Dundee Womens Festival 2021 – The WeeCAIR Medicinal Garden
Many thanks to Dundee Women’s Festival 2021 for having us! We had a great time. During the festival we put on a virtual disucssion event with Dundee Botanic Garden and Hosptialfield House on March 9th.
If you didn’t get the chance to join us on the night, we posted a recording from the event on our YouTube channel.
We’ve put together here some fun activities that you can find below. These are aimed at all ages and can be enjoyed solo or with your family. We will have colouring sheets about the plants that will be going into our garden as well as other fun activities such as a word search and scavenger hunt.
We would love to see how you get on with our activities. You can reach us on Twitter and Instagram.
Colouring Sheets
We’ve put together some fun colouring sheets on some of the flowers that we are putting into our medicinal garden. You can learn all about the medicinal extracts from these plants that have gone onto creating some of today’s medicines!
DOWNLOAD THE FLOWER COLOURING SHEETS HERE.
We also have some simpler colouring sheets for those who would enjoy them too. They can learn about gardening and explore different colours of flowers.
DOWNLOAD THE GARDENING TOOLS AND SIMPLE FLOWER COLOURING SHEETS HERE.
Rainbow Scavenger Hunt
Our next activity is a scavenger hunt! As flowers come in all the different colours, we thought what better than a rainbow to help you hunt for them.
We want you to be able to enjoy our scavenger hunt anywhere at any time. You can go out for a walk and spot all the different coloured plants and flowers but you can also do it from the comfort of your own home by looking out of windows, checking any houseplants you have or even using the internet to look up colourful flowers.
Wherever or however you go on our rainbow Scavenger hunt we would love to know what you found! Tweet us using @WCAIRDundee and tag us on Instagram using the handle @wcair_sci_garden.
DOWNLOAD THE SCAVENGER HUNT HERE
Medicinal Plant Word Search
You can put together all your skills you’ve leant so far and have fun doing this word search. All the words in the activity have been mentioned and explored in the previous activites. You can test your knoweldge here or use this as an easy way to start off. Explore what your know already and learn some new words.
Don’t forget to tell us how you got on! Tag us on social media using @WCAIRDundee on Twitter and @wcair_sci_garden on Instagram.
Our Garden Library
We have listed here some exciting books and papers that have had an impact on our garden. Our researchers and experts have suggested books that they have enjoyed whilst exploring medicinal plants.
Gardens are a great place for quiet contemplation, and our garden will incorporate the cherry tree planted in memory of Yuji Saito, a researcher at the University who, tragically, passed away not long after returning to his home in Japan. We have the pleasure of including the papers published by Yuji within our library as well.
Our Reading List –
Books:
• The Gardeners Companion to Medicinal Plants by Monique Simmonds, Melanie-Jayne Howes, Jason Irving (2016)
• A Handbook of Scotland’s Wild Harvests by Fi Martynoga, (2012)
• Healing Threads – Traditional Medicines of the Highlands and Islands by Mary Beith (2018)
• Folk Tradition and Folk Medicine in Scotland: The writings of David Rorie by David Bucan (1994)
• The English Herbal of Physical Plants by John Pechy (1694)
• Culpeper’s English Physician and Complete Herbal by Nicholas Culpeper (1652)
• Napiers History of Herbal Healing, Ancient and Modern by Tom Atkinson (2003)
• How Shakespeare Cleaned His Teeth and Cromwell Treated His Warts: Secrets of the 17th Century Medicine Closet by Katherine Knight (2006)
• The Medieval Gardens by Sylvia Landsberg (1998)
• Early Scottish Gardens by Sheila Mackay (2001)
• Black’s Nature Guides Medicinal Plants of Britain and Europe by Wolfgang Hensel (2008)
Websites:
- ‘Plants for a Future‘ website. Our team used this as a start point when researching the plants we are going to put into the garden.
Journal Articles:
- Papers published citing Yuji Sato on how MEK1 is activated and on how epidermal growth factor inhibits the protein kinase GSK3: Alessi et al (1994) EMBO J. 13, 1610-1619; Saito et al (1994) FEBS Lett 341, 119-124; Saito et al (1994) Biochem. J. 303, 27-32
Please note that the links for the books take you to their ‘Goodreads’ or ‘Amazon’ page where you can read more about them and you choose an online retailer if you wish to purchase them.