Once upon a time my little brother and I decided we were going to learn to do Science. This was a challenge because we were homeschooled so had no lab, had a general fear of biology because it didn't seem like something God much approved of, and it seemed to involve sticky things
Nonetheless being older I had to figure out how we were going to conduct Science without offending God and so I picked the most Scientific books I could find in the downstairs bookshelf, J Henri Fabre's The Insect World and a beautiful book by Capon called Botany for Gardeners
Capon's book has the first pictures I ever saw of cells, but I was iffy on the scale. Plants were suitably nonsticky compared to animals so I set out a day's agenda of Science, that we would try to cut into plant stems and observe their vascular structure
Fabre was dense but I liked him and I picked out an experiment involving ants and experimenting with getting the ants to go in a circle--part 2 of the afternoon's agenda, BEHAVIOR, unclear how these were related but I was cross-sectional from the start
We set up a Lab on the wrap-around porch of our house and my brother dragged in 1) a huge branch of wood 2) poison ivy 3) a handful of leaves (?? not on the agenda, exploratory work clearly) 4) a bag of sugar to attract ants 5) a saw from the garden shed to dissect the plants
I vetoed the saw but we squashed up plenty of stems and stained our hands green from leaves, sadly did not observe any cells (at least not at the right scale), so I decided we could use a proxy measure like drawing what we thought the cells looked like on a piece of paper
The sugar attracted YELLOW JACKETS, not ants, Fabre had not prepared me for this but we bravely stayed on the porch and documented the movement patterns of the yellow jackets in weird little line tracings of our own making, hoping to analyze later (operationalization!)
The first paper from our porch lab was therefore an interdisciplinary meditation on the hardness of giant wooden branches, speculation about poison ivy (I am not allergic to it, turns out), and a huge picture of a yellow jacket from my brother that took up two pages
We retired to the kitchen and used the remaining sugar to make cookies and I read Botany for Gardners while they baked. I still have both of those books, and they are still beautiful. I have never gotten to see real plant cells and I should some day, that would be grand.
