This month’s featured alumna is Nina Antze, who holds an NYBG Certificate in Botanical Art & Illustration. While she is currently teaching colored pencil in California, Nina was initially a quilt maker with a degree in Fine Art from San Francisco State University before coming to the NYBG’s Certificate Program. She now teaches botanical art students of her own, including those at the Botanical Illustration Certificate Program at Filoli Gardens outside of San Francisco. We asked her to guide us along the path that brought her to the NYBG and a new career.
What made you pursue a Botanical Art & Illustration Certificate with NYBG? Were you looking for a new career, or just a hobby?
NYBG introduced me to the world of Botanical Illustration. I started taking colored pencil classes when we moved from California to New York, and it was basically to meet people. My new friend Jane found NYBG instructor Carol Ann Morley’s Colored Pencil class; after that we took Laura Vogel’s drawing class and we really wanted to continue. I was not thinking of a new career, but I fell in love with drawing all over again and I loved having all the plants in the world for possible subjects.
It’s not only the born-and-raised green thumbs who find their way into professional horticulture. Among some of our Horticulture Certificate program’s accomplished alumni you’ll find horticulturists and landscape designers who started their careers in very different fields, and Amy Henderson, who spent much of her working life designing without a trowel at her side, is just such a person. We recently caught up with Amy to get her take on entering a Horticulture Certificate program, working in garden design, and more.
What drew you to the NYBG Horticulture Certificate Program?
Around 2009 I started visiting the Garden frequently and treated myself to a few Gardening classes. I was looking for a change from my decades of work in graphic design, and it dawned on me that I could use my design skills with a new, living medium—plants—and that maybe the Horticulture certificate could lay the foundation of a path to a new career. I settled on the Garden Design Horticulture track because to me, the plants are what it’s all about.
Vincent Simeone is a well-respected horticulturist who teaches a number of plant-related courses in the Garden’s Horticulture Certificate program. He just released a new book, Grow More With Less: Sustainable Garden Methods (Cool Springs Press, December 2013), that offers the home gardener detailed and practical ways to create a sustainable home landscape with less work, less water, less money, and better results. Vincent graciously offered to share with us some tips from this valuable resource.
Proper plant selection is very important. What will your book cover and is there one general tip you can share?
There is an entire chapter in the book dedicated to properly selecting the right plant for the right place and it encourages gardeners to think outside the box. This chapter offers some popular, tried and true favorites such as flowering dogwood and winterberry, along with some lesser-known species plants and new cultivars that extend seasonal interest and are low maintenance once established. The resurgence of native grasses such as Little Blue Stem and Switch Grass have raised the bar in the horticultural industry giving us many new possibilities that we didn’t necessarily have before. The key is to do your homework and purchase plants from a reputable plant source.
Joyce H. Newman holds a Certificate in Horticulture from The New York Botanical Garden and has been a Tour Guide for over seven years. She is a blogger for Garden Variety News and the former editor of Consumer Reports GreenerChoices.org.
Nancy White, owner of The Flower Bar in Larchmont, N.Y. is a graduate of NYBG’s Floral Design Certificate program and current instructor. But that’s not the real reason we’re talking about her. Recently, White created a beautiful and unique seasonal floral design that deserves highlighting.
“One of our customers asked for a holiday arrangement including amaryllis,” so White put together a “living garden” consisting of amaryllis, frosted fern, and cyclamen, accented with red dogwood branches, pine cones, and holiday evergreens. “We didn’t expect to get such positive feedback, but it really took off.”
Since the original design, White and her staff have created quite a few more of these beautiful holiday displays. The plants are housed in plastic pots, and then placed in wooden or tin window box style containers to create the garden effect. White says that the popularity of these arrangements proves that, sometimes, “People just want something different!”
Most people think of gardening as a solitary activity, but Horticultural Therapy is a unique profession because it turns plant care into an opportunity for human interaction. It was that human element that brought plantsman Rob Bennaton back to The New York Botanical Garden to pursue a Certificate in Horticultural Therapy. With a previous NYBG Horticulture Certificate and 18 years’ worth of experience in community development and habitat restoration under his belt, Rob told us why he returned to study the therapeutic effects of plant care on people.
“Working with plants through a nurturing process has tremendous healing potential because people are motivated by success in caring for living organisms. That process helps us understand our place in the world, and our ability to help make it a better place, and that’s what brought me to Horticultural Therapy.”
As a student, Rob is learning the therapeutic skills and horticultural techniques needed to serve a broad population of people in need. “In order for the activities to be therapeutic, they must be well planned, address specific treatment needs, offer steps towards personal growth, and be considerate of the client population’s desire for independence.”
For someone who is a tireless entrepreneur, the owner of YL Event Design, and an NYBG Floral Design Instructor, Yolanda LaGuerre still knows how to enjoy life. Not surprisingly, she finds it to be a strong advantage in the party business! Here she shares with us her trend predictions going into 2014, industry advice, and how she came to discover a career in flowers.
You say you started your floral design career at age 15?
That’s correct. I lived in the city and took full advantage of living so close to one of the best flower markets in the world! With a sheet of oak tag, a pair of scissors and a marker I made myself business cards with my name, beeper number, and tag line, “Designer willing to do anything,” and passed them out all over the New York Flower Market at 5 a.m. every day! After a while I got my first break and freelanced with many designers for a few years before attending NYBG.
Visitors to the Adult Education classrooms on Garden grounds may have noticed a recent addition to the walls of the Watson Building in a series of framed, vintage botanical posters. These treasures were discovered in storage while refurbishing the botany lab, and we could not bear to dispose of such a colorful glimpse into the history of botanical science. While the paper had begun to yellow, the ink was flaking, and a few of the posters were beyond saving, Center Art Studio in Manhattan graciously took on the challenge of restoring ten of these double-sided instructional posters as a gift to the NYBG.
This series was originally the work of Father Hilary Jurica O.S.B., as published by A. J. Nystrom & Co., Chicago. Born in 1892, Jurica was a monk and a priest who earned a doctorate degree in biology from the University of Chicago in 1922. He was also the first monk of St. Precopius Abbey to attain this academic honor and the first American Benedictine to receive a doctorate from a secular university. Partnered with his young brother Fr. Edmund, a zoologist, Fr. Hilary the botanist spent forty years traveling around the country to gather many of the specimens on display in the Jurica Nature Museum in Illinois.
When it comes to climbing our trees, we have a hard and fast rule: Never … Except occasionally when we say it is okay. And one of those rare occasions is this weekend!
When you enroll in this Saturday’s Recreational Tree Climbing class, you’ll learn to climb the Garden’s stately trees like our arborists do—with ropes and harnesses—and you’ll have the chance to see the Bronx from an angle that is usually reserved for our resident raptors.
It is a once in a lifetime chance for all tree-loving daredevils! The class is taught by the Garden’s professional arborists, who are all graduates of NYBG’s storied arboriculture program.
Daryl Beyers is a landscape designer with over 20 years’ worth of experience who teaches Gardening and Landscape Design for the Garden. However, he first came to the Garden as a student in the spring of 2000 when his employers at a 10-acre estate in Connecticut sent him here to take classes in composting and orchid care. Daryl had earned a degree in Environmental Design, but it was here that he polished his horticulture skills, since, as he explains, “Not all landscape design programs stress plant knowledge, let alone gardening skills.”
The pitfalls facing new gardeners are familiar to Daryl, who built his skills both in the classroom and on the job, first as a laborer—“the guy pushing the wheel barrow”—then as a nursery worker—“the college kid holding a hose out in the container field.” He also had the same amateur gardener’s idealism: “Not knowing any better, my unstated goal first starting out was to keep every plant in my care alive… I share this experience with my Fundamentals of Gardening students because it demonstrates a common thread of how most inexperienced gardeners think. They believe, unhappily, that if a plant dies they have failed, when in fact the death of a plant is just a lesson. I quote a gardener friend who once said, “You don’t really know a plant until you have killed it three times.”
Cold season: It’s as inevitable a piece of the New York City calendar as the Marathon, the Thanksgiving Day parade, and New Year’s Eve in Times Square. Colds are miserable and difficult to get over, but that doesn’t mean you have no recourse. In fact your local greenmarket, grocery store, garden, or crisper bin might just hold a few plants that can help you get through the winter with a slightly cheerier demeanor. No, seriously.
Next Tuesday at our Midtown Adult Education Center in Manhattan, Andrea Karo will be teaching you how to make your own herbal medicine kit. Learn how medicinal herbs and lifestyle approaches can help prevent and treat common winter woes including coughs, earaches, fevers, sore throats, and stuffy noses. After seeing easy-to-follow demonstrations for making syrups, soothing oils, natural decongestants, and healthy teas, you’ll go home ready to stock your own herbal medicine kit.
