Main image in photo collage shows Claire Davis ’09 collecting twig samples at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Brooklyn, NY.

*        *        *

For each year they attend the College, Bennington students go out into the world to complete seven-week winter internships in areas that fascinate them and complement their studies. They bring back stories from across the country and across the globe—tales from political campaigns and research laboratories, law offices and art museums, hospitals and theaters, newspapers and national parks.

This internship period is called Field Work Term, and it’s been going strong since the College's founding. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be presenting stories from this year’s FWT.

*        *        *

Claire Davis ’09 never expected to fall in love with a banana tree.

But sometimes, beauty is just too hard to resist.

“It was pretty much the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” Claire says. “It has this amazing and bizarre fruiting structure, a dark purple flower, and the bananas grow in tiers…It was like something out of Dr. Seuss.”

When Claire decided to spend Field Work Term at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, part of the allure was the chance to work with plants that don’t grow naturally in New England. Each day, she had access to a 52-acre living museum with a 30,000-specimen herbarium, a native flora garden, an aquatic house and orchid collection, a bonsai museum….and, of course, the Tropical Pavilion—the soaring greenhouse where she fell in love with Musa speciosa (a.k.a. the banana tree) and scores of other exotic plants.

She didn’t spend all her time in the moist environs of the greenhouse, however. On some days, she searched the grounds with pruning shears in hand, clipping twigs from magnolias and maples to help create a new winter identification key. Other days found her setting out with a camera, taking photos for the Botanic Garden’s website.

“I came late to science. I actually disliked biology in high school.”

Hands-on work with plants was one of the things that primed Claire’s interest in biology and ecology in the first place. “I sort of came late to science,” she says. “I actually disliked biology in high school. But then I took Biology of the Sexes with Betsy [Sherman], and it was a lot of fun, and I thought I would take another science class.”

Her next venture was Natural History of Plants, taught by Kerry Woods. Kerry is known for taking classes on hikes through the woods to examine plants firsthand, and this course put a special emphasis on learning to identify native flora in their habitat. “After that,” she says, “it just really clicked.” Classes in forest ecology, evolution, and cell biology followed.

“I went in thinking ‘This will be fun,’ but then I totally fell in love.”

Partly because Claire’s interests are so diverse—she is concentrating in both literature and science—she wasn’t necessarily expecting to find her life’s work on this Field Work Term job. For her first FWT, she did tech work for a theater in Seattle; for her sophomore FWT, she went to Paris to teach at a bilingual school. “They were great, fantastic experiences, but I realized they weren’t for me.

“I went into my FWT at the Botanic Garden thinking, ‘This will be fun; I’ll have a science job for a month and a half and I’ll see how it is.’” But as the internship progressed, she says, “I just loved it. I totally fell in love. Now I definitely want to do something, either while I’m at Bennington or after I graduate, that involves research with tropical plants.”

“What exactly is this thing I’ve pulled a twig from?”

On rainy days at the Botanic Garden, Claire cozied up in the herbarium’s mounting room alongside brushes, bottles of glue, and wax paper—first pressing the the specimens she’d collected, then putting them in the drier for a few days, then mounting them on acid-free paper.

“There was really a sense of camaraderie in that office,” she says. “It was great to have people around who could answer my questions: What exactly is this thing I’ve pulled a twig from? What kind of habitat does this naturally grow in? Why does it grow the way it does?”

Because the colors of plants fade over time, she also wrote descriptions of each specimen she catalogued, so future readers would know what it had looked like when freshly cut. “That was another fun thing, looking through the specimens,” she says. “People have such different ideas of what the colors of things are. Paul, who took care of the herbarium, was a painter, and I’d find things he’d done the labels for, with descriptions like ‘carmine’ and ‘aquamarine.’

“Chamaedorea elegans looked so cool when it was mounted on paper…”

And herein, perhaps, lies another mark of a true falling-in-love experience: The objects of Claire’s affection are still pretty vivid in her mind. Even in the mounting room, it was the tropical plants that captured her attention. “Chamaedorea elegans looked so cool when it was mounted on paper. It was a palm leaf, but it had this spiky orange infructescence....”

Claire Davis '09 in the Dickinson Greenhouse on the Bennington campus.

More:

• Field Work Term
• More Field Work Term stories
• A sampler of recent FWT jobs

Click here to read more stories about Bennington.