[soft music] Hi, I'm Casey.

I'm the Director of the Arboretum at Penn State.

The arboretum is an amazing gift.

It's a place for lifelong learning.

It's a place to have really cool research get done.

And it's a place to just come and enjoy life 365 days a year.

Hope you enjoy your visit.

[calm music] Welcome to the arboretum at Penn State.

My name is Rebecca Horwitt and I'm here to talk to you about the watershed map.

This is something I'm really excited to share with you because it is a really cool tool for understanding the way the water moves in our area.

All the drops of water that fall in the Spring Creek Watershed, all the rain, all the snow, ends up traveling out through the gap in Bald Eagle Mountain, ends up in the West Branch of the Susquehanna River, and travels on to the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.

To understand how water works in the Spring Creek Watershed, you have to imagine a single drop of rain falling on one of the big mountains here in the watershed.

That drop of rain, maybe it hits a leaf.

And the leaf drips into a stream.

And the stream runs down a mountain.

And that drop of water ends up in the Spring Creek.

Perhaps it soaks into the ground and ends up in a well that feeds into the tap in your house or into the fountain here in the gardens.

But it can also evaporate or it can continue on its journey towards the Chesapeake Bay.

The watershed map shows some places where we haven't always been good stewards of our water.

For example, at the foot of Mount Nittany, back in the 1970s, leaky chemical storage tanks discharged a pesticide into the water.

And that pesticide ended up in Spring Creek and ended up in the fish in Spring Creek.

And that meant that you couldn't eat trout from parts of Spring Creek for close to 30 years.

We've gotten a lot better at managing chemicals since that point.

But there are still some challenges that we face.

A lot of them are related to the growth of the community.

As towns and cities expand, they produce more pollution like sewage and road salt and household chemicals.

All of those things can end up in the water.

As towns and cities expand, they also bring more hard surfaces with them, things like roads and parking lots and roofs.

Water can't soak in on a hard surface.

It just runs off, carrying pollution with it.

If you preserve open space, then you have a space where water can flow into the ground and into the groundwater that we depend on.

One of the places that we do that is in the Marsh Meadow.

The Marsh Meadow preserves an area where water that flows from the Penn State campus and the surrounding neighborhood can flow into the ground and filter into the groundwater and continue on its long journey to the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.

So the next time you're here at the Arboretum, bring a water bottle and go over to the watershed map, pour some water into the channels, and see if you can watch it flow through those channels.

And imagine the journey that water is on as it comes from our watershed and goes all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.

And that will help you remember that we all have a part in being good stewards of our watershed.

HEATHER FRANTZ: Pollinators are some of the most important members of the food chain.

Without them, we wouldn't have some of our favorite food and plant species Hi, my name is Heather and we're here at the Pollinator and Bird Garden to talk about pollinators.

In Pennsylvania, the five main animal pollinators are bees, flies, butterflies and moths, hummingbirds, and beetles.

If you are building a garden and you want it to attract every pollinator species native to Pennsylvania, how would you do it?

That was the goal here in the Pollinator and Bird Garden at the Arboretum.

And I'm going to show you some of the secrets to providing habitat for hundreds of different species.

First, we need to provide animals with food to eat.

Bees are the most important pollinator.

And there are over 400 species of bee in Pennsylvania, including the familiar domestic honey bee and hundreds of species of native bees.

Bees eat both nectar and pollen.

Nectar is a carbohydrate that helps bees have energy.

Pollen has both protein and fats that help bees grow and stay healthy.

Just as a food item from the grocery store has a nutritional label, flowers do too.

Some bees visit a wide variety of flowers.

Others have favorite flowers.

For example, there are species of mining bee that almost exclusively visit willow trees.

And guess what?

We have willow trees planted for them in the garden.

Adult butterflies are another pollinator that feeds from flowers, but they only drink nectar.

They drink the sugary liquid with their long tongue or proboscis.

But butterflies start their lives as caterpillars or larvae that eat plant leaves.

We call those plants host plants.

Caterpillars can be very picky eaters.

The black swallowtail caterpillar eats plants in the Apiaceae or carrot family.

And for them, we have fennel.

And then over there, we've planted milkweed, which is the host plant for monarch butterflies.

If we wanted to provide the perfect plant for every pollinator in Pennsylvania, we would need a much bigger garden.

So many of the plants in the garden were chosen not because they are perfect for one particular species, but because they are useful for a wide range of different species.

Creating a plant menu for the thousands of different insects that live in Pennsylvania means growing specific kinds of plants.

Some of them live in shady woods, some live in dry meadows.

In order to get all those species to grow, the garden needed to have specific types of soil.

When you visit the garden, check out the dirt.

Some places, you will see deep, moist soil that's good for woodland and marsh plants.

And in other places, you will see dry sandy soil for plants that prefer drier habitats.

The sandy soil is also great for ground-nesting bees and wasps.

Now that we have food for the animals, we need to provide them with places to raise their young.

Domestic honey bees live in hives with a queen who lays eggs and workers who make honey and tend to the baby bees.

Our honey bees live in a human-made Langstroth hive.

But in nature, they would build their hive in a hole in a tree.

Honey bees are social, but 90% of bee species are solitary.

The solitary female bee lives and works alone.

She makes her own nest and does all the work of feeding the larva.

Many solitary bees nest in the ground.

Others raise their babies in places like hollow plant stems and holes in dead wood.

Since dead wood is hard to come by, we build bee hotels.

You will see bees of all sizes, big and small, coming and going from the different-sized holes.

Another great place to watch for insects is the edge of the big pond.

The pond is built so there are shallow spots where insects can come to drink.

You might also spot birds bathing in the shallows.

Anyone can make a garden habitat.

If you want to attract lots of different species to a garden, start with the right kind of soil, add drinking water and shelter, and grow the right menu of plants.

If you do that, you get a garden that not only looks beautiful but also has an abundant habitat for many different species.

[soft music] Hi, everybody.

My name is Jen.

I'm a teacher here at the Arboretum's Children's Garden.

When the children's garden was being created, the garden designer wanted to make a magical realm where visitors could imagine what it would be like to be the size of a tiny insect.

That's why we have a giant tree stump, enormous bolete mushrooms, and a giant caterpillar.

We could have put an Alice in Wonderland-style imaginary caterpillar at the back of the garden, but the children's garden is full of sculptures of native Pennsylvania animals, and the Arboretum wanted another one.

We chose a real native caterpillar, the spicebush swallowtail.

Spicebush swallowtail caterpillars really do look like this, with tremendous yellow spots on their heads that look like eyes.

The caterpillars' real eye are on the sides of their heads, and you probably wouldn't notice them.

The yellow spots are thought to be useful for scaring away predators.

When they grow up, these caterpillars transform into beautiful black and blue butterflies that feed on a wide range of flowers.

These caterpillars are very picky eaters.

They can only survive on a diet of leaves from a few types of trees-- redbay, which doesn't grow in Pennsylvania, sassafras, and spicebush are planted here at the back of the garden.

Our spicebush caterpillar is sitting under a grove of real spicebush plants.

There are lots of different species of swallowtails in Pennsylvania.

We have Eastern tiger swallowtails, black swallowtails, zebra swallowtails, pipevine swallowtails, giant swallowtails.

And their caterpillars all eat completely different types of plants.

If you want all the different types of swallowtails, planting one type of plant is not enough.

And if you look around the children's garden, you discover that it has plants that can support the unique needs of all sorts of different swallowtail butterflies.

The pawpaws are food for the zebra swallowtail caterpillars.

The Dutchman's pipe vine is food for the pipevine swallowtails.

The birch trees, mountain ash, and quaking aspens are food for the Eastern tiger swallowtails.

Parsley in the harvest garden beds is food for the black swallowtail caterpillars.

When a gardener is picking out plants, they can make a huge impact on the environment around them, and not just by choosing just the right kind of plant for different types of very picky caterpillars.

Most plants support more than just one type of animal.

A great example in the botanic gardens is the white oak, which was actually the first tree planted at the Arboretum.

Oaks support many different types of native insects.

The average life span of a white oak is around 300 years.

Just imagine how many generations of insects, birds, and mammals a single white oak can support in its lifetime.

You don't have to think 300 years into the future every time you plan a garden, but every plant has its own story and special relationships with the animals and other plants around it.

And as a gardener, you have the power to be part of those wonderful stories.

Hi, I'm Sanford Smith and I'm a Professor of Forestry at Penn State.

Lots of times, I get the opportunity to work in the Arboretum.

And this is a natural area in the Arboretum that we're in right now.

It's called Hartley Wood.

Hartley Wood is a beautiful, unique location, and the old growth here is very special.

It's unlike old growth in many other areas because it's dominated by large oak trees.

These trees here in this forest are between the ages of about 150 and 350 years old.

How do you tell the age of a tree?

A tree's age can be determined in a lot of different ways, some of which are just estimates on the age, such as looking at the height of the tree or looking at the bark of the tree.

But many people know that counting the rings is a surefire way to determine the age of a tree.

But to do that, you have to either cut the tree down or cut a neighboring tree down and compare the ages.

So foresters have invented a little tool.

It's called an increment borer.

An increment borer is like a hand drill bit, except it's hollow inside.

And you can core that into the tree and then pull that little core of wood out that formed in that hollow drill bit.

And you can count the rings that way.

And this is how we determine the age of trees.

And every one of these trees in the Arboretum has been cored and we know its age.

One of the really cool things about old growth like Hartley Wood is that they have so much history.

So many things have occurred during the lifetime of this forest.

One of the interesting things is that we believe that this old-growth forest was the result of Native American burning.

Native Americans used fire to burn fields for agriculture, for driving game, and also encouraging berry growth.

In this case, it's possible they were driving game in this area and they burned it over.

Now, what does that have to do with the old growth trees?

Well, when you burn an area, one of the first trees that comes back and re-establishes on the site are oak trees.

They do much better after a burn and they come up from the roots that weren't burned.

Another interesting aspect of this old-growth forest is that all of the land around it was owned by the Iron furnace.

The iron furnace cut those forest lands to produce charcoal for smelting iron ore.

Smelting means they boiled down the rocks that had iron ore in it and they produced iron products.

In this case, the Hartley Woods was owned by James Hartley, and he didn't sell his land to the furnace and didn't sell the timber or the trees from his land to the furnace.

So he kept this land here, as well as subsequent landowners for wood and for firewood and things like that.

Lastly, another reason why this is probably an old growth forest today is that the soil is very shallow here.

Right in the back of the property behind us, there's actually a cliff that shows that the soil here is only a couple of feet deep.

This forest was not going to be good land for agriculture, so it was left as forest.

When people come to Hartley Wood, we like to tell them about all the great things that forests provide, and they all start with W-- wood, water, wildlife, recreation, and wonder.

I know that Hartley Woods no longer provides wood, but it used to provide wood for people.

Wildlife is something that people love observing here, especially birds.

Water moves through Hartley Woods forest floor and replenishes the wells at Penn State.

Recreation is something everyone likes to do here-- riding bicycles, walking, hiking.

And then lastly, wonder.

That's something everyone appreciates.

The aesthetic beauty is wondrous and it keeps people coming back all through the year, through every season.

We hope you'll visit Hartley Wood as well.

[soft music] CASEY SCLAR: Thanks so much for spending time and seeing all the great things that we have at the Arboretum at Penn State.

We hope that you'll come and join us here and experience things throughout the years.