At 7 p.m. sharp on Friday, the Botanical Garden will open its doors to the public for an extraordinary scientific event: Researchers’ Night, which invites visitors to friendly encounters with local scientists and to discover places that are not usually accessible to the public, including the Marie-Victorin Herbarium.
Inspired by The European Researchers’ Night, which is in full swing each year in hundreds of European cities, the Quebec version of this event, which is in its third edition, will take place this year simultaneously at the Botanical Garden of Mont -réal and at the Sherbrooke Nature and Science Museum.
She was also to branch out to Exploramer, a museum devoted to the marine life of the St. Lawrence, in Sainte-Anne-des-Monts, in Gaspésie, but as the institution is under renovation, its researchers will be at the Botanical Garden.
The purpose of the event is “to create opportunities for more intimate encounters with researchers so that the public feels that they are not on a pedestal. We are not in a model of conferences or panels. All the activities have been designed so that there is direct contact with the scientists,” sums up Marika D’Eschambeault, scientific leisure coordinator at Space for Life.
The theme of the 2022 edition aims to discover the evolution of scientific research over time. A trio of characters named Past, Present and Future will greet visitors and lead them first to the Art Deco-style Henry-Teuscher Auditorium, where the spotlight will be on eight forgotten women botanists, including Marcelle Gauvreau, close colleague of Marie-Victorin, or who deserve to be known, and some of whom will be present during the event, such as Anne Bruneau, the instigator of the Center on Biodiversity, and Catherine Potvin, who represented Panama in the climate negotiations .
We will then enter the greenhouses, first of all in the Closet of the senses, which will give visitors small sensory experiences, without however revealing to them what it is, so that the visitor is placed “in a situation uncomfortable”. “The goal is to create the emotion that is experienced by scientists when they are in uncertainty and doubt and have to formulate hypotheses as part of their research,” explains Ms.me D’Eschambeault.
Demonstrations
Visitors will then walk through the greenhouses of the Garden, along a route along which they will see stations animated by scientists who will discuss their research and give demonstrations. A station will show the evolution of the tools used in research. Another, devoted to animal behavior, will inform us about the Biodôme’s conservation projects.
The route ends at the Biodiversity Center, where bistro-style tables and a bar offering drinks will allow one-on-one meetings with one or other of the 45 researchers who have agreed to take part in these informal meetings.
In all, around 150 scientists from Space for Life, Concordia University, McGill University, Université de Montréal and Université du Québec à Montréal, research institutes such as the Institute for Research on Exoplanets, Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer and Institute for Research in Maritime History and Underwater Archeology as well as the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Canadian Space Agency will be available to discuss their work.
Finally, three original visits will be offered in small groups of 15 people: one of the laboratories where the researchers who won the Acfas competition Proof by image will show the specimen represented in their photo; another from the Ouellet-Robert and Insectarium entomological collections; and a final one from the Marie-Victorin Herbarium.
For many, the highlight of this evening will be the visit to this herbarium, created by Brother Marie-Victorin a little over 100 years ago and distributed since 2017 in two rooms located in the building of the Center on Biodiversity.
When Marie-Victorin died in 1944, the herbarium included 150,000 specimens, many of which came from Cuba, where the botanist stayed several times and developed a passion for its tropical flora with his colleague and friend the brother Leon. Since then, the herbarium has been enriched by numerous donations, in particular from the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, and from Cornell University. It now includes 750,000 specimens, including plants of great historical value since they were collected in 1769, during Captain James Cook’s first voyage to New Zealand.
Even though Researchers’ Night continues until midnight, ticket sales will end at 9:30 p.m. Some time slots are already full, so it’s best to book your tickets on the Space for Life website.