Brian Sullivan is the Vice President for Landscape, Gardens and Outdoor Collections. He oversees the care, presentation, and development of the outdoor gardens and landscape management of the Garden’s 250 outdoor acres.
If you visit the Garden this summer and walk down Perennial Garden Way to the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, you will find a tidy planting bed that runs parallel to the roadway, edged with a short iron wicket fence and filled with robust perennials. If you were lucky enough to find yourself walking here three to four weeks ago, around Memorial Day, you would have been immersed in the flowers of the newly renovated Matelich Anniversary Peony Collection.
Now in its second growing season, this collection of herbaceous peonies, Paeonia lactiflora, showcases the fragrant pink, white, red, and coral blossoms of one of the most popular garden plants and cut flowers.
The tradition of growing herbaceous peonies near the Conservatory dates back to the early 1900s, when peonies were grown in double borders along pathways surrounding the elegant glasshouse.
Kristine Paulus is NYBG’s Plant Records Manager. She is responsible for the curation of The Lionel Goldfrank III Computerized Catalog of the Living Collections. She manages nomenclature standards and the plant labels for all exhibitions, gardens, and collections, while coordinating with staff, scientists, students, and the public on all garden-related plant information.
Pinus rigida
I don’t like baseball. I feel about the sport the way the protagonist of a certain Boomtown Rats song feels about Mondays. My dad, on the other hand, is the world’s biggest baseball fanatic (you might say phanatic if you knew which his favorite team is). While I will never share my dad’s passion for this popular bat-and-ball game, I try to be a good daughter and humor him in conversations as I try to find something (anything!) interesting about it. One way to amuse myself during a baseball game is to botanize it. It turns out that there are plants in baseball! That sticky goo that batters use to improve their grip? It’s pine tar from Pinus rigida, or pitch pine, a tough native tree that grows where few other can, in poor conditions, dry windswept slopes and shallow, rocky soil. The pine which gives the Pine Barrens of Long Island, New Jersey, and Cape Cod their name can be seen in the Ross Conifer Arboretum Its common name alludes to the high resin content that makes the production of pine tar possible. Its is so important in baseball that historians recall the infamous Pine Tar Game.
Two bulb experts, Michael Hagen, Curator of the Rock Garden and Native Plant Garden, and Marta McDowell, NYBG instructor, author, gardener, and landscape historian, recently commented on some frequently asked questions about the gorgeous spring bulbs now blossoming in the garden . Here’s what they had to say.
Q: What are some of the easiest spring/early summer bulbs to grow?
McDowell: Narcissus seem to be almost indestructible and with so many varieties, you can have them in bloom for almost two months. Other choices: Crocosmia—graceful in leaf and flower and blackberry lily (Iris domestica or Belamcanda chinensis). Great foliage, flowers, and seed pods.
Q: What are some of the most difficult bulbs to grow, aside from climate issues?
Hagen: Climate aside, the hardest to grow are the ones that our native ground squirrels, chipmunks, woodchucks, and gophers enjoy eating. Species tulips have been a particular challenge in the Rock Garden. If it’s a warm fall (and the chipmunks are not hibernating yet) they can be dug up and eaten right after they’ve been planted.
Esther Jackson is the Public Services Librarian at NYBG’s LuEsther T. Mertz Library where she manages Reference and Circulation services and oversees the Plant Information Office. She spends much of her time assisting researchers, providing instruction related to library resources, and collaborating with NYBG staff on various projects related to Garden initiatives and events.
The Dictionary of Science for Gardeners by Michael Allaby clocks in at 553 pages and 6,000 scientific terms. Upon first learning about this publication, I was intrigued. Reading the introduction, I became even more fascinated. Allaby has written, edited, or co-authored over 100 books on environmental science. Prior to writing The Dictionary of Science for Gardeners, he edited four other scientific dictionaries for Oxford University Press. He also has an absolutely delightful personal website from which the following quote is taken—“Dictionaries don’t tell stories, well not really although I do my best even with them. I compile dictionaries, you see…Oh yes, I do dictionaries. Want a dictionary? I’m your man.”
The Dictionary of Science for Gardeners covers 16 branches of science relevant to gardeners as determined by Allaby and includes “plant classification, the science of how and why plants are grouped into genera and families, plant geography or how the world breaks down floristically, plant evolution, with the genetic code as an appendix, plant structure and function, or how plants work, fungi, insects, other invertebrate animals, vertebrate animals, bacteria and viruses, the way major nutrients move through cycles, pesticides, soil science including the way soils are classified, ecology, conservation, and weather and climate.” It is interesting to see the branches of botany so defined, and a good indication as to how The Dictionary is written in order for a wide array of scientific terminology to be accessible to readers, including scientific names of birds and bugs that might be seen in a garden.
Winter is coming. It’s only a matter of time before you’ll be climbing crusty brown mountains of ice and snow at street corners, fording knee deep slush puddles, or creeping down the Bronx River Parkway in your car at speeds that give the illusion you’re traveling in reverse (this all assumes our unseasonably warm fall turns a sharp corner). But before you jet off to the tropics for well-deserved respite, beware an unheralded danger. Not a rogue wave accident on the best paddle board for beginners or exotic jellyfish—I speak of something far more dangerous.
Worldwide, sharks are responsible for approximately five fatalities each year. By comparison, falling coconuts take roughly 150 lives. That’s right—while visiting a tropical coast you are 30 times more likely to be dispatched by an unassuming and immobile coconut palm (Cocos nucifera) than the ocean’s most evolved, sleek, and efficient predator.
Kristine Paulus is NYBG’s Plant Records Manager. She is responsible for the curation of The Lionel Goldfrank III Computerized Catalog of the Living Collections. She manages nomenclature standards and the plant labels for all exhibitions, gardens, and collections, while coordinating with staff, scientists, students, and the public on all garden-related plant information.
Amsonia ‘Blue Ice’
Just about every color in the spectrum is represented somewhere in The New York Botanical Garden, but this summer blue is particularly significant. According to scientific studies, the hue is the most universally liked by humanity and so visitors to the Garden will certainly be pleased at the sight of the evocation of Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory The celebrated Mexican painter’s famous blue house was closely studied, enabling exhibitions staff to precisely match a backdrop of cobalt-blue walls for FRIDA KAHLO: Art, Garden, Life.
It’s not surprising that Frida chose this shade for her abode. Blue has more symbolic meanings than any other color. As the tint of life-giving water and of the sky, home to numerous deities of many cultures, blue has been held in high regard throughout time. In art and in life it has been reserved for the most important people and things, including Pharaohs, Renaissance Madonnas, and Elvis’ shoes. The first synthetic pigment ever created, invented by the Ancient Egyptians, was, of course, blue! The pursuit of the perfect blue has molded entire civilizations. [1]
Among our many extensive botanical collections in the Garden, the daylilies have a story that is very close to the heart of The New York Botanical Garden. Considered the “father of the modern daylily,” Dr. Arlow Burdette Stout (1876–1957) spent a majority of his career as a scientist at NYBG. The daylilies that bloom along Daylily/Daffodil Walk this time of year include Hemerocallis species, Stout’s own hybrids, and selections of the tens of thousands of named cultivars that Stout’s work has inspired.
A mainstay in American home gardens and a common sight along our roadways in the summer, daylilies are actually not native to the Americas but rather introductions from Asia via Europe. As European settlers moved ever westward across North America, they brought daylilies with them as reminders of home. Stout grew up in the midwest, and as a child became interested in the bright orange flowers that his mother grew in their yard. Prior to his breeding program, very little work had gone into improving and diversifying cultivated daylilies. Stout saw potential in these plants, and a stroll along Daylily/Daffodil Walk in July is a testament to his vision.
My office is situated in a most advantageous location adjacent to the ever-changing exhibition houses, my beloved desert houses, and steps from the breathtaking courtyard pools brimming with flowering lotus and water lilies. Voltaire might say “it is the best of all possible worlds.” Directly outside my door hang several beautiful specimens of Staghorn Fern (Platycerium sp.) As I sit at the computer, I am delighted by the amazed exclamations these plants elicit—so much so I feel compelled to write this post in hopes of answering the many wonderful questions visitors seem to have.
For the most part, patrons agree that the plant appears otherworldly. “It looks like some type of alien!” is a commonly overheard remark. I completely understand the sentiment, but these plants are most certainly of this world—found throughout the tropics and subtropics from the Philippines and Australia to Madagascar, Africa, and South America, to be exact. The way they grow in habitat and the unique way we display them in the Conservatory certainly present an unusual spectacle.
Ecological restoration, or “the process of assisting in the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed” (SER, 2004), is what the Forest staff, interns, and volunteers do in the Thain Family Forest every day to reduce invasive plants and increase native plant regeneration in managed areas through planting.
We start with an inventory that samples nearly 250 plots that are 10 meters by 10 meters squared. The sampling involves measuring all trees and shrubs, living or dead, with one centimeter or greater diameter at breast height (DBH) and collecting percent cover information for all herbaceous plants, woody plant seedlings and saplings, and non-living components such as leaf litter, coarse woody debris, and bare soil. This inventory is repeated every five years and provides a picture of forest change overtime that allows us to prioritize management and guide the restoration process: inventory, establish priorities, manage invasive species, restore native species, and repeat. The Forest staff last carried out an inventory in 2011 and will be repeating this process in the summer of 2016.
In a previous blog a few months ago, we explored the interdependency of plants, insects and birds. When I was at New England Grows, I was reminded of plant’s interdependency with soil. This relationship was sensationalized in 2006 with the publication of Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis’s book Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Food Web.
I remember when Lowenfels came and spoke at The New York Botanic Garden. He was one of many proponents for healthy soils. T. Fleisher, Elaine Ingham and James Sottilo were just a few members of the healthy soil brigade who were working the speaker circuit, educating and informing us on their work on soil microbiology, compost, compost tea, and soil restoration.
At New England Grows, the Foreman of the Grounds at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Chris Roddick, gave an informative talk that took me back to the heydays when soil was exciting and alive. Roddick started with a reminder of what we often do wrong: over-fertilize or fertilize without a purpose, over-sanitize (by removing leaves, etc.), create mulch mounds, drive heavy equipment up to the base of trees, and garden in the rain.
If you visit the Garden this summer and walk down Perennial Garden Way to the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, you will find a tidy planting bed that runs parallel to the roadway, edged with a short iron wicket fence and filled with robust perennials. If you were lucky enough to find yourself walking here three to four weeks ago, around Memorial Day, you would have been immersed in the flowers of the newly renovated Matelich Anniversary Peony Collection.
