Left to right: Tom Sebenius and his business partners, Nicole Spector and Brian McNamara
Love is in the air, and we’re anticipating hundreds of couples hosting weddings and wedding-related events at the Garden this year.
And while brides and grooms enjoy their day of pampering, pledging, and partying, the run-up to the big day is often accompanied by pressure and panic. That’s where the wedding professional steps in with creative solutions, a willingness to compromise, and the ability to keep calm.
We sat down with New York City wedding floral design expert and NYBG instructor Tom Sebenius to learn more about designing for this most memorable day built around romance, personal preferences, and utmost attention to detail.
“Couples have so many options that being chosen to provide the flowers for their special day is a real honor,” Sebenius said.
It’s the classic gardener’s dilemma—you want lots of fresh flowers to decorate your home, but you want to keep your landscape flowers intact and beautiful. And the solution is… the cutting garden! This spring, Adult Education puts a fresh twist on the cut flower concept, with two classes that highlight the ever-growing interest in native plants.
For an in-depth, practical guide to the best wildflowers and techniques, join Kathleen Salisbury for Native Plants for Cut Flower Gardening(May 17). You’ll learn how to cultivate, cut and condition enough New York ironweed, sweet coneflower, meadow rue, and more to give you beautiful and natural arrangements all season long.
As spring turns to summer, try your hand at Arranging with Summer Wildflowers(June 26). Ken Norman will help you evoke a natural landscape with loose, textured designs using native wildflowers you can find in your own garden or at area farmers’ markets.
Both one-day sessions are presented in memory of Mae L. Wien, and include an inspiring tour through the Garden’s Seasonal Walk, newly designed by Piet Oudolf.
Some people are born to garden. Some people are born to teach. And some people have a knack for both.
Marlene Lyons, a 2012 Gardening Certificate graduate, is a gardening educator for kindergarten through fifth grades at Western Connecticut Academy of International Studies, a magnet school in Danbury. Her students actively tend their school garden and are involved in planting, pruning, harvesting and composting. Lyons encounters teachable moments regularly.
“The kids enjoy having their hands in the soil,” she said. “Initially, many of the kids will treat the garden soil like sand on a beach, smoothing it and patting it down.”
She explains to her class that soil actually does its best work, and plants like it better, when it’s not packed down tightly.
NYBG instructor Jan Johnsen designs gardens on three principles: simplicity, sanctuary, and delight.
These three ideas, she said, help us return to a kinship with the natural world, so we can quiet our thoughts and enjoy the present moment in our busy lives.
Johnsen, who has taught Landscape Design at NYBG off and on for almost 20 years, recently released a book, Heaven is a Garden: Designing Serene Outdoor Spaces for Inspiration and Reflection, in which she offers her unique perspective on designing with reflection in mind She hopes to use her book as a tool to open people’s eyes to a deeper understanding of power and place in nature and to appreciate all aspects of the world around us, even rocks, which she believes “have resonance.”
Leda Meredith is the Gardening Coordinator for Adult Education
After months of an especially relentless winter, spring is officially here! It’s not only the time when sunshine and blossoms beckon, but also when we need to get busy in the garden. The gardening you do now will determine the success of your landscape through summer and even into fall. Tasks to tackle can include anything from preparing your soil for the coming year to making the leap toward designing a pollinator-friendly garden. For those of you more concerned with indoor plants, it might be time to think about a spring repotting!
Whatever your focus, NYBG’s Adult Education courses offer you plenty of opportunities to become a better gardener. They might even give you the confidence to try something entirely new in your home garden. Here are my picks for the classes that will give you the skills you need for your best gardening year ever:
This Thursday, March 20, is the exciting culmination of our 14th Annual Winter Lecture Series. Our final speaker will be Thomas Rainer, an accomplished landscape architect who teaches planting design for the George Washington University Landscape Design program. He has worked on projects such as the U.S. Capitol grounds, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, and The New York Botanical Garden, but he is happiest puttering in his small garden at home in Washington, D.C.
It’s true, Thomas Rainer isn’t crossing any oceans to visit the Garden as our previous two speakers did, but professional and amateur gardeners will relate to Rainer’s personal journey. On Grounded Design, his award–winning blog, Rainer charts his process of discovery towards ever-better planting designs and methods. Click through to see his impressive designs.
Our spate of presentations from international gardening savants continued in February with British landscape architect Kim Wilkie, who joined us for the second of our annual Winter Lectures. At face value he may seem mild-mannered, but make no mistake: Wilkie loves to play in the mud. He shifts massive amounts of soil to sculpt the landscape in a very literal fashion.
Wilkie began his discussion by explaining how he infuses his contemporary ideas with historical perspectives. One source of inspiration is Mother Nature. He paid tribute to the powerful influence of ice and water, and the role of erosion in shaping the landscape. After this long, punishing winter, most of us will remember ice and water as a combined nuisance, reflecting on the piles of snow that buried our cars and blocked sidewalks. Wilkie, however, had a much more romanticized view of nature, presenting images of graceful contours carved into the land by winding rivers and glacial erosion.
In his quintessentially British Oxbridge manner, Wilkie related the fascinating chronology of both the military and spiritual tradition of moving massive amounts of earth to create man-made fortifications and construct sites for burial, solace, and worship. His slides carried us back in history with a sublime visual tour of this Northern European landscape custom.
Finally, it’s just about March, and we can stop dreaming about gardening and actually get going! Whether you’re a novice to the gardening game or a dyed-in-the-wool green thumb, pre-season education and preparation can go a long way. That’s where the NYBG’s Spring Adult Education classes come into play.
Here are my top picks for classes that will help make 2014 your best gardening season ever. I’ll be back next month with April picks, so be sure to keep an eye on Plant Talk for upcoming courses and workshops that you won’t want to miss!
Tom Lawson was a massage therapist until he bought a piece of property in the Hamptons.
The land was overgrown and neglected. Tom spent years lovingly redeveloping the landscaping. Then, over time, more and more people said to him, “You need to go do this professionally.”
So he tried. As projects fell into his lap, he realized he needed a language to communicate his ideas. Words weren’t enough.
“Most people don’t have the ability to visualize something that isn’t there,” Tom said.
He needed to learn how to sketch, how to draft. Tom found his way to The New York Botanical Garden Adult Education Program, where he earned Certificates in Horticulture (’12) and Landscape Design (’13), and continues to study.
At the end of January, our 14th Annual Winter Lecture Series kicked off with the first of three presentations as given by Brian Huntley, emeritus professor, renowned conservation scientist, and former CEO of the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI). Huntley was instrumental in shaping South Africa’s most famous garden, Kirstenbosch, from the ’90s and into the ’00s, and was a key figure in post-apartheid conservation across South Africa.
The Cape Floral Kingdom populating Kirstenbosch is incredibly diverse and unique, full of color and contrast. The poster child of South African flora is the protea (Proteaceae). As the country’s national flower, it has since become a huge success in the cut flower trade worldwide, but apart from this iconic South African plant, the country is also famous for its unique collection of geophytes (bulbs of all colors and shapes), irises (Iridaceae), heathers (Ericaceae), and a variety of colorful succulents and grass-like restios (Restionaceae). A few of the internationally-known plants from this region are the ubiquitous geranium (Pelargonium), the Kaffir lily (Clivia), African lily (Agapanthus), and gladiolus (Gladiolus).
I arrived at the lecture expecting to be captivated by the many South African floral treasures discussed by Professor Huntley, but even I couldn’t anticipate such beauty. I further came away with a profound appreciation of the country’s botanical history. Huntley intertwined the famous flora of South Africa with stories of conservation efforts and a history of their premier botanical garden—Kirstenbosch. His leadership was clear as he provided us with a vivid history, mission, and vision of the famed garden.
