While the taste of a flower bud may not be what you are thinking of while walking around Tufts' campus, there are many more edible options than one would expect, according to Associate Professor of Biology George Ellmore. For the past five years, Ellmore has led students and community members around Tufts for seasonal culinary tours, exposing the bounty of edible plant life hidden in plain sight throughout campus.
An expert botanist, Ellmore has been a member of the Tufts Department of Biology since 1980 after receiving his Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley that same year. Ellmore noted, though, that his interest in foraging for food was not a popular one among students a decade ago.
It used to be, 10 or 15 years ago, that if I brought a tropical fruit or seaweed into class maybe five or 10 students would taste it out of 100. Now 90 will taste it out of 100," he said.
Ellmore links this change in attitude to an increased interest in the study of food security among Tufts students, particularly those enrolled in his popular springtime course "Plants and Humanity."
"Students are much more adventurous than before," he said. "There is much more interest in food and in the springtime people wanted to go outside, so the idea came forth about five years ago to have campus tours that involved foraging."
These campus tours have now expanded into the fall semester and, for the first time this year, in the summer - an event documented by a short video created by Tufts Multimedia Producer Steffan Hacker.
In the video, titled "Edible Campus," Ellmore takes viewers along on one of his campus tours. In an approximately 40 square foot area behind the Fletcher School, Ellmore identifies and tastes seven different species of plants. These range from Daucus, commonly known as Queen Anne's Lace, to Stellaria, also known as chickweed. Daucus is the ancient ancestor of the modern day carrot and Stellaria, which was found growing in the shade of a wild apple tree, is described as "a very delicious green, a combination of alfalfa sprouts and baby spinach."
By the end of the video Ellmore is eagerly saut?ing a handful of Day Lily buds over a camping stove. As rich as the plant life of the Boston area may be, it should come as no surprise that Ellmore's interest in plants takes him much further afield than Medford.
"One of the advantages of being a faculty member of Tufts is that while you might stay here, you have tremendous travel opportunities," he said. "So yes, here we are at Tufts, but I do work in Hawaii, the Bahamas, recently Vietnam. Tufts encourages us to do work abroad."
Since 1999, Ellmore has taught "Flowers of the Alps" for students studying at Tufts' satellite campus, the European Center in Talloires, France. This class provides Jumbos with the opportunity to go out and experience what they are studying first hand.
"Every week we would trek into the French Alps and discover new plants, flowers and trees," junior Abbie Cohen said. "We would learn their names in French, English, Latin, alongside the plant's genus and family."
According to Cohen, exams were unorthodox, and Ellmore made full use of the opportunity to explore the surrounding environment of Talloires.
"The class would go out onto a new area of the mountains and Professor Ellmore would grab a flower or point to a plant which we then had to fully identify on a flashcard," she said. "By the end of the course I learned over 100 different species of plants."
Ellmore described his excitement for the richness of this summer opportunity.
"The Talloires campus is blessed with an eruption of wild flower color just when the students are there. Our summer semester in Talloires has flowers everywhere, and even non-botanists are always saying, 'What are these flowers,'" he said. "You can actually see meadows with more color than green, more yellows and oranges and blues than green. What's fun is hearing about the French people asking the Tufts students two or three weeks into the course about the flowers."
In addition to teaching a course in Talloires, Ellmore also leads 14 students on a ten day Tropical Field Ecology trip in March at the Hummingbird Cay Field Station in the Bahamas. This trip is composed of both biology and geology students and allows them to work on various research projects.
Ellmore was invited to the other side of the globe two years ago to help professors in Hanoi,Vietnam adopt different educational techniques. After this program was deemed a success, he was able to return to Vietnam with something more.
"A year later, I was able to get some funding through Tufts to bring two students to Vietnam to work on a couple of research projects," he said. "One was a project involving dragon fruits that required a 30 hour train ride into South Vietnam."
Ellmore received support from the Tufts International Research Program to create his next project to help southern Vietnamese farmers.
"We set up certain experiments there to see if we could increase the efficiency of dragon fruit production by having small farmers use less electricity
