Volunteer Chris Leach is as excited as the 3- to 6-year-olds gathered Thursday morning at the State Botanical Garden of Georgia for the weekly Sweet Pea Club. It’s Carnivorous Plant Day, and the activities and crafts planned for the next 45 minutes are all about insect-eating plants native to the southeastern U.S.
The first activity is an experiment with Pitcher Plants, bog dwellers that have long skinny leaves that appear to replicate a pitcher at the top. Bugs get trapped in the openings and fall into a deep cavity of digestive liquid, where they die and become food for the plant.
Each of the 17 Sweet Pea kids gets a freshly dried pitcher plant from the botanical garden bog, safety scissors, plastic tweezers and a magnifying glass to examine the remains of their plant’s last meals.
With their parent’s help, they cut the bottom inch or two of the plant, and then pull the layers of leaves apart to see what’s inside.
“It’s a ladybug!” Leach says excitedly as she helps 4-year-old Zoe Oosthuizen empty the contents of the plant stem into a specimen dish. “That’s so cool!”
Leach spends as much time at the garden as some full-time employees. When she’s not there she is often promoting programs, or sewing vests made from fabric covered in images of green pea pods for garden educators and volunteers who help with the Sweet Pea Club week after week. She’s also using the fabric to make bags to give to the children on Oct. 31, the last Sweet Pea Club scheduled for 2024.
Education has always been a big part of her life. In Ohio and later in Georgia, Leach’s students, from preK to age 21, were profoundly disabled. There is no educational curriculum that meets all of their needs, so teachers are challenged to find different strategies to reach individual students who were self-contained in the same classroom. After retirement, the botanical garden offered the perfect place to apply her expertise.
“I wasn’t ready to give up the teaching,” she says. “I get to use my skills to work with kids.”
Her husband of 16 years, Lanse Leach, also has a teaching background. Retiring from the U.S. Army as a Colonel, Lanse also holds a PhD in computer science, which he taught at West Point.
He has helped improve technology at the State Botanical Garden by donating funds to support technology improvements.
Working with Jason Young, director of the garden’s horticulture and grounds, Lanse donated funding for technology to create GPS maps that can help visitors find specific benches or plants donated in someone’s memory. The maps also allow garden employees to locate specific plants and botanical collections across the grounds.
Funding from the Leaches paid to upgrade computers that control the climate in the garden’s greenhouses, maintaining temperatures between 60 and 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
“They are extremely generous with their time and money,” Young said.
The big educational gift from the Leaches this year is an outdoor puppet stage for the theater in the woods in the Alice H. Richards Children’s Garden. The children’s education department has a permanent indoor puppet stage, as well as a small portable puppet stage. The outdoor stage will be installed at the theater for easy access and will provide another permanent venue for learning through educational puppet shows.
“Chris and Lanse have impacted multiple areas of the garden with their generosity,” said Jenny Cruse-Sanders, State Botanical Garden director. “From helping with educational programming to funding technology upgrades, we are extremely grateful for the Leaches’ support of the garden.”
The Leaches say providing funding and volunteering time are just what they do.
“We made an intentional decision to live our lives to the fullest while we’re here,” Chris Leach says.
Andrea Fischer, volunteer and tours coordinator for the State Botanical Garden, began her career at the garden as a volunteer more than 20 years ago.
Volunteers are “ambassadors” for the garden, she said. “They enjoy connecting with the people who come here.”
In FY2024, 434 volunteers worked 14,796 hours at the garden, the equivalent of eight part-time staff. Put another way, volunteers provided the garden with $204,185 worth of essential labor that year.
But, Fischer said, volunteers don’t think of the monetary value of their service.
“They like helping, they like being social, they like the garden,” Fischer says. “Volunteers come out here because they want to. If they didn’t want to be social, they would stay home.”
For more information about volunteer opportunities at the State Botanical Garden, visit botgarden.uga.edu.
