the world. I think they are super cool trees, and I am really grateful that I get to live in a place with them. This is a photo of the three coastal redwoods that are planted in our front yard.

  • Introduction

    Hello Everyone, my name is Anu and I have been a part of this course since 2021 throughout the quarantine. I began this process of diving deeper into plant life because I am deeply invested in using plants and herbs for medicinal uses, such as making teas, oils, and tinctures, and wanted some more background in understanding everything related to plants from a scientific perspective. What I have learned and discovered throughout this journey has been incredible and impacted me for the better. Throughout this ethnobotany journey, I lost one of my close friends and my grandma who both enjoyed plants. So this specific course has opened my heart to reconnect with the plants from a lens of mourning, grievance, and also rebirth. I have been enjoying this process since traveling to Nigeria for the celebration of my grandmother’s passing. Reconnecting with the land after 8 years of not being here has revealed to me how much I want to know about each region and the states in which most of the useful, edible, and medicinal plants reside. We have a backyard with a lot of active plant life, as well as farmland we are aiming to begin planting on. So far, I have watched this journey of mine begin from the comfort of my own room to now in a different country applying this knowledge from the lens of a curious child. I cannot complain! My current and all-time favorite plant is aloe vera as it has always been very helpful for my dry skin, psoriasis I experience, and has personal connections to my grandmother. We have decided to plant some by her grave per my request of me. Here is a picture of an aloe vera plant that was near my grandmother’s grave.