It’s a sunny spring morning; the air is crisp and the sky is blue. I am on my way to teach a class at The New York Botanical Garden and, as always, am reveling in the lovely green setting that surrounds me. This particular morning I notice the water drops glistening atop the blades of grass and remember that the season of dew watching is upon us.
Dew appears when the days are warm, the nights cool, and the air is moist. The earth cools overnight, chilling the air, and like magic, drops of water appear out of nowhere and settle on whatever is near the ground. But it does not last long. By late morning the dew evaporates and our momentary watery celebration of spring is over.
Spring flowers are lovely when covered in dew. The blossoms of daffodils, pansies, clover, dianthus, phlox, and euphorbia sparkle in the morning sun with the jeweled globes of water perched lightly upon their petals. One of the best dew catchers is lady’s mantle (Alchemilla mollis). Alchemilla is Arabic for “little magical one” and refers to the healing properties of the water that collects on its wide, crinkled leaves.
The idea that dew contains healing powers was echoed in the 1930s by Dr. Edward Bach, an English physician who developed the famed Bach flower remedies. He surmised that the dew sitting upon a blossom absorbed the healing energies of that flower. He reasoned that ingesting a small amount of a flower’s sun-drenched dewdrops could rebalance key emotional energy patterns that were behind many people’s illnesses.
So, when you walk out among the Garden’s tranquil spring flower borders, look closely and see how the dewdrops, nature’s ephemeral wonder, act like little crystal balls, magnifying the early morning sunlight. Herein lies the magic of dew.
The key is to plan ahead. My wife and I managed another year of preparing our tax returns, and we did so by revisiting our financial strategies soon after completing our taxes at this time last year. We kept thinking of five criteria: earnings, tax withholdings, deferred retirement savings amount, charitable giving, and lastly, what we owed! Increasing our retirement savings and charitable giving last year significantly reduced the tax amount due this year.
Enter the gift annuity—the gift that gives twice.
With a gift annuity, you irrevocably transfer cash or stock in exchange for an immediate tax deduction and guaranteed annual payments for life. For a cash transfer of $10,000, for example, a 65-year-old person would receive $530 per year of which $351 would be exempt from personal income tax for an effective rate of 7.3 percent.
Wayt Thomas is the Elizabeth G. Britton Curator of Botany in the Institute of Systematic Botany. Stella Sylva is Administrative Curator in the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium.
The pair of red-tailed hawks (Buteo jamaicensis) nesting on the Library building appear to be consistently present at the nest although the female is usually not visible when sitting. So, although we cannot say for sure, it is likely that she has laid eggs and is brooding.
Their nest is in a small triangular alcove near the top of the front face of the building on the east side (see photos). The close-up photo captures the female stretching her wings and preening herself. Afterward, she went back to the middle of the nest, hunkered down, and disappeared from view. If all goes well, the eggs will hatch sometime this month. We’ll keep you posted when we find out more.
No School this Week? Come to a Our Special Programs
Gayle Schmidt is Manger of Public Education.
I am a little confused about spring—is it here or not? The wacky weather makes me think that it is not quite here yet, but the daffodils are coming up and green leaf buds on some trees are starting to show. Besides that, there are also many more children visiting the Garden on their spring break! We have rolled out a new series of programs just for families who are looking for something fun to do during the time off from school.
Break for Biodiversity is packed with tours, self-guided adventures, and workshops that showcase the variety of plant life around us. Our docents will guide you through the Native Forest and point out features of trees that make them different from one another and that explain the benefits of these differences. Bring your binoculars for the bird walks this weekend so that you can easily spot the fuzzy new additions to the great horned owl family and the other wildlife that the Garden supports. During the Herbarium Specimen-Making Workshop, you will learn about the “library” of pressed plants of species from around the world and make a specimen to start your own collection.
So come out and enjoy the fun programs. Even if there are some April showers, the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory and Everett Children’s Adventure Garden have plenty of plants and activities to explore indoors.
Living Orchid Chandeliers and Wall Dazzle Visitors
Karl Lauby is Vice President for Communications.
Francisca Coelho has outdone herself this time.
The Senior Curator and Associate Vice President for Glasshouses and Exhibitions is principally responsible for the creation, implementation, and management of the exhibitions that have solidified The New York Botanical Garden’s reputation as an international leader in horticultural display.
But she’s taken her work to new heights with the sensationally popular Orchid Show: Brazilian Modern, which takes its final bow this weekend.
While the whole show is her handiwork, in particular she has created a set of four massive hanging baskets of tropical aroids and descending orchids that alone are worth the trip to The Orchid Show. The baskets or chandeliers—each containing a huge philodendron, six smaller philodendrons, six grape ivies, and 120 orchids overflowing and pouring down from high overhead—embody living art with hidden engineering, creative design, and clever construction.
Fran took designer Raymond Jungles’ illustration and executed it brilliantly, using pipes, cables, and four-foot metal baskets that, once arranged with flowers, became six-foot-wide creations. In rummaging through her storeroom, Fran saw just the right-sized tree baskets—baskets usually used for moving big trees in the nursery trade—and traced the manufacturer to McKenzie Nursery Supply in Perry, Ohio. She asked the company to make eight baskets to her design and placed one basket within another and tied them together to make four strong baskets that would hold the weight of the hanging plants. A smaller, 30-inch-wide basket holding the large philodendron was then placed within the large basket on a wire frame placed six inches above the basket bottom. Each large philodendron is flanked by six more philodendrons and six grape ivy vines.
To suspend the whole apparatus, Fran rigged up crossed galvanized pipes in a square formation from which the baskets are suspended. Then the whole planter was lifted—using two lifts, one for the basket and one for the person hanging the basket—and hung from the conservatory ceiling. It took four staff members working in unison to accomplish this.
The outside of the entire large basket was then wrapped in black chicken wire. The basket-within-a-basket design left enough room for Fran’s able gardening colleagues to create the chandelier effect by edging the baskets with two types of orchids, Phalaenopsis and Dendrobium, in the pink-lavender color range and hung upside down, defying gravity, 120 orchids to each basket.
But the chandeliers are only part of the fun.
Fran also built the Orchid Wall. While it looks spontaneous, whimsical, and picturesque, in fact, the wall is meticulously designed and executed with artifice, contrivance, and calculation. The wall, 8 feet tall by 25 feet wide, is covered with 800 orchids, all Phalaenopsis, each hand-tied one by one to create a wall of flowers that mesmerizes visitors. In the center of the wall is a giant staghorn fern, surrounded by the five varieties of Phalaenopsis. Fran herself tied each of the 800 orchids onto the wall and has great stories about how she arrived at that number, tied each one, and managed to keep the entire wall seemingly in subtle motion from top to bottom as well as appearing fresh for the six-week run of the show.
Come see for yourself these magnificent, unique orchid creations in this, the final weekend of The Orchid Show: Brazilian Modern. Meanwhile, take one last chance to vote for your favorite type of orchid in our poll at right. So far, Vandas are in the lead by a large margin.
As we say goodbye to the orchids, we say hello to the Auricula Theater, a display in the Herb Garden of two types of alpine primroses in a presentation based on a centuries-old tradition.
And, of course, it’s spring all over the Garden. Walk around and see what’s in bloom, look for seasonal birds that are arriving and the recently born baby owls, participate in waking up the Family Garden, and more. Click on the daily highlights below.
Nieve Shere is Information and Collections Manager for The New York Botanical Garden’s Institute of Economic Botany.
As the Information and Collections manager for the Institute of Economic Botany (IEB), I manage ethnobotanical data and collections, coordinate the work of volunteers, and curate the Teaching Herbarium of Economic Plants, a valuable tool for education and botanical science.
The Teaching Herbarium comprises specimens that have economic value—for instance, those that are used in a commercial industry such as food production—and that are preserved in a way that allow for hands-on study. In fact, the Teaching Herbarium is used to train students in botanical identification as well as in the development of the Botanical Garden’s educational curricula and scientific exhibitions.
The Herbarium’s first specimens, in the early 1980s, were collected by Garden scientists Michael Balick, Ph.D., and Hans Beck, Ph.D., shortly after the creation of the IEB; later collections included those by Garden scientist Scott Mori, Ph.D., and longtime volunteer Dick Rauh, Ph.D. The majority of the teaching specimens are from the Arts Resources for Teachers and Students (ARTs) project, the first project initiated by IEB to develop the Teaching Herbarium.
Through the ARTs project, middle and elementary school kids on the Lower East Side surveyed plants sold in the Chinese and Hispanic markets. The students collected vegetables such as bok choy, cabbage, and taro and pressed, dried, and mounted the specimens. The specimens documented the historic and commercial data specifically about the diversity of foods sold in New York City markets. These collections, along with the specimens collected by the above-mentioned scientists, were instrumental in the development of the early Economic Botany courses that Dr. Balick taught at Yale University and at Columbia University’s CERC program.
Over the years the collection has continued to grow into a rich repository of plants used commercially such as for food, construction, and medicine. It now houses more than 600 specimens made up of 200 species from 113 different families. Dedicated volunteers reorganize and repair damaged specimens and update the database, making the collection even more user-friendly. The IEB is fortunate to have had for more than 25 years the dedication of Dr. Rauh, who has carefully assisted in the curation of this collection with the help of volunteers Connie Papoulas, Margaret Comsky, Ermgaard Clinger, Gwen Dexter, and Daniel Kulakowski.
Specimens from Dr. Mori’s Brazilian teaching collection are currently on display in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory (pictured) as part of The Orchid Show: Brazilian Modern. Additional specimens from the Teaching Herbarium will be featured and new plant material provided for visitors to make their own specimens during the Herbarium Specimen-Making Workshops to be held in the Library building each day from April 9 to 19, beginning at 2 p.m.
If you would like to get involved with the Teaching Herbarium, please contact Volunteer Services at 718.817.8564 or volunteer@nybg.org.
Jim Miller is Dean and Vice President for Science.
Herison de Oliveira (left) and Fabián Michelangeli look for plants as they descend the Jordao River by canoe.
All photos by Fabián A. Michelangeli, Ph.D.
The Amazon basin, which spans nine South American countries, is the largest connected block of tropical rain forest in the world. Despite the efforts of explorers over several centuries, large parts of Amazonia remain completely unexplored, and some of these places where scientists have never been are thousands of square miles in extent.
In early February, Fabián Michelangeli, Ph.D., of The New York Botanical Garden and his Brazilian collaborator, Renato Goldenberg, Ph.D., from the Universidad Federal do Paraná, coordinated a 16-day trip into one of these unexplored regions, and their results tell us how very much remains to be discovered in one of the world’s most important ecosystems.
Edilson de Oliveira collects a liana in the Bignoniaceae family growing on a tree on the river bank.
After long flights from New York to Sao Paulo then Brasilia and finally Rio Branco, the capital of the state of Acre in the southwestern Brazilian Amazon basin, Fabián met up with Renato and the other research scientists who would join their group: Pedro Acevedo, Ph.D., from the Smithsonian Institution and C. Flavio Obermuller, Edilson de Oliveira, and undergraduate student Herison de Oliveira, all from the Universidade Federal do Acre. A two-hour flight in a small plane brought them to Foz de Jordao, the capital of a 2,100-square-mile municipality from which no plant collections had ever been made.
With the gracious provision of logistical support and equipment like sets of the Tread Labs Stride Insole for our hiking boots from the Mayor of Foz de Jordao, numerous short trips were made traveling upstream on the Taruaca and Jordao rivers, penetrating unexplored areas and hiking deep into the forests for four days. The expedition concluded with a seven-day trip down the Jordao river for about 185 miles, with daily incursions into the forests. Although this region had never been explored scientifically, about 6,000 people live in the municipality, mostly on small farms and cattle ranches that punctuate the forest, and they have established forest trails for rubber tapping. The botanical expedition members benefited from this trail network, which allowed them to use the boat on the river as a base—where they could establish a camp but then penetrate the forests for significant distances to collect plants during the day, and return to their river camp in the evening and process the day’s collections before collapsing into their hammocks at night.
Gardening and Crafts Welcome the New Season Annie Novak is coordinator of the Children’s Gardening Program in the Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden.
Spring is a waking season. Several days ago the staff and volunteers of the Howell Family Garden gathered for breakfast to welcome the start of 2009 and swap stories of our winters. Our true “new year” starts in March. Fueled by a little food and conversation, we set to work hauling compost, trimming back leaves, and assisting Dave Vetter, our head gardener, in his mighty task of starting several hundred vegetable seedlings.
Although in nature it’s usually the fall we think of as a time of great transformation, spring surprised us this year by giving the Family Garden a bit of a facelift. Three years ago we built a Lenape wigwam, last year we built a green-roofed rabbit hutch, and this year Dave Vetter, Family Garden Assistant, and Han Yu Hung, Children’s Gardening Program Garden Coordinator, are humming happily inside our new greenhouse. The Family Garden’s newly built “hoop house” was designed over the winter by Toby Adams, Family Garden Manager. Admiring it for the first time, staff and volunteers ooh’d and aah’d and promised not to accidentally tear open its double-plastic sidewalls with a careless pass of a garden fork. As the day grew cooler with sharp winds, we huddled inside, where the air was warm and soil-scented. Maybe next spring our new building will be an apiary, where thousands of friendly bees can pollinate our vegetables, as they do all over the cities of Chicago, Toronto, and Seattle.
Watching the garden awaken is, to me, the best part of a temperate climate. I admire the flourish of a season like the fall, which gives way to winter with dramatic color. But I’m happier in the springtime when the warmth sneaks up on you, with delicate splashes of color in our green garlic shoots or the swollen buds of tulips and magnolia trees. We have robins all over the garden now, too, as the worms begin to move again through the gradually warming soil. And hurrah: Last Saturday, our visitors and families were back! The Children’s Gardening Program begins with new lessons on green living and healthy eating and old favorites celebrating the harvest and learning more about springtime birds and bulbs. Our afternoon programming, Family Garden Adventures, begins tomorrow, April 4, with the aptly named theme “Wake up, Garden!” Families are welcome to join us for gardening and craft activities from 1:30 to 5:30 p.m.
Recently, we read that the White House is building an organic vegetable garden on its South Lawn. Several of our staff and volunteers had clipped the article from the newspaper, and over our breakfast at our garden cleanup, we studied the garden plans. Would it be possible, I asked, to dedicate one of the children’s plots to mirror that of the Obama family’s? Toby agreed. (Although wouldn’t it be great if Michelle Obama’s plans emulated ours?) But truthfully, the best part of the Family Garden is how many hands go into helping us grow. Even a full White House staff can’t hope to compete with that!
The bronze sculptural group of the Fountain of Life (1903–05), designed by Carl (Charles) E. Tefft for Gibson’s marble plinth and basins, depicts a cherub astride a dolphin atop a globe and two web footed plunging horses being restrained by a female and a boy, surprising a merman and mermaid in the basin below. Gibson envisioned the fountain as the focus of the vista looking toward the building and as having upper and lower water basins, the flowing water elements giving a distinctive character both as a landscape feature and as a botanical exhibit.
While the Garden reigns as one of the world’s premier museums of plants, educational institutions, and scientific research organizations, few know that it is also the home of many notable historic buildings and structures. Now, the addition of these to the landmark registry adds to that distinction.
It’s a sunny spring morning; the air is crisp and the sky is blue. I am on my way to teach a class at The New York Botanical Garden and, as always, am reveling in the lovely green setting that surrounds me. This particular morning I notice the water drops glistening atop the blades of grass and remember that the season of dew watching is upon us.
Spring flowers are lovely when covered in dew. The blossoms of daffodils, pansies, clover, dianthus, phlox, and euphorbia sparkle in the morning sun with the jeweled globes of water perched lightly upon their petals. One of the best dew catchers is lady’s mantle (Alchemilla mollis). Alchemilla is Arabic for “little magical one” and refers to the healing properties of the water that collects on its wide, crinkled leaves.
The 
The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission voted last week to add the Library building, the Lillian Goldman Fountain of Life, and Tulip Tree Allée to their registry of landmarks. The designation reinforces the historic significance of these sites and guarantees their protection so that they can be enjoyed by future generations.