The Engaging Environmental Experiences Internship team invited the community to the Arboretum and Botanical Garden at Cal State Fullerton to participate in a plethora of fall and Halloween-inspired activities at their Autumn in the Garden event Saturday, Oct. 25.

With booths scattered all throughout the arboretum featuring educational science demos, spooky stories, arts and crafts, scavenger hunts, composting workshops and bouquet making, the arboretum came to life. The activities combined interactivity with education, inviting visitors of all ages to learn more about the arboretum and how to help protect the environment.

Edleen Suh, the graduate assistant for the academic and environmental program coordinator at the Arboretum and an environmental studies graduate student at CSUF, helped organize the event alongside the five current E3 intern teams at the arboretum.

“Part of my job entails managing and being involved with all of our intern teams,” Suh said. “Part of their internship requirement is to put on a public-facing community event centered around the arboretum, so we decided to try and get all of the teams together on one day, so that they get more engagement.”

Suh’s intention for the event was for visitors to learn about preservation and see what the arboretum has to offer. The event was designed as a call for visitors to ground themselves in nature and pay more attention to the real world around them.

“I hope that people are able to come here and connect with something natural and outdoors,” Suh said. “I hope that they take that home with them, and either think about it, and it makes them want to come back, or it encourages them to be a little more mindful of the environment, or inspire people to either want to learn more about science or natural sciences or to take care of our planet.”

One of the E3 interns participating in the event was Samantha Garcia, a third-year public health major on the Climate Impact Assessment team. At her booth, she explained the work that her team is doing to predict and understand how today’s plant species might perform in the future. 

“I feel like I do a physical impact onto the campus and the arboretum,” Garcia said. “Our work is mainly to use the Climate Assessment Tool to find climate information and projections of how plants are going to do in ‘2090/2050’ and compare those to the current conditions.”

Alongside her fellow interns, Garcia took a hands-on approach to engaging with visitors, teaching them how to plant their own newspaper pots.

“It was mainly an outreach event just to get the public to get to see or work at the arboretum,” Garcia said. “We also have a little experiment to show them how to plant California native plants, in this case we’re doing the California poppy.” 

One of the most popular stops at the Autumn in the Garden was the “Flower U-Pick” station. Located at the flower fields, members of the arboretum, CSUF students and children under 12 were all given free admission to pick, cut and arrange their own bouquets of flowers. Visitors like Paloma Vargas, a third-year psychology major, who attended the event with a friend, explains how interactive activities like these can help students get involved.

“It helps students engage with one another because you’re kind of in a close, intimate environment, so you’re interacting with one another, and you might be complimenting their bouquets,” Vargas said. “I think it also kind of promotes mental health, too, for students, because this is self care – this is something cute for you.”

Vargas also shared the impact that an event like this can have on the broader Fullerton community.

“A lot of people don’t come to the arboretum, and I think it’s a really beautiful resource and obviously they had to come to it to attend the event,” Vargas said. “Because it’s deeper inside of the arboretum, they get to see more of what it has to offer.”