Plants growing on youngsters
Students work with rarities

Suzanne Carr / The Free Lance–Star Project director Scott Gilbert hands out pots of seedling pitcher plants to Meredith Wolfe and other fifth-graders for analysis Wednesday. The project sprouted with the aid of a grant.

Just ask any fifth-grader at Potomac Elementary School—pitcher plants are cool. 

Why? 

Well, that’s simple. 

“They eat bugs,” said Shelby Minter, 11. The bugs drop into the plant’s tube-shaped parts and are digested inside, he said. 

To the King George County students, working with plants is just fun. 

But a lot of learning is going on as well, said Scott Gilbert, who teaches science for grades three to five. 

The school near Dahlgren received a $10,000 grant from Toyota last spring to grow pitcher plants and perform experiments on them, Gilbert said. Only 50 schools across the country received science grants from Toyota last year. 

Some of the plants they’re growing are Virginia’s endangered yellow pitcher plant, Sarracenia flava, he said. 

After students finish raising and experimenting on the endangered plants, they will be replanted in a protected wild area, he said. 

The project is in line with the state’s Standards of Learning. The students fulfill their science requirement and learn the basic principles of scientific investigation, he said. 

Besides Gilbert, two other third-grade teachers, Amy Keeton and Melissa Schmutte, are working on the project. 

Biologist Phil Sheridan of Caroline County and master gardener Susan Harmon of King George are also helping with the research. 

Sheridan runs the Meadowview Biological Research Station in Woodford. A handful of Virginia and Maryland biologists, naturalists and volunteers work at Meadowview to identify, preserve and restore wetland habitats. 

Sheridan has worked to restore endangered pitcher plants to their native habitats for several years. 

He doesn’t know of any other elementary schools in the area that are researching rare pitcher plants. 

The school has used gardens as a teaching tool for a couple of years. 

Harmon helped build the first garden to fulfill her master gardening community service hours requirement. 

She attended Potomac and thought it would be fun to work with students on a garden. 

The first was a butterfly and hummingbird garden. It was so successful that soon other teachers wanted gardens. 

Now, the school is home to five: the Wizard of Oz garden, the Virginia native plant garden, the wildlife habitat garden and the moss garden. A bog garden there contains the pitcher plants as well as well as better-known insect-eating plants such as the Venus Flytrap. 

The students tend the gardens; the school even offers an after-school gardening club. About 15 children are in the club this year. 

“The kids really love to get their hands in the dirt,” Harmon said. “They’ll see me in the grocery store and tell their parents ‘that’s the lady who helps us garden,’” she said. 

The students are eager to share their knowledge about gardening. Several fifth-graders volunteered to give “garden tours” to parents on a recent back-to-school night. 

Many students also remember which plant they grew in the butterfly garden. 

“We have a lot of fun with plants,” Lawrence Green, 11, said. “We love them.” 

The pitcher plant experiment has been the school’s biggest garden project so far. 

Students in grades three to five started the project last spring. They have planted pitcher plants in about 130 pots. 

This week, a group of fifth-graders measured the plants and counted the number of them in each pot. 

Lawmont Green, 11, said he could hardly see the plants last month. Now, some of the plants he measured were up to 7 centimeters tall. 

“They’re pretty. It’s fun to watch them grow,” he said. 

The students performed the work very carefully. 

“They’re endangered,” explained Amy Copeland, 10, as she measured a plant. “So we need to take care of them. Then we’re going to put them back in nature.”