Speaker 1: Welcome to Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden.

This is a really special place because we grow many different plants from all over the world.

Miss Penny: Wow.

Speaker 1: We really rely on plants to live for food, so we eat them.

They're really great at giving us the air that we breathe, and they're also very beautiful, so we can use them like decoration and use them in our everyday lives.

Miss Penny: Kid Vision kids.

Do you realize how many different things plants do for us every day?

Plants are important for people and animals.

They make our lives better in many ways.

For example, by giving us shade and shelter.

Plants are truly amazing.

Do you study plants here?

Speaker 1: Oh, yes.

The study of plants is called botany, and somebody who studies plants is called a botanist.

Miss Penny: That's very interesting.

What kind of plants do you have here in your garden?

Speaker 1: Here, we have a lot of plants that are edible.

These are plants that we can eat.

Miss Penny: Wonderful.

Speaker 1: We have lots of yummy stuff growing.

What I was looking at over here are some peppers.

These are really pretty and they're orange.

Miss Penny: They're pretty and orange.

Speaker 1: We have some yellow ones over here, and sometimes, if they're really spicy, they can be a bright red color.

Miss Penny: You grow them right here.

Speaker 1: Yes.

Right here at the garden.

Miss Penny: What do all plants need to survive?

Speaker 1: You need three really important things, like the sunlight, of course water, when it rains, and soil, so the plants have a place to sit.

Here in the garden, we have so many beautiful plants I want to show you, some that are big and pretty, like orchids, and some that are very delicious, like the cacao tree.

Miss Penny: Wow.

I'm excited.

Speaker 1: Me, too.

Follow me.

Let's check them out.

Miss Penny: Let's come.

Speaker 1: This plant right here is called the cacao tree.

It's super special because this is where we get chocolate from.

Miss Penny: Chocolate.

Speaker 1: When this plant grows, it has a really teeny, tiny flower that grows on the trunk.

Miss Penny: Oh, it's so sweet.

Speaker 1: Then, as that continues to grow, it'll create a seed pod.

This is where we actually make the chocolate from.

Inside, there are seeds.

We'll open it up and we'll add different ingredients like milk and sugar to make chocolate.

Miss Penny: That's great.

So you have to start with a tree in order to make chocolate.

Speaker 1: Yes.

Kind of like the fruit of this cacao tree.

Miss Penny: I see one up here.

It's kind of like an orange yellow.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

When they're fresh, they're that orange yellow color, and then when they get dried up, they'll turn into this brown color.

All right, so now I showed you the cacao tree, which is really yummy and something we can eat.

I want to show you this other tree over here, which is very useful in a different way.

Miss Penny: Great.

Speaker 1: Follow me.

Right behind us over here is a plant called bamboo.

It grows super, super fast and is a really strong building material, and some people also eat something called bamboo shoots, so this tree serves two purposes.

Miss Penny: Wow.

You can use plants for so many things.

Wow.

There are so many different types of very cool plants here at Fairchild Gardens.

What are you going to plant at home?

Wow.

Shiny.

That is a great idea.

It's a beautiful plant.

Oh, orchids are so beautiful.

Let's go learn more about them.

Hi, Nicole.

Thank you for meeting us here.

Nicole: Hi Miss Penny.

I'm going to show you something very special at Fairchild today.

We have a vanilla orchid that's growing up this tree, and it is the very first time that it has ever bloomed at Fairchild.

Miss Penny: We're so lucky.

Nicole: If you look up there, you can see the yellow flower that's sort of drooping down and then you can see a couple other little things sticking out, and those are going to be the new flowers that are going to emerge in the next couple of days.

Miss Penny: A vanilla orchid, does vanilla come from vanilla orchids?

Nicole: It does.

Did you know that when you are eating ice cream, do you know what part of the orchid plant you are actually eating?

Miss Penny: No.

Nicole: It's the orchid seeds, which are really, really tiny.

Do you want to go to the lab and look at some orchid seeds underneath the microscope?

Miss Penny: I would.

Would you like to go?

Speaker 4: Yes.

Miss Penny: Yes.

Nicole: Welcome to the Million Orchid Project lab.

Miss Penny: Wow.

Nicole: This is where we do all of our research on orchids in here.

Speaker 4: Why are these orchids important?

Nicole: We're working with species of orchids that are rare and endangered to South Florida, and so these are all species that you used to be able to find all over the habitats of South Florida.

We are trying to put them back out as they naturally used to occur.

Miss Penny: Botanists like Nicole and others in the Million Orchid Project team are working hard to save and protect orchids, orchids that are in danger of disappearing.

In this lab, they are learning how to help grow and keep them healthy to plant one million orchids back into nature.

Nicole: All right, so I thought that we would look at some orchid seeds over here underneath the microscope, and the reason that we need to use a microscope to look at orchid seeds, see that white dust in there, those are millions and millions of orchid seeds.

Orchid seeds are some of the tiniest in all of the plants.

The microscope allows us to look at really tiny structures and make them bigger, so it's kind of like a magnifying glass.

And we have- Miss Penny: Like a super magnifying glass.

Nicole: Yeah.

Remember, the orchid fruit has the seeds inside, and there's millions of seeds inside each fruit of an orchid.

Miss Penny: Wow.

Nicole: Take a look and you can look at what they look like underneath the microscope.

We are walking through the National Orchid Garden.

This is a very special place because we have orchids that are attached to the trees and grow here naturally year round.

You can see here how these roots have adapted to attach all on their own onto the tree bark.

Miss Penny: Like you have plants that grow in the ground.

They're using the tree bark.

Nicole: Exactly.

You can see here, we have a flower that's about to pop out.

Miss Penny: Oh, it is.

I wonder what color it's going to be.

Nicole: Let's keep walking and we'll look at a few more examples of orchids.

Miss Penny: Let's go.

Nicole: I'm going to drop you off at our innovation studio where you can learn about how we're growing plants to be grown in space.

Miss Penny: Kid Vision kids, plants are extremely important to all animals on earth.

We need them to survive.

They provide clean air, food, shelter, and wellbeing, so we need to bring plants with us anywhere we go, even when we travel into outer space.

Speaker 1: What we're doing here is something called our Growing Beyond Earth project, which is in partnership with NASA.

We're working with them to figure out how to grow plants on the International Space Station.

That's up in outer space, right?

We're trying to grow plants that the astronauts can eat in outer space.

This is called a growth chamber, and it's kind of like a little greenhouse, so it's supposed to be like a little mini earth inside of a box that the astronauts can have up on the space station.

On the space station, you don't have the same amount of sunlight like we do have here on earth, so we have these LED lights up at the top.

This is kind of like the sunlight that helps the plants grow upwards.

We have this kind of dirt and sandy mixture, which is like soil where the plants can sit.

Miss Penny: Like they did in the garden.

Speaker 1: Exactly, like in the ground.

Then, instead of watering the plants, kind of like with a hose, for example, we have a lot of the water in this pool in the bottom, so that way the plants can just drink it up that way.

Then, what the astronauts can do is just open this up and they can harvest or pull out whatever they want to eat, close it back up and let the plant keep growing.

Miss Penny: Fantastic.

Speaker 4: What type of plants are you growing for space?

Speaker 1: The types of plants that we are growing are ones that are edible.

These are ones that we can eat.

Every year, we do different kinds of plants.

Here we have beans.

It looks like we have some herbs, like basil, down here.

Just think about it.

You're up in space for maybe a few months or even a year at a time.

They don't have grocery stores up there, so it's really helpful to do this project so we can have fresh food for the astronauts to eat.

Miss Penny: How will you get them from here to space?

Speaker 1: That's a great question.

We don't really send these up to space.

We will send the seeds.

We do different tests here on earth to figure out which plants work best in this growth chamber, and then the best ones that we like a lot, we'll send them over to NASA and they'll send them to the astronauts, and then they have the same growth chamber on their space station, and then they'll be growing them from seed up there.

Miss Penny: Wow.

Just think, astronauts might be eating these same type of plants.

Speaker 1: We use plants like we've been talking about almost every single day in so many different types of ways, so we're just trying to figure out how we can use them in the best way.

Miss Penny: Thank you so much for teaching us all about plants and about botany and botanists.

We've learned so much today.

Speaker 1: I'm so glad.

It was a pleasure having you here.

Plants are super important because we rely on them so much, so it's our job to take care of them.

Miss Penny: I can't wait to start my own garden.

Speaker 1: Definitely.

We hope to see you here at the garden soon.

Bye.

Miss Penny: Bye.

Speaker 4: Bye.