Honing Our Winter Botany Skills

Join founding naturalist Laura Chávez Silverman and special guest teacher Richard Mandelbaum for a day of exploration and learning. Winter is a time to slow down. Botanizing in winter requires a quieter, closer kind of attention: focusing on the brilliant colors and differing shapes of buds, noticing the subtle patterns in bark or the markings on twigs. We’ll spend the day alternating between walking outside along the Delaware River and enjoying the warm indoors at The Outside Institute, honing our botanical identification skills while weaving in a healthy dose of winter ecology. The emphasis will be on the woody plants: deciduous trees and shrubs, as well as any conifers we come across. Our exact schedule will depend on weather and conditions. If more frigid, we’ll spend shorter spurts of time outdoors, identifying the plants we see and coming back inside to warm up and examine what we collect with our loupes and under a microscope. If it is milder, we’ll spend more time outdoors and may visit a third site later in the day.