i applied to the internship on a whim, mostly because i figured no one else was going to want a job that started at 6am. my interest in horticulture before august of 2023 was incidental and never very serious– my mother is an herbalist and enjoys gardening, i was just along for the ride. but after several consecutive months of an unbearable obsessive compulsive episode fuelled by my anxiety around ecological collapse, i took more of an interest, mainly in converting lawns back into ecologically sound systems. coincidentally, my mother had gotten sick of our grass lawn and decided to dig it up, slowly converting it into what we now call our pasture; a mixture of clover, medicinal plants, small fruit trees, corn, sunflowers, and other earnest failures in the native plant department (i think i seeded them too late). this is why the listing caught my eye.
now, the description of the job wasn't all that enticing. 6am start, manual labor, i had to get a TB test (not the worst but also not pleasant), and the process to actually get the internship was so arduous i had to consult my therapist to see if it was actually worth the trouble. in hindsight it's unbelievable how much i worried about pursuing it because it truly became one of the highlights of my life and i'm better for having done it. that said, i wanted to document some of the (many, many) things i learned over the course of my time with the zoo. my internship ended in may of 2024, but i've since essentially become a fixture at the zoo (to the point that people from other teams ask if i'm an employee).
during the time that i was applying/starting my time at the zoo, my cat also got diagnosed with diabetes. looking back, it kind of feels like i was granted one unbelievably good thing and had one good thing taken away. eye for an eye and all that. my cat died a month after my internship ended. before that, his insulin schedule was shaped by the fact that i was at the zoo. i would wake up at 5:50, give him his shot at 6:00, and head out at 6:45. it's interesting to think about how closely his decline and my discovery of the most amazing thing ever were lined up. not only that, but someone i'm friends with there also had a pet that was going through the same thing. a few weeks after my cat's death, i couldn't figure out how to find an inroad to telling him that he'd died, so i just announced it in the middle of conversation. not my finest moment.
my time at the zoo is characterized by feeling like i was part of a group for probably the first time ever, seeing animals three times a week, and getting to know some of the nicest people on the planet. the time i spent at the zoo was always the highlight of my week (and continues to be). i loved that i had someone teaching me the ins and outs of zoological horticulture who i would just get to latch on to for the two or three weeks i was with them. i've always struggled in large cohorts of interns so to have an entire team of specialists to teach just me was kind of an amazing experience. there have been so many times at an internship that i would slip through the cracks and end up neglected because there were too many interns or because the environment wasn't prepared to train someone new. all in all: this was the best internship i've ever done.
now that my internship is over i spend a lot of time volunteering in the greenhouses, with the same hours that my internship was (although i tend to wander in late every day because if i'm not required to be there it's hard for me to get up earlier than 7:30). i love the work even when it's menial and a bit boring, like weeding beneath the benches or watering the large specimens, and i'm so grateful that i'm allowed to stick around for a bit. i will forever cherish the memories & relationships ive cultivated over the last year.
as a thank you, i actually wrote and illustrated my own comic to give to the team, which included all of the illustrations that i'd done over the course of my time there. a while after i finished the actual internship i also digitized all the diary comics i'd done during the internship and made a little comic out of those too. every single situation i was in at the zoo was so cartoonish i couldn't pass up the opportunity.
gallery
i love to sit around and draw/take photos of the blooms in the houses.
here are some of the pieces of art i made while there as well!
