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visits museums and historic places. established by congress in 1820 the united states botanic garden is the oldest botanic garden in north america. next, we will take a tour of the conservancy at the foot of capitol hill and learn about the collections of this museum originally proposed by president washington in 1796. >> welcome to the united states botanic garden. i am the executive director here. my name is ari novy. the botanic garden is a wonderful place to come and learn about plants. our official mission is to demonstrate to the public the importance of plants and their value to the time. today, i'm going to show you a little bit about the u.s. botanic garden and introduce you to the stars of the conservatory . those are the wonderful plant specimens we have today. right now we are standing in a

room called the garden court. i like to orient people to the garden court when we come in. one of the most important elements are the twc in the front prominently displayed. they are incredibly important for us because we represent a part of our historical collection. the u.s. botanic garden came into existence in some ways as a permanent institution in 1842 when the united states exploring expedition returned from a four-year voyage on the pacific ocean at the behest of congress, mainly doing surveying, but also picked up a lot of artifacts including living plant specimens. in 1842 when the expedition returned, they had about 150 fascinating plant species, many

of which had never been on the north american continent. this was deemed very valuable. this collection of plants was immediately recognized as important by congress. funds were appropriated for a temporary greenhouse structure your the old near the old patent office building. we still have to this day a couple of plants that are direct descendents of those plants. the sackets -- cycad on the left is one of the original species. it has become an important tree species in terms of ornamental trees in the tropical parts of the united states and specifically in southern florida. i'm going to use some terms

occasionally about how we grow and maintain plant lines. some are more technical. i will try to explain them as we go forward. vegetative propagaules are pieces of a plant that can be coaxed into growing into a full plant without having to go through c generation. they look a lot like troop columns but they are a completely different family and order of plants altogether. cycads are conifers. palms are more closely related to grasses. they are very different even though they look similar. one of the big differences between them is the way in which they grew. a cycad is able to be grown into a full plant from a small part of tissue. you can take a cutting or a section of its trunk and let that go dormant.

that is most likely how these plants were transported from the pacific to this part of the united states in the mid-1800 -- early 1800's actually. you can coax it into growing roots and leaves and turning into a full plant. by contrast, a palm, and i can show you a nice example, right here we have the classic coconut palm which gives us the coconut and all of the wonderful products we get from coconut. it has a special growth characteristic. it has a tip of growth. once the plant loses that he said growth -- that piece of growth, it cannot survive. you cannot take a cutting from that paltry in the same way you could from a cycad and

regenerate that tree. there are a couple of great iconic plants that a lot of people may never have seen in their living plant floor. but people are familiar with them as products. one of the most wonderful and something that people are fascinated about is this beautiful tree right here. this is the chocolate tree. in fact, all chocolate comes from this species of plant originally native to the amazon region of brazil but now grown all over the tropics for commercial chocolate production. plant right now does not have any fruit or pods on it, which are harvested and processed to make chocolate. you can see some beautiful flowers forming. one of the most fascinating things about this is it produces flowers out of the stone or

trunk of the plant. there are a few of these trees. when you have them they are interesting because of the location of the flowers. we love to pollinate this plant so it can produce wonderful chocolate pods. we don't have a natural insect pollinator. our gardeners act as the little insects and will take flowers off of the other plants and take them over here to carefully touch the flowers and create wonderful fruit. typically, we do that around the fall. they come in to full maturity in the late spring. in addition to chocolate we have many other iconic plants people would recognize from their everyday uses. maybe even more exciting and

useful to people than chocolate although it is hard to imagine is coffee. here we have the two species of coffee commonly grown for the commercial coffee production. this plant is the erotica coffee -- arabica coffee. this is most of the coffee produced in the world. it is high-quality coffee. the plants need to be grown in full shade. they are grown with other plants to provide shade and the right conditions this plant needs to deliver -- produce militias coffee beans -- produced coffee beans. even though this looks similar it is a full sun plant. the can be grown in plantations under. conditions -- full sun conditions, no shade required. it has a higher yield than the

replica -- rarabica coffee. because we are so discerning in the taste we prefer, even though this yields a higher yield, we still have about 80% of world production in arabica coffee because that is what the market demands. being in a tropical conservatory we grow mostly tropical plants. everybody has had bananas or at least seen bananas. very few people have seen what they look like growing on a banana plant. we have a wonderful sweet, edible banana. you see the tree itself is not a true treat. it is not a trunk. the large stem is a group of compressed stocks holding the beautiful leaves in the air. it is a herbaceous plant.

it has no woody parts. the cluster of bananas grows from the top of this cluster of leaves down. the purple flowers you see begin to open. in nature, they would be pollinated by bats. they don't need pollination to produce edible fruit. they would begin to open. behind them, the clusters of bananas would form. one of the most important functions of the botanic garden is to provide a safe environment for rare plants that need to be maintained outside of the natural environment because they may be under threat or stress. these are plants out of the natural environment. because of challenges to these plants in their environment whether through human development or changes in climate or whatever else is happening to change the ecosystem, you are plants that need help to survive -- there

are plants that need help to survive so they don't go extinct. we can tell the wonderful stories of the plants and help the public learn what they can do to protect them and what we are all doing institutionally to protect these plans by telling their stories here. my favorite stories is the plant behind me. it is called the wall of me pine -- wallamy pine. it is a positive story about how sometimes plants that we think are lost can be refound. it is an interesting genus. he was known only from the fossil records. it was thought all species were extinct. in the 1990's, there was a hiker in australia who found a plant he thought looked strange. he called in experts to help him out. they realized it was a still living version of whose -- what was thought to be fossil

species. they named it after the last name of the gentleman who discovered the plant. just rain government was able to safeguard these plants. -- guessed right in government was able to safeguard these plants. there are areas where they grow healthy and strong. now we realize they are here in life, we are working hard to preserve them in their natural environment and we are disseminating them by propagating them throughout the botanic garden and other conservancies to make sure this unique species is known to people and not lost. it is exciting for us to present plants to the public that have a long history of human use and have become indispensable plants for human beings to survive. one of the plants that illustrates that message is the sugarcane. sugarcane is something we associate with tropical brazil. certainly we associate it

with baked goods. if you're into biofuel, you associate it with ethanol. it is an old plant utilized in ancient times. we believe it was found in the southeast asian arctic pallidus -- archipelagoes. it was moved around in ancient times and able to find its way to europe by the middle ages. anecdotally, we believe christopher columbus brought it from the azores to the new world on his second voyage to the new world. it ended up being an important plant economically in plantations, grown predominantly by slave laborers. first in the caribbean islands and then later on in south america and the gulf coast of the united states. it is fascinating and reflective and solemn to think about the history of this plant and the wonderful resource in terms of

sugar it is capable of providing us. also the dark and sordid history of how human beings chose to cultivate this plant in terms of utilizing it is one of the main pillars of the slave trade. and really having it be a resource that drove what we would call now today a negative aspect of human history where we utilized slave labor to cultivate the plants we need. it is important and sobering to recognize how the plant's history affected vast demographic shifts of people coming to the new world, the burgeoning economies of the new world, and how we have moved hopefully beyond some of the negative practices in the growing of plants to new, better practices as we still require the resources is plants provide us -- these plans provide us.

people have been interested in the usage of plans to let plants -- the plants since time immemorial. people have always been interested in the curative properties. as long as there have been people, there have been diseases and ailments. we have an investigating all types of substances to help us deal with those problems. plants have provided many of the wonderful solutions and cures we associate with ancient traditional, and modern medicine. in this bed, there are several plants that have importance today or in the past. one of my favorite stories is this particular plant right here that looks kind of like a garden variety. winkle. in fact, this is a special and rare. we call them -- periwinkle that grows only in madagascar. it has given us two important chemotherapeutic drugs these

have been really important working against several different types of cancer. it is also a fascinating conservation story. the plant is found only in madagascar. to safeguard this great therapeutic against the horrible disease of cancer, we've also had to learn how to preserve and cap for these plants -- care for these plants. the process of plant preservation has a dual purpose. we present ourselves sometimes by preserving plants. another fascinating plant in this bed is this trade. -- is this tree. this is quinine. for those who enjoyed gin and tonic, it brings the atomic. it is even more important in history for bringing the last being the first functional antimalarialc medication for the

local people in ecuador could be used to create a potent compound. colonial's, especially the british were interested in these two combat issues they were having in different parts of the world such as south asia, with malaria issues. this plant has a very important history. it was adopted by colonial powers like the british and dutch. they learn how to grow this in plantations halfway around the world to provide medicine for their folks to safeguard them against the ravages of malaria. there are many other antimalarial drugs that exist today. however, quinine is still used. it is still effective is still a very important and relatively cheap drug available for protection against malaria.

we like to think of the botanic garden as a museum of living plants, a collection of living things. one of our primary responsibilities and the heart of the operation is maintaining these living collections. like many other museums, we have collections that are too large to be displayed to the public at any one time. we occasionally put on shows that allow us to highlight aspects of our collection to help the public understand the diversity and usage of the various parts of the plant kingdom. in this room, which we call the south transition, we frequently change the display to highlight exciting and unique parts of our collection. currently, we have on display a plant in the specific genus eupohhorbia. we also have other plans from the same family.

we are pleased to be able to show them in all of their strange diversity and fun forms for the public. we are going to make our way into the u.s. botanic garden house of world deserts. i have a wonderful collection of desert, eric, and succulent plants. these are wonderful plants to show people because they showcase how people have adapted to live in a specific environment. plants are responsive to the environment in which they live. we've all seen cap type -- cacti and other succulent plants. one of the goals of botany is to explain the almost childish question of why plants look the way they do. it is fascinating looking at the desert plants. this is the old man cactus. we can see a couple of fascinating and common features of desert plants. we see there are in many cases

no were very few or small leaves. the stems have become large and swollen. they are green. the plant is trying to operate and live in an environment with very little water available. leaves create a large surface area for the plant to lose water through evaporation and transpiration. the cacti have reduced or eliminated the leaves and transferred all of the photosynthesis to the green stem to conserve on water. in addition, you see this particular plant has thorns and hairs. in many cases, the thorns are protective. the hairs are creating a boundary layer of air air flow where the air moves more slowly next to the body of the plant. i also reduces the evaporation potential of the water from

leaving the plant. you will see all these common themes in the class of the deserts so they are able to live in the harsh conditions of deserts but thrive and be wonderful and unique in their solutions of being able to live in that environment. at the u.s. botanic garden, we have a few of the plants left from the original 1842 collection. the one we are looking at here is the very aptly named plant. the leaves on this cycad are sharp and ferocious. the plant is horrible to touch. it is not commonly used because it is so painful to brush up against. it was brought here in 1842. this is most likely a vegetative proper guilt -- prpaopagule that we were able to coax into a beautiful plant.

they are conifers. there closely related to pines. you see a cone of this plant species have informed from the base of the top of the plant -- have informed -- having formed from the base of the top of the plant revealing the seeds which would be to come. it is exciting to show people the exotic locations and how plants often serve to define space and place for the environment but also for the human understanding of that environment. we find ourselves in the u.s. botanic gardens version of hawaii. this is a collection of plants all native to and in many cases endemic to the hawaiian islands. the concept is important in conservation. certain plants, animals, or other organisms are found only in restricted ranges of geography. when that happens, we refer to that as ended missing --

endemism. this become important plans to preserve because of their relationship to the ecosystems in which they live. hawaii has a high degree of it because it is an island, a series of islands that are very isolated the pacific ocean. it is hard for new plants and animals to get there. on plants and animals have arrived in the hawaiian islands they've often set off on their own unique evolutionary trajectories in isolation from plants on the mainland. it has created this wonderful radiation of adaptations and fascinating types of plants in large quantity in a large concentration in the hawaiian islands. the room we are coming into now we call the garden primeval because the plants represent ancient lineages. plants that are similar to

plants that existed before the earth became dominated by flowering plants, the current kind of dominant plant. this can be thought of a type -- as a type of environment we could have seen during the time of the dinosaurs. it is fascinating to note the predominant plants then were different from the plants of today. it was a different climate. it was winter. the plants that lived here cap a part of their life cycle that require a significant amount of moisture. plants even today we associate with what places like ferns, mosses, these are all plants we associate with what places. when the earth was more wet they were plants that were more dominant. one thing we love pointing out about these plants as they do not reproduce with flowers. they do not have them. pollination with insects and birds would not have been part of the group.

you see in the lower plants like ferns that they are not pollinated at all. they don't produce seed. they produce spores. these often grown the bottom of the leaves of the ferns or fronds. you can see them right here. if we lift up this fern and look underneath, you will see a row of two round strips -- brown strips. these contain spores. these will fall to the ground. they will produce growth. eventually those will grow into the full plant we see here. rare and endangered plants are a very important part of the u.s. botanic garden. that is why we have a whole room dedicated to them. you can find them throughout our collections. we are looking at the sinking

cedar, a very rare plant only found in one section of florida. sometimes the plant is called the florida torrea. there is a state park in the panhandle of florida where you can go and visit these particular plants. we are currently in a courtyard space we call southern exposure. we call it southern exposure because we are taking advantage of the microclimate created by being in this courtyard surrounded by the greenhouse that creates a warmer environment relative to the natural climate of washington, d.c. that allows us to grow a host of plants native to the southern united states that under most conditions would not be able to survive outdoors in the washington, d.c., area. some wonderful examples are the magnolia over here. it is kind of like an magnolia -- a magnolia on steroids.

it has huge sleeves and large flowers. it is a bit of a rare plant found further south in the united states. can you also like to take the opportunity to show them -- we also like to take the opportunity to show wonderful carnivorous plants. we tried to reach out to the young audience. young boys get excited about plants that eat insects. overall, we are excited about the grotesque aspect of plants that eat insects. this is the venus fly trap. not many americans realize the venus fly trap is only native to northern south carolina. it feels exotic but is really from our backyard. it is endangered. we do have to make sure we watch the populations in the wild. keeping them in botanic garden settings is an important part of what we do.

you're currently in the u.s. botanic garden jungle. historically, the tallest rimini conservatory was called the paul house. it was in it to be a space where you can showcase the diversity of all tropical things in temperate environments where he would not be able to see them otherwise. that was the historical usage of this room at the botanic garden. more recently to reflect a growing understanding of ecology, we have recast this room to showcase not only interesting tropical tall things but show them in a way that is indicative of the ecosystem of the tropical rain forest. . as you look throughout this room, you will see multiple layers of plants. this is meant to mimic the actual structure of a tropical rain forest. you will see a groundcover layer, a shrub layer, a higher layer, as well as plants growing

up. you will see a canopy layer of the tallest plants that creates the canopy of the forest. as with most things in life, it is often instructive to change one's perspective. to achieve that here, we've made sure to include a canopy walk in the higher levels of the jungle house. it is wonderful to get up amongst the tops of the trees into the canopy to see the wonderful and interesting plants that grow at this level and also see a different perspective. look down at the trunk, straight ahead at the leaves and flowers. it provides a fantastic and interesting environment different from what you would see from the ground level. i want to thank you for taking time to visit with us here at the use -- u.s. botanic garden. it is a wonderful resource.