Calabar Botanical Gardens

Achi Tree

        To go along with our kindergarten science curriculum studying plants and insects this year, I arranged a field trip for my class to the Calabar Botanical Gardens.  As little scientists, the students observed the plants and insects they found there and recorded the information in handmade explorer journals with colored pencil sets.  I made the journals from brown paper bags.  I crinkled the paper and applied multiple layers of cocoa butter on the paper until they resembled leather then attached the covers to plain paper inside with leather shoe laces.  I told the students about the Lewis and Clark Expedition and how  Meriwether Lewis was a botanist and recorded information about what he saw during his exploration of North America.

He was using a magnifying glass to observe the details on the flowers.

They were recording what they saw in their journals.

           I received the information below from one of my student's parents about the history of the gardens.  He works here in Calabar for the Wildlife Conservation Society.

                    Calabar was one of the first two Botanical Gardens in Nigeria in 1893 (the other being 

          in Lagos) in affiliation with Kew Gardens in London.  I love local history and wish there was 

          more available on the Calabar Botanic Gardens.  It must have been a fascinating place 100 

          years ago and significantly larger than it is today stretching all the way along Garden Street.  

          Plants coming and going from all over the world (the British empire).  Most of the traditional

          foods in Nigeria we now take for granted were imported from other countries: cassava, 

          maize, cocoa etc.  Rubber and oil palm were exported from West Africa to the rest of the 

          world.  Oil palm was vital for the Industrial Revolution in Britain and replaced the slave trade.

          In the 1970’s the garden was renamed the Calabar Zoo.  The rising cost of maintenance, and
          ever-dwindling revenues to the Calabar Zoo resulted in its eventual collapse. 

          My teaching partner remembers the zoo and went there as a child.  We found the burial site of some of the animals who lived at the zoo while we were there.  Some of the trees were so old that my class holding hands could not reach around the base of one of those huge achi trees which are only found in tropical Africa.  All of my students come from affluent families.  This is often true for private schools like the one I currently teach at.  When I told my class we had to sit on the grass to work on our notebooks they were not happy.  I discovered they really have no experience being out in nature and roughing it a little.  Two wanted to go back to the van only minutes after arriving at the garden.  I think it was good for them.  Most of them finally adjusted and had fun exploring.  I had some magnifying glasses for them to use to get a closer look at the plants and insects.  I was very thankful we didn't come across any snakes.  We saw several insect cocoons and one bee hive.  There were several different kinds of flowers and a couple of fruit trees.  One of the trees was a soursop which has a green spiky fruit.  I purchased one at the market the next day and served it to my class at lunch.  Most of them would not try it but for those that did it added to their experience from the field trip.  The soursop tree is originally from the West Indies.

The soursop has a white flesh with a texture similar to a mango with big black seeds.

The black ovals are insect cocoons.

Beetle Homes

Palm Fruit - My teaching partner took one of the red ones and chewed on it.  She said the palm oil is very tasty.