Friday 11th April 2025

It was a beautifully sunny day on this last session before Easter and we continued to discuss how flowering plants and pollinators evolved together for their mutual benefit.  I started by asking them how plants were useful, and they were really good at explaining how plants absorb carbon dioxide and give out oxygen, thereby helping to combat global warming and the increasing carbon dioxide in our world.  They were also able to explain how they reproduced and  were often grown for us to eat.  I then asked them about plants as medicine and they weren’t too sure, so we talked about where paracetamol and aspirin come from.  Coincidentally, they did remember what I had told them about foxgloves (too early for these, but we did have one last year) and the fact that digoxin comes from it- a treatment for regulating the heart.  Finally, I got them to walk around and see which herbs they could identify and what they were used for.  We were rubbing the leaves and smelling the scent and they insisted on trying some of the mint, which they said was delicious.  Rosemary was used for headaches as it contains acetylecholine, mint is used to aid digestion.  There is even research into medication for dementia using the bulbs of daffodils and snowdrops, which contain galantamine.  We finished off watering everything, (we need some rain) and then looked at some forget me nots- which they recognised.  These lovely little flowers  have yellow centres to let the pollinators know they are full of nectar.  When they have nothing left to offer, their yellow centres turn white, so the insects don’t waste their energy.