This weekend brings a beautiful event to the Garden, the Garden Sculpture and Antiques Fair: 1750-2013! Vendors and artists from across the country and across the Atlantic are gathered together under the Conservatory Tent with a gorgeous range of functional and artistic decoration for your garden, patio, solarium, and home. In addition, enjoy complimentary wine tasting with the Naked Grape 12-5 p.m. each day as well as special tours and demonstrations.
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Wares range from incredible contemporary kinetic sculpture, to tiny colonial lanterns, giant sprouting shallots, Majolica kittens, Grecian urns, mossy otters, and everything in between. The star of the show, however, seems to be a beautiful set of chairs featuring a peacock-motif that were once owned by the woman whose name graces our stately Conservatory, Enid A. Haupt. If your mother is a gardener with impeccable taste, the Garden Sculpture and Antiques Fair: 1750-2013 might just be the perfect place to pickup an unforgettable Mother’s Day present!
As if that weren’t enough, the Garden is just glorious right now. Cherry blossoms, daffodils, tulips, and a very special rhododendron are stopping people in their tracks across our 250-acres. There’s a palpable sense of happiness and ease wherever you go, with incredible scents wafting on the air, and smiles everywhere. And as if that weren’t enough, the lilacs seem set to pop at any moment! Just the thought of lilacs in this springtime sunshine makes me shoulders feel less tense.
And the ghostly, creamy colored little tree of leaves
white, ivory white among the rambling greens
how evanescent, variegated eider, she hesitates on the green grass
as if, in another moment, she would disappear
with all her grace of foam!
Scrolling through the photos taken by my colleague Ivo this spring is a bit like eating a Parisian macaron; airy, sugary, delicate, delicious, evanescent, amazing. This spring is one of the prettiest I can remember, but unlike the finest confections, it keeps lingering on. It’s just wonderful!
It’s closing weekend of The Orchid Show and blooms and blossoms abound; inside, outside, simply everywhere! Can you think of a better way to celebrate Earth Day? We can: let’s make it a three-day weekend and open our 250 acres to you on Monday!
While at NYBG every day is Earth Day, Monday, April 22 is the official day to celebrate, and we’re doing it in literal fashion with a focus on the soil that nourishes us all. In the Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden kids of all ages can learn about the earthworms that are so vital to healthy, living soil. Speak with a worm expert, meet the earthworms, and take some of the nutrient-rich earth that they have produced to nourish your plants at home. Explore the newly planted Mario Batali Kitchen Gardens and enjoy special activities. If you can’t make it to NYBG, dine at any of Mario Batali’s restaurants or shop at Eataly and receive a special seed packet with which to grow your own Genovese basil at home.
In the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden and in the Home Gardening Center composting advice and demonstrations abound. Stick around in the Adventure Garden to make a terrarium—based on rich soil and a self-contained microenvironment—to take home.
The Orchid Show is a major must-see for New York City’s fashion crowd, and when I see orchids like these, resembling the most hautesilk faille, well, it all begins to make sense.
What’s in a name? Ask dogtooth and bloodroot. Together they kind of sound like the beginning of a Shakespearean curse or insult, no? And yet, they’re such beautiful ephemeral spring wildflowers!
