Cristina Salvador, Francesca Davies, Fran Cole, Clayton Bass, Mollie Parsons, and Linda Milbourn.

Summer Intern 2013

Welcome to our new summer intern Zachary Sippel.  He is going to be in eighth grade at The Academy for Technology and the Classics and is a budding botanist.  Zack will be helping put together some educational activities and will also be volunteering at the grand opening.  He was recently interviewed about his internship.

What do you want to focus on during your internship at the Santa Fe Botanical Garden?

Z: This summer I want to learn about plant types and how certain plants will grow in their environment.

What are you most excited about doing?

Z: I am most excited about making scavenger hunts and making the garden fun for kids.  I want to make it interesting so that it fits their age group.

Why did you choose to volunteer here?

Z: I want to volunteer here because plants have always seemed interesting and are fun to watch go through growing stages.

When did you discover that you might be interested in studying plants?

Z: I first became interested in botany when my fourth grade teacher gave everybody in the class a spider plant.  She gave me the job of taking care of them along with the other plants in the room.  I really liked watching runners grow and appear, flowers opening and withering, and seedpods ripening.

We are thrilled to have Zack join us for the summer, and we look forward to all the wonderful work he will do to make the garden fun for visitors of all ages.

Summer Intern 2012

Annie Corbitt on Franz Josef glacier, New Zealand.

Annie Corbitt, from Conway, Arkansas, is a junior philosophy major at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. With the Brown Fellows Merit Scholarship she received upon entering college, she has travelled to Vietnam and Cambodia and has acted as a research assistant to Cambridge University professor Gillian Carr, studying the German occupation of the British Channel Islands in World War II. As her Brown Fellows project this summer, she is searching for ways to combine her love for the natural world – kindled by her family’s travels and their goal to hike in every U.S. National Park – with her interest in philosophy. She hopes to bring philosophy about the beauty of nature, and how it encourages love and respect for all life, to practical purposes by working with a non-profit organization dedicated to nurturing the appreciation and conservation of nature. In high school, Annie was a founding member of the board for the non-profit Blackbird Academy for Dance and Fine Arts, having danced herself since she was three. The experience opened her eyes to the difficulties involved in running a non-profit organization but also to the ways in which non-profits can greatly enhance their communities. Annie lists among her favorite things the music of Peter, Paul and Mary, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, tall grasses rippling in the wind, and her childhood dream of one day raising a grizzly bear cub. Follow Annie’s photolog of the Leonora Curtin Wetland Preserve Summer 2012 on Facebook >>

Teaching Team

Our work would not be possible without the dedicated core of volunteers who serve as docents at our preserves, lecture speakers, educators for school programs, horticulturalists, contributing authors of articles and research, photographers, artists, graphic designers, and so much more.