To be completely frank, I didn’t expect much from the Cornell Botanic Gardens when I got there. It was hot, I was thirsty, and we had just trekked what felt like five miles across Central and North Campuses – featuring a surprise encounter with a squirmy garden snake along the way. I had chosen the event because I wanted a break from the stuffy libraries and poorly-ventilated classrooms I was used to. To me, plant science was a field I had always dismissed as “not for me.”  But as soon as we arrived, I was enveloped in every variety of the color green known to man, eye-to-eye with taro and banana plants that should not have existed in Ithaca but did. Suddenly, plant science didn’t seem so boring.

“You might wonder why we’re growing these here,” our tour guide, Shirley, said as she gestured to the tangle of tropical leaves and stems behind her. “Well, it’s because we can.”

And with that sentiment in our heads, we were off to explore the wild wonders of the Botanic Gardens. Although I hadn’t had much interest in any of the gardens when I’d briefly looked through the website, everything became much more impressive in person. In particular, the Robison York Herb Garden caught my interest, with its assortment of everything from sage to stevia to foxglove. In my anthropology class – Health and Disease in the Ancient World – we had just read a journal article on the medicinal practices of ancient Mesopotamia, in which the author noted that due to translational issues and inadequate plant remains, there was no way for modern humans to ever identify the many plants used in ancient medicinal remedies. Standing in front of herbs both all-too-familiar and completely unknown to me, I couldn’t help but wonder if any of those plants were the long-lost relatives of an ancient Mesopotamian cure-all.

The Young Flower Garden also held a surprise for me. On the far side of the garden from the entrance stood a collection of flowers commonly used for dyes, their vivid hues somehow managing to stand out in an already over-saturated environment of color. Surveying the various growths, a memory my mother once shared with me came to mind. Growing up in a rural village in China in the ’60s and ’70s, without many of the luxuries already common to every household in America, she and her friends would pick the bright orange flowers off a certain bush and wrap them around their fingernails as a natural alternative to nail polish. I wondered if any of the many bushes arranged along the fence was the very plant so integral to my mother’s childhood, and jotted down their names to translate into Chinese later. Unfortunately, my mother only knew the local slang name for the flower – and so another mystery faded away, unsolved.

As I’m writing this in the sleek, coldly modern Clark Atrium after my anthropology class, the thought I’d had going into the Botanic Gardens – that it would be a nice break from learning – seems incredibly naive to me. In fact, I’m now hyperaware of the long legacy of plant life on this planet, and the fact that certain plants – which existed thousands of miles away, tens and hundreds and thousands of years ago – could have made it all the way to Ithaca thanks to the gentle hands of Cornell plant biologists and botanists and various others.  Even more frustrating, the questions that come with that awareness have answers that have yet to be discovered, despite the great progress made by people around the world – and at Cornell – working to unlock the mysteries of plant genetics and evolution, hoping to uncover exactly how Mesopotamians treated skin rashes, or how certain crops affect the economies of rural villages. I’m still hopeful, though. Maybe someday, I’ll have the answer to one of my questions.

But alas, plants don’t tell their secrets that easily.