So to show you how much we love you and your photos, we’re offering half-off admission for a limited time, holding Saturday afternoon photography tutorials, and we’re throwing a photography contest in honor of our latest exhibition, Caribbean Garden which opens on Saturday. The contest will have two categories: Macro and Sense of Place, and the winner in each category (two total) will get a seat in a spring semester photography class! (See all the details here).
There’s just a few things to remember:
Tripods are not allowed inside the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory.
To be eligible a photograph must have been taken during the course of the Caribbean Garden.
Photographs entered into the contest should have Caribbean Garden as their main theme.
To vote, you do not need to be a member of the Flickr community, but you will need a free Yahoo or Google account.
In case of a tie, we’ll convene a panel of NYBG experts to pick a final winner!
So get your shutter finger warmed up, dust off your lenses, charge up your batteries, and get ready to snap some pictures! And please, if anything is unclear, let us know in the comments below. We hope you’re as excited as we are!
Hello everybody, Ann here. I’m back from my summer vacation, jet-lagged but so happy to be home for this beautiful New York City weather! My intention of blogging from the road was pure, but I was thwarted by technology. Who would have ever expected it would be so hard to find reliable wifi (or “weefee” as they say in France) in London and Paris? Regardless, I had a great, garden-inspired trip. Here are some pictures I snapped on a rainy day visit to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
IGPOTY Exhibition at Kew
If you win one of the categories or special commendations in the IGPOTY contest, your photos will be on display at this beautiful outdoor exhibition at Kew Gardens. The photos are printed onto a special kind of vinyl and hang outside year-round. The exhibition is right near the main gate, and is therefore one of the first stops for Kew’s many visitors. The quality of the winning IGPOTY photographs is extraordinary, so hone your chops by joining in on one of our monthly photo contests. I can’t wait to see at least one photo from NYBG hanging here next year!
The Temperate House at Kew Gardens
There are three main glasshouses at Kew, and many smaller, secondary houses as well. They are very old and very lovely.
Staircase to the Temperate House Walkway
Both the Temperate House and the Palm House have catwalks around the upper levels that you access by climbing these mysterious-looking, vine-laden staircases.
The View from the Temperate House Catwalk
These catwalks give you an unusual perspective on trees that is nearly impossible to gain in nature.
Don't Forget to Bring a Brolly
As might be expected, rain is a common occurrence, so don’t forget to bring an umbrella. Of course, if you forget yours, though (like I did), the shop sells very nice ones.
Sheltering from the Rain
Should you choose not to use an umbrella, however, there are plenty of trees to shelter under while waiting for the showers to pass. This one is near the Sackler Crossing, a really cool walkway/bridge over Kew’s big lake.
King Willam
One of my favorite things at Kew was this garden known at King William’s Temple. It is planted with flowers, trees, shrubs, and herbs from the Mediterranean, and smells divine, especially in the rain. It is full of lavendar, rosemary, olive trees, cypresses, and so many other plants. It reminded me quite a lot of our current exhibition, Spanish Paradise: Gardens of the Alhambra.
A Typical English Garden
Just before I met up with two of my colleagues at Kew, I dashed through the Plant Families Beds and the Student Vegetable Plots just as the sun peeked out. This garden at the entrance to this area, at least to my mind, exemplifies everything that is beautiful about the English garden. It is a profusion of colors, heights, and textures, and is a joy to behold.
Badgers!
We’ve got beavers, Kew’s got badgers! I think I know which one I would prefer to run into on a dusky forest trail ….
The Palm House
And finally, I couldn’t possibly leave you without a shot of the structure that probably helped inspire the Garden’s founder, Nathaniel Lord Britton, to push the great men of New York City to found The New York Botanical Garden. The Palm House is an absolutely breathtaking work of engineering, and a great thing of beauty.
If you love The New York Botanical Garden, and you find yourself with a few days in London, you should absolutely go visit Kew Gardens. There are, inevitably, a lot of similarities between Kew and NYBG, but England’s climate, and Kew’s history, make the 30 minute trip out to Kew entirely worthwhile. I hope you have enjoyed my very brief tour of Kew, and that you’ll stay tuned next week for my adventures at Claude Monet’s garden in Giverny.
Special thanks to Mary from IGPOTY for showing me around Kew, and to Claire and Nicola at Kew for the cup of tea.
In England, the day after Christmas is called Boxing Day. In New York City, at least in 2010, it was Blizzard Day. The city was socked-in by a massive storm that brought not only several feet of light, fluffy, powder snow; but also thunder, lightning, hurricane-force winds, and five-foot high snow drifts.
The Garden was supposed to be open for a rare holiday Monday, but due to the conditions and the dangers they posed to both visitors and staff, the decision was made to close. (If you had tickets to visit the Holiday Train Show on December 26, see exchange details here.) Despite the closure, some staff did come to work for the day, including intrepid photographer Ivo M. Vermeulen. See some of the stunning images Ivo captured in the photo essay below.
While I cannot tell you whether or not a tree makes a sound when it falls in the forest and no one is around, I can tell you that when a tree falls in the Forest at The New York Botanical Garden, we tend to find a good use for it. Case in point the beauty below, which was felled by one of this past summer’s violent storms.
While fallen trees are an important part of a forest’s ecosystem, they can also be an important part of the enjoyment of the place. Especially when they’re made into a beautiful bench by Bien Hecho for Garden visitors to rest upon.
Esther Jackson is the Public Services Librarian at NYBG’s LuEsther T. Mertz Library where she manages Reference and Circulation services and oversees the Plant Information Office. She spends much of her time assisting researchers, providing instruction related to library resources, and collaborating with NYBG staff on various projects related to Garden initiatives and events.
With photographs by Richard Hanson, Writer’s Garden is a very thoughtful and lovely book. Bennett explores the gardens and estates of 19 authors in the United Kingdom. The authors themselves—English, Irish, Scottish, or American by birth—left their marks in the form of their gardens on the British landscape. Bennett is an engaging tour-guide through the landscapes that shaped their works, inspired their art, and became their homes. Using an individual’s garden as a way of telling his or her story is indeed a popular device. At The New York Botanical Garden, there have been several garden-wide exhibitions around this theme. Most recently, FRIDA KAHLO: Art, Garden, Life in 2015, which followed Monet’s Garden of 2012, Emily Dickinson’s Garden: The Poetry of Flowers of 2010, and Darwin’s Garden: An Evolutionary Adventure of 2009.
Esther Jackson is the Public Services Librarian at NYBG’s LuEsther T. Mertz Library where she manages Reference and Circulation services and oversees the Plant Information Office. She spends much of her time assisting researchers, providing instruction related to library resources, and collaborating with NYBG staff on various projects related to Garden initiatives and events.
The Art of Gardening takes its reader on an immersive journey through one of the world’s great pleasure gardens—Chanticleer. Like a visit to the garden itself, The Art of Gardening titillates the reader, drawing them in with its gorgeous photography and well-crafted garden essays.
I struggled a bit with this review, perhaps in the same way that I struggle to describe Chanticleer to those who haven’t visited. “A gardener’s garden” is the line most frequently used to encompass the mission and scope of the grounds. Fittingly, the book’s introduction includes a section titled “What is Chanticleer?” The section quotes an interview, which I in turn quote below.
So, what is this place? Why do you exist?
We are a garden; a place of beauty, pleasure, escape.
But, I mean, what do you do? Why would anyone come?
Esther Jackson is the Public Services Librarian at NYBG’s LuEsther T. Mertz Library where she manages Reference and Circulation services and oversees the Plant Information Office. She spends much of her time assisting researchers, providing instruction related to library resources, and collaborating with NYBG staff on various projects related to Garden initiatives and events.
Plants with Style: A Plantsman’s Choices for a Vibrant, 21st-Century Garden by Kelly D. Norris. Timber Press, 2015.
Identified by the New York Times as one of “Botany’s New Boys” in 2014, Kelly Norris is the author of a new book, Plants with Style. In the introduction, Norris writes, “The modern eclectic garden isn’t easily defined. It’s earnest, enthusiastic, and unbounded.” Like the garden he describes, Norris excitedly presents the reader with a book that is similarly earnest and enthusiastic. The tone of the opening pages and the love that Norris so clearly has for his chosen profession is infectious. The introduction reads more like a manifesto, with lots of quotable winks, such as “Cultivate your inner plant geek—it’s sexy.”
Like Norris’s beloved and eclectic gardens, Plants with Style takes the reader on a romp throughout plant profiles that the author has curated, artfully-photographed and penned essays for. (As a caution to readers, the typeface used is rather small, and the photographs offer limited botanical detail.) The text is broken down into several sections, “Environment,” “Structure,” “Emblems,” “Vignettes,” and “Essential Kitsch.” The categories are intriguing, a departure from the more systematic approach taken by other books of garden plants. The “Vignettes” section presented the most novel content, and in general Plants with Style would have benefited from more vista photographs and planting combination suggestions throughout the book as a whole.
There aren’t huge departures or surprises from Norris, and many of the plants profiled will be recognized as tried and tested favorites. This is very much a coffee table book, and as such it winds up coming up short in terms of practical gardening advice and innovative plant selections. However, seeing the selected plants through Norris’s eyes, and through his words, is a treat for the logophile* in us all.
The Lake at Chapultepec Park, Mexico City. Photo ca. 1920.
On June 26, 2015, The Humanities Institute conducted its fourth seasonal interdisciplinary colloquium, in the Readers Room-Auditorium of the LuEsther T. Mertz Library. With these more informal round table conversations the Humanities Institute has been able to start the process of reconnecting the various disciplines within the arts and sciences that form part of the environmental humanities: the complex relationship between nature, culture, cities, and society.
This Summer Colloquium’s topic, From the Garden of Eden to the Megalopolis: Mexico City Before and After Kahlo, was inspired by the Garden-wide Frida Kahlo exhibits and focused on the architectural and ecological historical development of Mexico City. The capacity crowd included a diverse mix of university faculty members and graduate fellows, art and architectural historians, as well as architects and urban planners, botanical and horticultural experts.
Scott A. Mori has been studying New World rain forests for nearly 40 years. He has witnessed an unrelenting reduction in the extent of the forests he studies and, as a result, has become concerned about their future.
From December of 1995 onward, the Institute of Systematic Botany at the NYBG has periodically worked with Michael Rothman to prepare paintings representing the research of our curators. Over the next year, the curators and the paintings that represent their work will be presented in a series of essays on Plant Talk. Today, I introduce the artist and discuss his painting of the understory of a lowland rain forest in French Guiana. I chose this painting to start with because it illustrates the rich biodiversity of lowland tropical rain forest, an area where I have studied plants for many years. If you wish to see rain forest or cloud forest throughout the year without traveling, you can enjoy tropical plants and get out of the cold at the same time by visiting the Garden’s Tropical Paradise exhibition in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory.
“A Terrestrial View of a Rain Forest in Central French Guiana” by Michael Rothman.
Botanical art and the study of plants are inseparable. In the course of my career, I have relied on Bobbi Angell for the preparation of the line art accompanying my species descriptions of the Brazil nut family, as well as those depicted in the Guide to the Vascular Plants of Central French Guiana, and the Flowering Plants of the Neotropics. In all, Bobbi has prepared a total of 600 illustrations for me.
Scott A. Mori, Ph.D., Nathaniel Lord Britton Curator of Botany has been studying New World rain forests for The New York Botanical Garden for nearly 35 years. He has witnessed an unrelenting reduction in the extent of the forests he studies and, as a result, is dedicated to preserving the diversity of plants and animals found there.
Snow in South Salem, New York in October 2011.
“So what,” you must be saying to yourself. In spite of how obvious the title is, the lack of cold weather in the tropics contributes both directly and indirectly to tropical biodiversity, the topic of this blog.
One of the many reasons that there are high numbers of species represented by low numbers of individuals in old growth tropical forests–compared to the opposite situation in temperate forests–is because of the greater number of plant/animal interactions in the former. In one of our 2.5 acre tree study plots in central Amazonian Brazil, we registered 285 species of trees with diameters at or above four inches at breast height. Because our plots average 600 trees above this size class per plot, almost every second tree we sampled represented a different species. In contrast, there are fewer than 100 species of trees of all size classes in the entire state of Wisconsin, where I grew up.
It’s obvious that we love photography here at the Garden. We love our Morning Eye Candy and photo essays. But best of all, we love the photos that you, the visitor, share with us!
