My group’s plan had a few different options which all varied on options and different resources. One option was to have an exhibit on Indigenous plants, more specifically plants indigenous to Missouri or even St. Louis. The final draft of this exhibit would be to showcase textures, accurate photos, sounds of the area, and even stories of how the plants are used in Indigenous communities. The obstacle with this plan would be a limitation on resources like funding. To contribute visual, tangible, and auditory aspects on multiple plants in an exhibit would cost a lot in technology. Time is another obstacle for this approach. There would not enough time to finish this exhibit in a manageable and well-done way. Also to consider the availability of the abundance of staff we would need to work with. They all have full time jobs at the Garden and considering the timeline and responsiveness we had from our surveys last semester, there is not enough attention given to the cause by the Missouri Botanical Garden staff.

The next idea was to provide information to staff to give a staff led tour on Indigenous knowledge and the plants that the Garden has, and how they use that information from the plants in their day-to-day studies. Our challenge with this choice was that we just didn’t have enough thought put into this idea and preferred the other option. This tour wouldn’t take as much money or resources, but it would take a lot of time to formulate all the material and sources needed for the tour to happen the way it should.

The idea we ended up choosing to go with is to do a QR virtual tour with a self-guided tour of all of the Indigenous plants that the Garden has on display. A further explanation of this is that our group plans on formulating a spot on important Indigenous plants within the Garden’s showcase. In these QR codes, our goal is that it takes you to the same website that they have all their other virtual tours stored. In this, it would take you to a place where it names the scientific name of the plant, as well as the Indigenous name of the plant. There would be a pronunciation section, a brief description of all of the different uses and categories for the plant. There could be an auditory aspect where the slides can be read to you for those who are blind or visually impaired. Obstacles for this idea could also be time since I am afraid of getting all that needs to be done in a good enough way to put out for the public. Biggest fear is that we put out this hard work, and it’s not good enough and needs to be taken off and redone by the Garden.

Barriers to building trust include putting the past in the past in talk about being afraid of time because of how long it took to ger back our surveys last semester. When it took the Garden more than six weeks to give back usable survey data, to say the least, it scares me about attempting to do something much bigger than a survey which would have taken less than ten minutes.

I think as of right now, considering last week we never proposed our ideas to anyone at the Garden like was originally the plan, there is nothing to change as of right now. Until we hear feedback from people/groups we plan on working with it is impossible to know what is and is not in the Garden partners’ reach. Aspects as far as time, money, and resources that we have are all up in the air and are unknown.

The activities that we were shown by the interpretation team opened my eyes for sure. Some of the ideas are effective, and some definitely need some revamping to make them better for the masses. That however is not our issue, our task is to come up with our own way of interpretation. Showcasing the information, we see fit in the way we want the message to be portrayed. Our constructive feedback given about the current interactive forms of information appeared to be accepted openly. Sean especially seemed open to all that we had to say.