Adelaide Botanic Garden The Spice Trail ebook Teacher resource The Spice Trail ebook guides students through six stations in the Adelaide Botanic Garden, unpacking the historical concepts of change and exploration. Students are encouraged to work collaboratively, observing, analysing, inquiring, recording, hypothesising and connecting knowledge they already have with new learnings.
Download the ebook: https://itunes.apple.com/au/book/the spice trail/id1093386365?mt=11 Hardware / Software Requirements: Schools will need to supply their own set of ipads (students to work in pairs or small groups). Prior to your visit, download The Spice Trail ebook and from the itunes store. Australian Curriculum Outcomes: Suitability: Year 4 General capabilities: Critical and creative thinking (ask questions, locate and select information, develop interpretations, exploring the past) Intercultural understanding (perspectives, beliefs and values of people, past and present) Cross curriculum priorities: Asia and Australia s engagement with Asia History: Geography: Journey of at least one world navigator or trader including contacts with other societies. Why did great journeys of exploration occur? Natural resources and the environment. Mapping and locating the countries of the world. Stations: 1 The Economic Garden 2 The Garden of Health 3 The Amazon Waterlily Pavilion 4 The Museum of Economic Botany 5 Classification Garden 6 Bananas and Sugar Pre visit learning engagements: Familiarise your students with the map of the Botanic Gardens, task locations and facilities. Introduce students to a variety of common spices to engage and provoke thinking: Taste some common spices and identify the foods in which they are commonly used and origin of each spice. Spice rack activity Students to identify spices in their homes and research the plant associated with each spice. Fridge activity Check out the fridge and list the fruits and vegetables inside, then trace where they originated. Investigate the reason spices were very expensive in the past: In Europe in 1450 AD, your meal may have included a stew of turnips, cabbage, celery, and brussel sprouts with a chicken neck and some pig fat. One of the first spices that made food tastier was pepper, but most people could not afford to use it as food, so instead used it as a general medicine for colds. At one stage in Europe a kilo of pepper was more valuable than a kilo of gold! Find information about Vasco De Gama and Christopher Columbus. Identify their voyage strategies and significant achievements.
Glossary Terms: The following glossary terms are highlighted in the text: Espaliered plants (pg. 5): Plants that are trained to grow flat along a framework or wall Contaminated (pg. 6): Something that is dangerous, dirty, or impure and is harmful Mediterranean (pg. 7): The sea and surrounding land areas between southern Europe and northern Africa Exotic (pg. 12): Something that is from or has the characteristics of another place or part of the world Museum of Economic Botany (station 4): A collection of plant samples, recognising the botanical world Plantations (pg. 24): A large farm or area in which crops and plants are grown Station 1 The Economic Garden Discussion questions: The age of exploration, around the year 1500 lead to the introduction of new and tasty foods into Europe. Many people consider this time to be the start of the modern age. Look through this garden and photograph 3 plants you would have taken on a 3 month sea journey without a fridge. Get them to look around for ideas keeping with in the circle of the garden. Lack of fresh fruit and vegetable of course was a major issue, with few sea captains overcoming it until Cook. Citrus was used as a way of managing scurvy. There is a circle of Espaliered plants around the garden including, lemons, oranges and of course limes from SE Asia. Discuss with students, why citrus was taken on board the ships. Audio record How do you think explorers stored water and kept it fresh? One way to sterilise water was to add rum and alcohol to it. Many sailors probably drank more alcohol based drinks than water for this reason. Look at some herbs. Pinch off a small leaf, crush it and smell it. Record: Where have you smelled these before? Investigate the herbs. Students may pinch off a small leave, crush it and pass it around to smell. Do they have them at home? If so what are they used for? Ginger was used for seasickness; ask the students if they have had ginger before? What else did sailors drink, other than water? Rum and alcohol What is the difference between a herb and a spice? Herbs are mainly leaves; spices can be flowers, seeds, bark and roots. Station 2 The Garden of Health Vasco DaGama was the first explorer to travel from Europe to India by sea. There were 4 ships and 170 men on his journey. On the way home, half of his crew died from scurvy. You will look at some of the spices DaGama brought back when he started the sea trade with India. Discuss: Why did Vasco DaGama choose to sail from India to Europe instead of crossing over land? Record an audio opinion. Discussion: To travel to India De Gama needed to overcome a number of challenges: The Cape of Good Hope (rough seas) The tropics (no wind, the doldrums and disease and food deterioration) Pirates (East Africa) Find the curry leaves. Pinch a small piece of the curry leaf. Describe the smell. Curry leaves do not have a pleasant smell but add lots of flavour when cooked with other food.
Station 3 The Amazon Waterlily Pavilion Supporting Teacher Notes Italian explorer, Christopher Columbus discovered the new world which we now call America. He thought he had landed on the eastern side of India and he called the local people Indians. Today the Native American people are still referred to as American Indians. Why do you think Columbus chose to travel across the Atlantic Ocean in search of India? Primary motivation for travelling to India was to bring back spices and make financial gain. They were looking for a sea route to break the overland spice route monopoly of the Venetians and then the Turks. The Spanish also wanted cheaper more readily available spices particularly pepper, which made salted meat palatable. They planned to travel to India by travelling west across the Atlantic and the Americas were discovered as a bi product of this search. Imagine you are a weather reporter; give a weather report to describe the climate in the glasshouse. Cacao and Vanilla Feel and discuss the tropical Climate in the Amazon Waterlily Pavilion. Most of the collection here is from Guyana in Central America. While the Portuguese were sailing around Africa to get to India, Christopher Columbus approached the Queen and King of Spain with the idea he could travel the other way around the world and get to India and the spices first. (Columbus was Italian and was offering to travel for Spain for a price. He knew the earth was round but thought it smaller than it was.) However he bumped into the West Indies islands (off the coast of Florida in the USA) before getting to India. He made three trips across the Atlantic Ocean but never actually landed on mainland North America. He never made it to India either. But he did however find some exotic plants in Central America. Cacao, Vanilla beans and Tomatoes to name a few. Chocolate is made from the pod of the Cacao plant. Much vanilla essence is imitation because it is cheaper to make. The flowers of the vanilla plant are hand pollinated early in the morning, which makes the spice very labour intensive to produce. This is the reason for both the expense and why most is produced in Madagascar and Indonesia where the wages are low. Tomatoes, corn, capsicum, chilli, pineapple, tabasco, allspice, and potatoes are from Central and South America. Ask students to imagine their diet today without these treasures.
Station 4 The Museum of Economic Botany The Museum of Economic Botany is the last plant museum in Australia. Museums like this one are very rare today. The collection contains plant samples from as early as 1865. It contains some plants that can t be grown in the gardens because of the climate we have in Adelaide. Discussion questions: Supporting Teacher Notes Photograph and make a list of at least 3 spices found in the Museum of Economic Botany. Discuss: Look at the way the plants and seeds are displayed. Why do you think they are displayed like this? The plants and seeds were displayed like this to present them in a way so that they could sell more items. Discuss: Why do you think the Dutch people travelled across the Indian Ocean in search of spices when they could have bought their spices from the Spanish and Portuguese? To make money and get access to cheaper spices. Museums of Economic Botany were common in the 18 th and 19 th centuries. Explorers and Travellers would bring back exotic plants from their travels and the colonies, and then display them to the public. This building is one of only 2 such museums left in the world so in itself it has a historical story to tell. Most of the collection is from 1850 1890 and is good to show plants we can t grow in the garden in Adelaide. The big Cocoa beans and the vanilla beans and strands are in the middle display table. The Coco De Mer is the biggest seed in the world. It looks like two large coconuts jointed together. Station 5 Classification Garden The Dutch East India Company was one of the first international companies in the world. It had control of the spice trade. Audio record: How do you think this affected the people who lived on these islands? Ethical discussion: This is a ripe discussion from a number of viewpoints. The behaviour of the Dutch was quite brutal as they conquered the people and enslaved them to work the plantations. So it presents a discussion of ethical views of today and yesterday (although this process still occurs today). Environmentally they cleared the amazing biodiversity of the forest to grow their crops. This destroys the homes of the people and animals who live there and contributes to the increase of climate change (deforestation is the second biggest contributor). There is a current parallel with palm oil and Orang utans. The Dutch East India Company took the spices back to Europe and sold them for lots of money. Within 50 years they were the richest company in the world. Cinnamon was one of the spices they grew and traded, they took it from Sri Lanka to Indonesia; at one stage 1 kilogram of cinnamon was more valuable than 1 kilo of gold. Discuss: Which part of the tree do you think is used to make cinnamon? Record an audio opinion. If there are green leaves on the ground, (depends on the season), students can crush and smell them. There is a faint smell of cinnamon in the leaves. But the bark of the tree is used to make the cinnamon. As the bark dries it curls up into a Quill.
Station 6 Bananas and Sugar Some spices were worth more than gold. Englishman William Dampier sailed around the world 3 times. Some of his work involved trading spices. He recorded details of his adventures and wrote 2 bestselling books, A Voyage round the World (1697) and Voyages and Descriptions (1966). Task: Supporting Teacher Notes As the banana plant grows, the leaves on top of the plant sprout out, unfurl and drop downwards. These are called fronds. Take a photo of the fronds. Discuss: Bananas are the largest herb and are a leaf not a tree. Each leaf stem fruits only once. Because of selective breeding over thousands of years, modern bananas don t have seeds so they are propagated from the rhizome which shoots from below the ground. (The new plants can be seen shooting around the base of the stems). These plants are both grown best in the tropics. We think they originated in our closest neighbour, New Guinea. William Dampier the English explorer, trader, pirate and buccaneer was perhaps the first world traveller. He circumnavigated the world 3 times in his search for riches and changed the way people thought about trade and travel. He also made a lot of money writing early travel books and one of his ventures inspired the book Robinson Crusoe. Dampier also collected a lot of animal and plant specimens in his travels and is believed to be the first navigator to chart the ocean currents of the world. Many other travellers including Captain Cook used his charts later in their explorations. On one adventure Dampier transported banana plants to Brazil as a cheap, easy to grow, high energy food for the slaves on the sugar and tobacco plantations. The bananas plants at the gardens usually have a frond of bananas on them somewhere most parts of the year.