My fingerprints are all over this town, high and low, in all neighborhoods, including those with fancy addresses with sweeping views, luxury buildings, and hotels as well as low income housing project courtyards. A GreenStreets park I plant in my uptown neighborhood is a labor of love. New York is my city; my career is about enhancing its green beauty quotient and sustainable functioning.
NYBG’s Landscape Design Portfolio Lecture Series has served for me as an access ramp to the world of international design culture. The presentations of the past few seasons have offered a rich feast. Through a previous speaker, Fernando Caruncho, who was new to me, I found that some designs, such as his grids of olive trees and wheat field patterns, are best appreciated by helicopter—how exciting! This led me to view my own work in a fresh way, as strong patterns to view from afar.
Thus my perspective shifted on my work in general; I began to see my gardens as microcosms of the Big Picture of Garden Design and to approach the garden layout with new eyes.
It feels great to be making New York beautiful, garden by garden. I have designed so many, installed so many, and worked on, rejuvenated, or created so many from a wreck of a neglected courtyard, the back of a brownstone, a rooftop, or a terrace. I have reclaimed dreadful spaces and made them into havens, many with inspiration gained from the lecture series.
The Landscape Design Portfolio Lecture Series is a vital educational tool; the format is perfect, and Susan Cohen, coordinator of the Landscape Design Program, continues to choose exceptional speakers. The consistent high quality and world-class talent of the lineup makes the series a winner.
Year of the Rabbit and Fall’s Finale at the Family Garden Annie Novak is coordinator of the Children’s Gardening Program. Sun-Tzu tells us “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” Two thousand years later, the Family Garden recently took the opportunity to follow the familiar adage with the latest addition to our garden: Newton, the Family Garden rabbit. Unlike the brown, sleek, and rapid rabbits that pillage the cornucopia within our walls, Newton, a domesticated Dutch dwarf, was rescued by Group Tours staff, who found him wandering the Botanical Garden last month.
Despite the reputation of rabbits, the adoption of Newton is a welcome one. Instructors and students on a recent class field trip to the Family Garden discussed the perils of abandoning domesticated animals in the Botanical Garden forest, gracefully making the segue into a discussion of ecosystems. Later, the students were rewarded with the opportunity to feed Newton pea shoots, the last crop of legumes before cold weather finishes the garden’s growing season. Magnetized by the hutch and the adorable rabbit within, it seems the spotlight has turned away from the Family Garden’s waning fall vegetables.
Newton also has the privileged position of living under what may be The New York Botanical Garden’s first “green roof.” A collection of sedums and sempervivums (hens and chicks), the green roof will help to keep the hutch warm in the winter and cool in the summer. As Toby Adams, the Family Garden Manager, explains, Newton’s new home illustrates the potentials of creative and efficient gardening. “The hutch shows how our visitors, too, might tend a garden despite the limited ground-level space in the city.”
The only thing missing from Newton’s nest is a pumpkin. In anticipation of Halloween, the rest of the Family Garden is festooned with gourds and squash. This Sunday, October 26, during Halloween Hoorah, visitors to the Family Garden can present an apple sticker and a pumpkin sticker, distributed during the Halloween Parade, to earn a cup of freshly pressed cider and a pumpkin to color with markers. In the Family Garden, staff will be on hand to help make marigold jewelry, frame fruit sketches with seeds, and reminisce about the three beautiful growing seasons that preceded the fall farewell to their vegetable plots. Costumes are encouraged. It is rumored that Newton, with his brown bandit-mask fur, will be dressed as Zorro.
The Halloween Parade meets at the Rose Garden entrance at 12, 2, and 4 p.m. and heads to the Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden, where you can decorate pumpkins to take home and press your own apple cider.
Karen Daubmann is Director of Exhibitions and Seasonal Displays.
If you’re walking or driving along the perimeter of the Botanical Garden on Kazimiroff Boulevard, you might be detecting a pungent, foul odor in the air. You might also be seeing people collect what seems to be the source of that smell.
It is the time of year that female ginkgo trees drop their fleshy fruit, which when crushed by passing cars or pedestrians release a stench that has been likened to rotten butter, vomit, or dog excrement. It is what gives the ginkgo tree a bad name.
Though they smell terrible, the female cones, once harvested and processed, reveal seeds known as “white nuts” or “ginkgo nuts.” These seeds are a delicacy in Chinese and Japanese cooking, used in stuffing, soups, and even desserts. This treat is also nutritious, containing 13% protein and 3% fats. That is why female ginkgo trees are sought out at this time of year by those who envision making Bird’s Nest Soup and other traditional Asian dishes. Ginkgo seed hunters carry gloves and Ziploc bags while wearing shoes with soles that can be easily washed.
Are you familiar with the ginkgo tree? These stately trees—mature trees can reach 100 feet tall—have light-gray bark and fan-shaped leaves. As they age, the crown of the tree gets wider, and in autumn its turn golden yellow. Ginkgo, or maidenhair tree, is known as a “living fossil,” because it was a common tree species when dinosaurs roamed Earth, about 225 million years ago. Ginkgo was thought to be extinct until several plantings were discovered in eastern China.
Learn why the ginkgo tree is unique after the jump.
Autumn is here and Kiku returns to The New York Botanical Garden from October 18 through November 16. Time to perform your “civic duty” and vote…for your favorite kiku style.
Is it the majestic dome-shaped array of the ozukuri (“thousand bloom”)? Could it be the colorful kengai (“cascade”) that resemble “waterfalls” of wild chrysanthemums? How about the towering ogiku (“single stem”) arranged in symbolic rows representing the colors of the horse bridles of Japan’s Imperial family? Maybe it’s this year’s new display style, shino-tsukuri (“driving rain”)?
Click the images on the poll to learn more about each variety and then choose your favorite. (P.S. You can vote as many times as you want. We won’t tell anyone!) Spread the word and get others to vote, too. Then, come visit Kiku: The Art of the Japanese Chrysanthemum and see the impressive cultural exhibition and flower show first-hand.
The polling widget will live on the upper right corner of the blog until Election Week (the first week of November), when we will announce the results.
Carol Capobianco is Editorial Content Manager at The New York Botanical Garden.
With the recent wet weather you may have noticed that mushrooms are, well, mushrooming—in moist areas of your garden, on a pile of mulch, in a nearby woodland.
Here at the Botanical Garden, from the end of June to the first frost you may see Dr. Roy Halling, Curator of Mycology, walking about the grounds after a significant rainfall in search of his favorite subject. He has dedicated his life’s work to studying mushrooms. “I want to know what they are, where they grow, and how they are related to each other.”
The casual observer can see about 40 to 50 different types of mushrooms at the Garden over the course of the season. Roy’s top three spots are Twin Lakes, the bottom of Azalea Way, and the Arthur and Janet Ross Conifer Arboretum. At the base of pines and oaks are the best places to look because of the symbiotic relationship between the roots of these trees and mushrooms.
Although, after almost 25 years on staff at the Garden, he knows where to look, he’s not always certain what he’ll find. “I search near Twin Lakes and used to find mushrooms there. The oak tree is still there, but there are different mushrooms now. The others either aren’t there or they’ve moved.”
Moved? Yes, mushrooms will travel—or actually not return and appear elsewhere—according to their nutrient needs.
Roy travels, too. He’s been to many parts of the world and has co-authored a guide to mushrooms of Costa Rica, but his specialty has been researching the fungi (the group to which mushrooms belong) of Australia and Southeast Asia. His current project, with a grant from the National Geographic Society, is to explore for and document the mushrooms on the world’s largest sand island, Fraser Island, north of Brisbane. Roy has found that fungi provide the nutrients for the survival of the rain forest that otherwise implausibly exists on this island.
Learn more about Roy and his work with mushrooms after the jump.
Sarah Richardson is Special Events Coordinator at The New York Botanical Garden. If, like me, you’re a Project Runway fan, then you saw the episode a couple of weeks ago that featured The New York Botanical Garden as the stunning location for one of the show’s fashion challenges—designing an outfit inspired by nature.
Finally, I’m able to tell the secret I held for over three months.
I knew this first-hand information since the end of June, when scouts for the immensely popular show contacted our Special Events office after viewing all the amazing images of the Garden on our Web site. They were looking for a place for a “Bravo reality competition show” (they hadn’t yet revealed to us which one) with colorful, abundant flowers and plantings, in combination with a landmark that epitomized New York. Of course, the Botanical Garden and our iconic Enid A. Haupt Conservatory fit the bill, and we were in business—show business, that is.
That’s also when they told us they’d be filming Project Runway, and I was sworn to keep things under wraps, so to speak.
Wendy Hollender is Program Coordinator for the Botanical Art and Illustration field of study in NYBG’s Continuing Education program.
Nature in New York, the first exhibition of NYBG’s Botanical Art and Illustration program, featuring the work of students, faculty, and alumni, is open and going strong at the New York Open Center in SoHo. The show features 48 pieces by 32 different artists.
As the coordinator of the program and an instructor at the Garden I became the organizer of the exhibit. We wanted this to be a professional, juried show and to choose the best work possible. The week before the opening, two prestigious botanical art shows also opened in Manhattan: the annual American Society of Botanical Artists juried show at the Horticultural Society of New York and the Florilegium Society exhibit at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. I have personally exhibited in both these shows and find these to be truly breathtaking. How would our first show hold up by comparison?
Opening night came. Would there be enough food and drink? Would anyone come? The show itself had been beautifully hung thanks to two artist volunteers, Doris Downes and Linda Vredenburgh, who had offered to help me and Maria Rodriquez, Director of Exhibitions at the Open Center, where classes from the Botanical Art program are held. Doors opened at 7:30 pm and the gallery was immediately flooded with a steady stream of enthusiastic people. By night’s end at least 200 people came and didn’t seem to want to leave! One visitor said this was the best opening they had ever been to. “The work had precision, expertise, and artistry,” she went on to say. Some said it was hard to tell the work of students vs. faculty and that it was all beautiful and professional. The students who worked extremely hard on their botanical masterpieces were so proud to be included in an exhibition in a public venue. Instructors were happy to be a part of the exhibit and also pleased with the quality of the students’ work.
I encourage you to go and take a look at the exhibit. From fall’s harvest to spring’s first blooms it is truly a feast for the eyes.
Nature in New York is on through November 7. For hours, call 212.219.2527, Ext. 135. The Open Center is located at 83 Spring St., between Broadway and Lafayette, in Manhattan.
Also this weekend is a full slate of programming. Click here for details.
If, like me, you’re a 