Berkeley is just a stone’s throw away from Silicon Valley, and it is sometimes easy to forget that there is a lot of fantastic natural beauty to enjoy in the state. In fact, just in the backyard of the UC Berkeley campus are two great natural spots: The UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens and the Redwood Grove. One of our after class field trips involved going to explore the Botanical Gardens, which is a 34-acre piece of land home to over 10,000 types of plants including many rare and endangered species. The Garden is organized geographically, and features 9 regions of plantings from Italy to South Africa, and a huge collection of plants native to California. Plants from all the continents on Earth can be found here.
As this group of students were mainly teenagers, I expected them to not be so interested in what the Botanical Gardens had to offer, thinking that they were more interested in the field trips that had to do with technology (like the Google field trip that we just did) or to do some shopping in the student store to pick up some souvenirs. To my surprise, many of them complained to me later on that the hour and a half I had allocated to exploring the gardens was too short for them to enjoy everything it had to offer. The one feedback I got was that if I were to ever do this again, I should allocate at least 2 hours, if not more.
Right next to the gardens is a redwood grove. Redwoods are some of the tallest trees in the world, and these tall beauties are indigenous to California and a wonder to behold. As it was summer, one of the very nice things that we were able to enjoy was a concert in a clearing in the redwood grove. The band that was slated to play during the time that we were in Berkeley specialized in country music, something that not many students in Singapore would be familiar with. Again, I thought that the students would not be interested and would want to leave by the first intermission so that we could catch the last bus back to campus and grab some dinner. The reason I put this on the itinerary was to give the students the chance to see the redwood trees up close and also to enjoy an outdoor concert, even if it was a genre of music they are not familiar with. Again, the students surprised me during the intermission, and they overwhelmingly voted to stay on until the end of the concert, saying that it would not be a problem for them to make the hike back to campus on foot. Wow. Here are some shots from the conert:
