11-Year-Old Student Persuades Classmates to Come See the Trees, Flowers
Huston S. Watson Jr., age 11, just completed fifth grade at Traphagen School in Mount Vernon, N.Y.
My fifth-grade teacher at Traphagen School in Mount Vernon, N.Y., Arlene Rosenblum, gave us an assignment to write a persuasive essay. I visited The New York Botanical Garden with my parents and then wrote about why my classmates should also make a trip there.
The first reason why you should go is because of the beautiful trees. Some of them are magnolia, cherry, conifer, and crabapple. Most of these bloom in springtime. In the fall, the trees remain beautiful because of the foliage. There are many other kinds of trees. Maybe you’ll learn about a new tree.
The second reason why you should go is because of all the beautiful flowers. There are so many flowers in the Botanical Garden. You can see lilacs, tulips, roses, peonies, orchids, daylilies, and chrysanthemum. These are just some of the flowers you may see on your visit. You might even see butterflies flying around the flowers.
Nick Leshi is Associate Director of Public Relations and Electronic Media.
Last year, Martha Stewart Living Radio visited The New York Botanical Garden for a full day of live broadcasting. We are happy to report that they are returning for another daylong broadcast from the Jane Watson Irwin Perennial Garden, near Martha Stewart’s Culinary Herb Garden.
From 7 a.m. until 5 p.m. on June 24, subscribers of Sirius XM satellite radio (Sirius 112 and XM 157) not only can listen to all their favorites—Morning Living, Whole Living, Everyday Food, Homegrown, Living Today, and Eat Drink—but see them airing live. (Even if you are not a subscriber to Sirius XM you can see Martha Stewart’s team of lifestyle experts broadcasting live at the Garden!) For a full schedule, visit Martha Stewart Living Radio.
A number of interesting guests are scheduled to chat about a broad range of topics, including gardening, food, holistic therapy, and more. New York Botanical Garden experts who will be interviewed include Jodie Colon, Compost Educator, NYC Compost Project in the Bronx; Annie Novak, Coordinator of the Children’s Gardening Program; Kristin Schleiter, Curator of Outdoor Gardens; Sonia Uyterhoeven, Gardener for Public Education; and Peter Kukielski, Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden Curator.
Among the topics of discussion will be The Edible Garden, the four-month long festival of growing and preparing good food, which runs through October 17 at the Botanical Garden.
Adult Ed Classes Teach You How to Grow, Prepare Good Food
Leda Meredith is the Gardening Program Coordinator for Adult Education at The New York Botanical Garden and author of The Locavore’s Handbook: The Busy Person’s Guide to Eating Local on a Budget.
When I took on a year-long challenge to eat, almost exclusively, foods produced within 250-miles of New York City, many people thought I was crazy. That was in 2007–2008, and it’s amazing how much has changed in just these past few years. Now “local,” “organic,” and “seasonal” have become buzzwords—and for good reason.
Just bite into a perfectly ripe, locally grown strawberry and your taste buds will never again be satisfied with its out-of-season, chemically grown cousin that spent weeks in transit before you ate it.
Superb taste is just one of the reasons to celebrate local, organic food. While you’re relishing that strawberry, you’re also helping the environment and supporting small farms and the local economy. It’s a lovely win-win partnership between consumers, producers, and the planet.
This summer and fall, The Edible Garden: Growing and Preparing Good Food brings you locally grown, seasonal food with cooking demonstrations every day, four spectacular kitchen gardens, appearances by celebrity chefs such as Lidia Bastianich and Mario Batali, and hands-on activities for kids. You won’t want to miss this year’s celebration, with more chefs and more events than last year.
The Edible Garden kicks off tomorrow with Get Out and Grill, the first of four Festival Weekends.
Don’t miss these highlights June 19–20:
Grilling and cooking with celebrity chefs, including Daisy Martinez
A Sunday BBQ perfect for Father’s Day, with an appearance by retired Yankee Roy White, booksignings, and more
Fun activities for the whole family in the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden and Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden
Get up-to-the-minute information, tips, and pictures throughout The Edible Garden: Text “NYBG CHEF” to 56512 to find out who’s cooking this week, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Read Plant Talk regularly for blogs by presenting chefs and cookbook authors.
Buy your tickets online for Garden-to-Table Weekends and Festival Weekends and WIN!
With every online ticket purchase for The Edible Garden you are automatically entered in a monthly drawing for a chance to win one of 20 Anolon® Ultra Clad 8-inch open skillets.
See contest rules for full details.
PT: What is most important to you when choosing ingredients for recipes at Gramercy Tavern?
MA: The most important thing when choosing ingredients is that they are grown close to home (in our region), that they are harvested and handled with care, and that they are cooked and served in the shortest timeframe we can possibly manage.
PT: How do you incorporate seasonal food into your favorite recipes?
MA: An ingredient itself is the origin of inspiration and the starting point of every new dish here. We find as many ways as we can to express an idea with that ingredient on each menu, so the same ingredients will appear in more than one dish although treated differently each time.
PT: What motivated you to begin incorporating seasonal, local food into your cooking?
MA: I started cooking professionally in Japan and fell in love with the connection to the changing seasons. I then worked in France for five years and found an immense amount of pride in regional ingredients. These feelings have always been at the heart of the way I look at food.
PT: What are you going to prepare for your Edible Garden cooking demonstration on June 20?
MA: On our menu for the day are Calamari and Carrot Salad, Grilled Kielbasa, and Pulled Pork with Pickles. Since the theme is grilling, we are going to use seasonal ingredients to enhance some basic grilling and BBQ techniques.
PT: What are your favorite tips for healthful eating?
MA: Allowing vegetables to play the starring role in a dish can be interesting, delicious, and healthy. No need to exclude meat or fish, but let them play the supporting role from time to time.
Father’s Day Celebration Also Features BBQ and More
Bob Heinisch is Vice President for Site Operations at The New York Botanical Garden.
When people think of the Bronx, the thought of first-class institutions comes to mind. Two of the biggest in the borough, The New York Botanical Garden and the New York Yankees, have enjoyed a good relationship over the years. We’ve had appearances at our annual Holiday Tree Lighting ceremony by former Yankees such as Willie Randolph, Joe Pepitone, John Flaherty, and Bernie Williams, and most recently, the display of the 2009 World Series Trophy on Mother’s Day at our Shop in the Garden. (That’s me holding the trophy in the photo.)
On Father’s Day this year, Sunday, June 20, we’ll add another player to our roster as former Yankee Roy White comes to the Garden, from 1 to 3 p.m., for a casual talk and to sign copies of his book Then Roy Said to Mickey…: The Best Yankees Stories Ever Told, which will be available for sale.
A two-time member of the American League All-Star Team and a member of two world championship teams, Roy has been characterized as “a quiet, dignified man who led by example…[and] achieved popularity with fans and peers alike due to his classy, respectful, team-first attitude, and his subtle, momentous achievements.”
During an incredible 15-year career (1965–79) with the Yankees, he bridged the gap between the era of 1960s superstars Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, and Elston Howard and the superstars of the 1970s, Thurman Munson, Willie Randolph, and Reggie Jackson.
Don’t miss this opportunity to meet Roy White, whose appearance coincides with The Edible Garden’s first festival weekend, Get Out and Grill. This two-day celebration also features a Sunday BBQ perfect for Father’s Day.
Discuss Research, Learn About Plant World in Casual Setting
James S. Miller, Ph.D., is Dean and Vice President for Science and Rupert Barneby Curator for Botanical Science.
During The Edible Garden, which opens this weekend and runs through October 17, visitors will have the opportunity to gather with some of the Botanical Garden’s scientists in a casual setting known as Café Scientifique. Begun in Leeds, England, in 1998, Café Scientifique is an informal meeting that brings together the public and scientists to discuss science in familiar terms.
Today the Café Scientifique idea has spread well beyond the borders of the United Kingdom. The Garden has presented these in the past, and this summer and fall will host 18 such events over four weekends, with the first set scheduled this Saturday and Sunday at 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. both days in the Garden Cafe.
Garden research staff, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students will talk about the research and conservation they pursue worldwide—from Latin America to Micronesia and our own backyard—and share with those who attend a greater understanding of the plant world and the efforts under way to conserve plant diversity. They will discuss a wide variety of research topics, such as the exploration of poorly known regions to discover, describe, and name new species of plants; how various plant groups are related and their evolutionary history; and the genetic basic for why plants have different structural features.
Celebrated poet Joyce Carol Oates and biographer Lyndall Gordon are among the esteemed poets and authors who will read their favorite Dickinson poems and discuss how she inspired their own work in the last installment of the poetry series My Emily Dickinson, co-sponsored by the Poetry Society of America.
Visitors can participate in a marathon reading of themed Dickinson’s poems relating to death, bees, roses, flowers, birds, and trees.
Dickinson scholar Judith Farr, author of The Gardens of Emily Dickinson, presents a lecture and slide show, Emily Dickinson in “Eden”: The Spring Garden.
Tour Dickinson’s Victorian Homestead re-created in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory and stroll along garden paths reading some of Dickinson’s most famous works near the flowers that inspired them in the Perennial Garden. This video gives you a peek at the exhibition.
And remember, the Gallery exhibition in the LuEsther T. Mertz Library, which gives an interactive perspective of Dickinson’s life through photographs, watercolors, manuscripts, her virtual herbarium, and her white dress fis on through August 1.
New Varieties Shine as English Grower and Garden Awarded this Weekend
Michael Marriott is Technical Director at David Austin® Roses, where he has worked for over 25 years.
The Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden is quite simply one of the very best rose gardens in the world, and so I am always very keen to have our new varieties planted there. The curator of the rose garden, Peter Kukielski, has been very generous with his allocation of space to the David Austin English Roses, with long stretches of them in the beds on either side of the garden’s entrance.
Each year David Austin Roses introduces several new varieties, and, hopefully, Peter will find space for three or four plants of each variety. Our latest introductions are Princess Alexandra of Kent, Young Lycidas, Wisley 2008, Sir John Betjeman, and Munstead Wood.
Princess Alexandra of Kent (above, right) is a particularly impressive variety with very large, full-petaled flowers that are a warm, glowing pink. They have a wonderful tea fragrance, which develops into lemon and, later, hints of black currant. It makes an attractive bushy shrub of about four feet tall.
Young Lycidas also has large impressive flowers but they are a much deeper color, being a wonderful blend of deep magenta, pink, and red. The outer petals tend toward light-purple, although, interestingly, this is in contrast to the outside of the petals, which are quite silvery. The growth is bushy, the stems tending to arch in a most attractive way. There is delicious fragrance that starts as pure tea but then changes to a blend of tea and old rose, with intriguing hints of cedarwood.
Wisley 2008 (left) has smaller flowers, but they are perfectly formed, the petals arranged in a rosette. The color is absolutely pure soft-pink, the color fading perhaps just a little toward the outside. It is quite vigorous and very bushy and makes a very good landscaping rose. The fragrance is fresh and fruity with hints of raspberry and tea.
Sir John Betjeman is quite modern in appearance, the color being a bright deep-pink and intensifying with age. It flowers particularly freely and has a very bushy habit. The fragrance is light and rather “green.”
Munstead Wood is arguably the most obviously attractive of the group. The flowers are large and a deep-velvety crimson, with a strong old-rose fragrance with hints of blackberry, blueberry, and damson. It will stay a compact rose even in the warmer parts of the United States.
Please do visit the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden—it is superb. You can see the whole range of roses, and they are most beautifully looked after.
This weekend in New York, at its 10th annual conference, the Great Rosarians of the World™ will honor world-renowned hybridizer of English Roses David Austin and present its 2010 Rose Garden Hall of Fame Award to the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden. Come to the Botanical Garden on Saturday, June 12, for a lecture series on growing sustainable roses and for a reception in the Rose Garden. Through July 1, 2010, vote for the Rockefeller Rose Garden as American’s Best Garden.
