Paeonia lactiflora 'Kevin' (photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen)
With apologies to T.S. Eliot:
The naming of plants is a curious matter;
It isn’t just one of those science-y things.
You may find me as mad as a rosy pink madder
When I tell you a plant must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
First is the name of the plant’s closest family
Such as Viburnum or Lilium, Paeonia or Oxalis–
All of them sensible, Latinate names.
There are names that are fancier, if you think they sound geekier,
Some are for flowers, others for trees:
Such as or Eschscholzia or Hesperantha, Metasequoia or Crassulaceae–
But all of them sensible, Latinate names.
But I tell you a plant needs a name that’s unique,
A name that’s precise, and more descriptive,
Else how can a scientist keep her croci in a row,
Or catalog her samples, or publish her findings?
Of names of this kind, I can give you a few
Such as odoratum, elegans, or subedentata,
Such as lactiflora, stellata, or else cotyledon–
Names that along with the first never belong to more than one plant.
But above and beyond there’s still one name to go,
And that is a name that you may know best;
It is a name that only a human can bestow–
The reason behind it ONLY THE HUMAN CAN KNOW, and will never confess.
When you notice a plant in profound meditation,
The reason I tell you is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought of why did this human give me this
Ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.
The concept of a rock garden sounds amazingly dull, like it would be a garden full of well … rocks. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Plants are imminently adaptable, and those that adapt to the arid, hardscrabble life of grappling for nutrients in a barren biome tend to be, well, really cool. Need proof? Just check out the fractal fabulousness of these Hens and Chicks in the Garden’s WPA-era Rock Garden.
The Antique Garden Furniture Show and Sale is celebrating 20 years of fine garden antiques this weekend, and the dealers have pulled out all the stops. I just got back from taking a walk around, camera in-hand, and I noticed a few really cool trends. While dogs and bunnies and horses are all present in myriad materials, there’s a new hot animal on the scene this year: birds. But not just any old birds (and I’m most definitely not talking about pink plastic flamingos from Leominster, Ma., though flamingos have flocked to a few booths), these are avian exotics, with a few domestic foul thrown in for good measure.
Ed. note: This is a guest post from Andrew Hill, Senior Scientist at Vizzuality, a small company specializing in data, GIS, and the Web. As an organization that is deeply concerned with biodiversity and conservation, the Garden is invested in using technology as a scientific tool, and I feel EcoHackNYC is an event worth sharing with the rest of the New York-area scientific community. If you’re a scientist or researcher, please consider joining this event. — Ann
This weekend, for the second time in under a year, we are throwing an event to bring together scientists, developers, designers, and others to work collaboratively on environmental projects that matter. We call this event EcoHackNYC. It is a free (un)conference where a small group of people present projects, problems, or data they think need to be developed, and then larger groups of enthusiasts and experts work tirelessly to develop solutions (also check out last year’s event here). For us, this is a special event.
Sunday night, The New York Botanical Garden got a brief mention on AMC‘s hit TV show ‘Mad Men.’ The episode–full of more twists and turns than the Floral Flyer‘s route–was set in 1966. This got us to thinking: What was the Garden like in 1966? We did a little research and learned that in 1966 (on April 19, three-days from today!), the Stone Mill–then known as the Lorillard Snuff Mill–was designated a New York City landmark. But we couldn’t find more, so we turned to the archivists of the Garden’s LuEsther T. Mertz Library, who, in surprisingly short time, uncovered a treasure trove of images that look as if they had been stills pulled from un-aired scenes of this dark and addicting drama.
Whenever I see a photograph of one of the terminal wings of the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, I can’t help but think it looks like a vaguely Victorian flying machine from a really great children’s book. What do you think?
The Enid A. Haupt Conservatory (photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen)
