Whenever Cornellians and campus visitors confess they must have missed the fabled Cornell Plantations, planners of the newly revised "Cornell Plantations Path Guide" politely disagree.

"If you're on the Cornell campus -- and it's green and you're not on a football field or a pool table -- chances are you're experiencing Cornell Plantations or you're a just few steps away from the Plantations Path," says Peggy Haine, chief writer of both the first "Path Guide" (1995) as well as the revised and much-expanded second edition (October 2002, $14.95). "That's how intertwined Cornell Plantations is with the campus. You can't hardly miss it! "But to discover some of the intriguing, 'secret' parts of Plantations and to learn the stories behind the stories, you'll want the new guide," says the writer of the map-filled, color-illustrated book, which is subtitled "Gardens, Gorges, Landscapes and Lore."

Called the university's museum of living plants, Cornell Plantations includes 200 cultivated acres in the Botanical Garden and F.R. Newman Arboretum, as well as 500 acres of natural areas on or very near campus and another 2,900 natural acres -- featuring bogs, fens, gorges, glens, forests and meadows -- in the surrounding counties. The 8-mile-long Cornell Plantations Path connects gardens and landscapes with the busiest parts of campus -- and with downtown Ithaca, via a spectacular water-level trail through Cascadilla Gorge to Collegetown -- in a series of interpreted loops of less than two miles each. The spiral-bound "Path Guide" includes full-color maps of each loop and a larger, fold-out map in a cover pocket, archival photographs and botanical drawings, and 150 pages of lore of all kinds -- natural history, human history, academic trivia and even romance.

"Since the first edition of this guide, Cornell Plantations has added Park Park and the Morgan-Smith Trail, offering additional opportunities for hikers, birdwatchers, cross-country skiers, nature photographers, botanists and anyone else looking for natural areas to explore and enjoy," says Donald A. Rakow, the Elizabeth Newman Wilds director of Plantations.

As for the little-known, hidden places, writer Haine hints: "Daisy's Secret Garden isn't the only one."The "Path Guide" is available at the Cornell Store, at the Plantations Gift Shop after Oct. 31, and at area booksellers, including Bookery II, Ludgate's and the Outdoor Store.

Open-book Final

From the pages of "Cornell Plantations Path Guide"

Q: Location of American elms that escaped the Dutch elm disease. A. Cascadilla Gorge

Q: "I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study" reads well on a crest, but what did Ezra Cornell really say? A: "I've a mind to set up a university where anyone can study what they'd like."

Q: Why doesn't Cornell University look like Central Park? A : Central Park designer Frederick Law Olmstead recommended a huge, rolling campus with native plantings and no apparent boundaries. Andrew Dickson White wanted a neat, English quadrangle layout. The university's founding president won and the Arts Quad was born.

Q: Let a student design buildings and what do you get? A. The Victorian gem, Barnes Hall, designed by then-architecture student William Henry Miller, who subsequently produced Uris Library and many other elegant local buildings.

Q: Name one garden that's selectively weeded and one you wouldn't want to weed. A: The International Crop and Weed Garden contains plots of pure weeds, identified for horticulture students; the Muenscher Poisonous Plants Garden has dangerous flora to train vet students.

Q: The shed where "genius" first flourished? A: The utilitarian-looking McClintock Shed, the assigned workspace for the late Nobel laureate Barbara A. McClintock, B.A. '23, M.A. '25, Ph.D. '27. Before her Nobel Prize for discovering mobile genetic elements (the so-called jumping genes) in corn, she received the first MacArthur Foundation "genius" prize. The shed still stands to the south of Plantations Road and might be converted to an interpretive center.

Q: Name the best place to fight a duel, the likeliest spot to steal a kiss and the worst place to ride a motorcycle. A: The courtyard of Myron Taylor Hall for duels, according to architectural historian Kermit C. Parsons; the Fall Creek steel suspension bridge, according to the legend that the span will collapse if a kiss is refused; and the former "motorcycle bridge," farther upstream in Fall Creek's Flat Rock area. That narrow, rickety bridge was swept away in a 1981 flood, and in 1982, engineering students designed and built the current wood-and-steel-cable bridge at Flat Rock. But motorized vehicles, including motorcycles, are now forbidden.

Q: What is Llenroc, besides Cornell spelled backwards? A: The locally quarried stone. Llenroc from the original foundation of Ezra Cornell's farmhouse can be found in the walls around the Robison York State Herb Garden.