Inside The New York Botanical Garden
Shop/Book Reviews
Posted in Shop/Book Reviews on December 10 2010, by Plant Talk
In addition to being the creator of BronxMama, Nicole Perrino is also a full-time graduate student. Having been in college for the past five years and only working part time, Nicole prides herself on her ”frugalista” skills–throwing birthday parties, holiday gatherings, and decorating her house–all on a small budget. Friends love turning to her for help when it’s their turn to plan an event.
Nicole’s picks are based on the premise that if you really put thought into a gift for someone, you don’t have to spend time worrying if you spent enough on each person. It’s a sentiment evident in Nicole’s thoughtful list of “Favorite Things” for holiday gift giving.
See Nicole's picks below!
Posted in Shop/Book Reviews on December 2 2010, by Plant Talk
Denise Shoukas has crafted a life that revolves around food. Denise is a writer for FoodSpring, including the Food Forager blog, and a monthly food trends columnist for Specialty Food Magazine.
When not writing about the latest trends and best specialty foods, she can be found cultivating her organic garden at home, cooking in her newly renovated kitchen, or making handmade pottery to use while serving up her culinary creations. Denise’s varied interests make for a fun and varied list of her “Favorite Things” for holiday gift giving.
See Denise's picks below.
Posted in Shop/Book Reviews on November 24 2010, by Plant Talk
Sara Kate Gillingham-Ryan, is more than the founding editor of the home cooking website The Kitchn. She is a cooking inspiration. The Kitchn was born out of Apartment Therapy, a website started by Sara Kate’s husband Maxwell whose stated mission is to “Save the world, one room at a time.”
In The Kitchn, (mission: Inspiring cooks, nourishing homes), experienced cooks and newbies alike swap recipes, tips, tricks, and tales in a chatty, well edited and lovingly curated forum shaped by Sara Kate and her devoted team. But Sara Kate’s world doesn’t revolve entirely around the kitchen. She’s also a passionate home gardener, a fact that comes out in Sara Kate’s list of her “Favorite Things” for holiday gift giving.
See Sara Kate's picks below.
Posted in Shop/Book Reviews on November 18 2010, by Plant Talk
Hannah Elliott, lifestyle writer and blogger for Forbes, has one of the more enviable beats we can imagine; she is tasked with writing about cars, fashion, luxury, and books in a way that doesn’t make “the muscle-heads hate the fashionistas in the process.”
If anyone can do it, Hannah can (Sample tweet: Do not buy the R8 Spyder if you’re shy or unfriendly. People love this car & want to know all about it, all the time. Huge attention getter). She’s stylish without being style conscious, intelligent without being nerdy, and can hang at the test track with even the most die hard gearheads.
And as might be expected, this breadth of interests and versatility of understanding surfaces in Hannah’s list of her “Favorite Things” for holiday gifts from the Shop in the Garden.
See Hannah's picks below.
Posted in Shop/Book Reviews on November 15 2010, by Plant Talk
Laura Fenton is one crafty lady! We first ran across her work when she wrote about the giant pumpkins for AOL’s home and garden blog ShelterPop. We immediately loved her sense of humor (we thought about charging rent inside the pumpkins, too), and the more we looked, we realized we also loved her sensibility. Laura loves cooking and crafting with in-season, locally sourced veggies, fruits, and flowers (just like we do).
So, when we had the chance to ask her about her “Favorite Things” for holiday gift giving, we knew it would be a lovely, inspiring list full of hidden gems from the Shop in the Garden. See for yourself!
See Laura's picks below!
Posted in Shop/Book Reviews on November 8 2010, by Plant Talk
Much as you would expect from the editor of a website called Fashionista, Lauren Sherman is a stylish young woman. But, unlike some of her fashion news peers, Lauren steers clear of dressing in all black (most days) and gratuitous trends, opting instead for an eclectic, self-confident mix of girly and masculine that comes off as classically feminine.
It’s a sensibility–inspired by much-loved trips to Europe with her technology-blogger fiancé and time spent living in London–that carries through to her “Favorite Things,” a list of gracious, classic gift picks from the Shop in the Garden.
See Lauren's picks below.
Posted in Shop/Book Reviews on November 4 2010, by Plant Talk
Olga Massov, creator of the popular cooking blog Sassy Radish, is a true triple threat: She’s a talented writer, photographer, and cook. Olga, a finance geek by day, writes about recipes and cooking in a way that makes you want to sit down with her and have a cup of coffee while working out what to cook for dinner. Her stories are sweet and lovely; her recipes simple, seasonal, and delicious.
When we began our “Favorite Things” campaign for the Shop in the Garden, we knew we wanted to see what Olga would pick. And just like her blog, Olga’s list of holiday gifts for friends and family is warm, genuine, and delicious.
See Olga's picks below.
Posted in Shop/Book Reviews, Uncategorized on October 27 2010, by Plant Talk
| Ann Rafalko is Director of Online Content. |
It seems hard to believe, but the holidays really are just around the corner. We love the holidays here at The New York Botanical Garden. The holidays mean the return of one of New York City’s most cherished family traditions, The Holiday Train Show in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory. It also means the arrival of beautiful new goodies at the Shop in the Garden, and on the Shop’s website. The selection of gifts in the Shop this holiday season is all about favorites, but they’re not just ours. We’re inviting some of the Garden’s most stylish, culinarily-minded, crafty, and green-thumbed friends to share a few of their favorite things with you!
So, take a spin around the Shop, whether in person while you’re visiting the giant pumpkins this weekend, or virtually. And if you happen to spot something that you’d like to call your favorite, you can use the “Tell A Friend” feature to give Santa a gentle hint.
So watch this space to see what some of your favorite bloggers will be giving as gifts this holiday season!
In the meantime, here are a few of my favorite things.
Get a jump-start on your holiday shopping list with a few recommendations below.
Posted in Shop/Book Reviews on July 21 2010, by Plant Talk
Authors of Books on Healthful, Sustainable Eating Come to the Garden
John Suskewich is Book Manager for Shop in the Garden.
No, “eating local” does not mean going to the Burger King that is down the block. It involves a set of conscious decisions about sourcing your chow in a way that emphasizes sustainability, nutrition, appearance, and taste, while leaving a smaller carbon trail.
Greenmarkets, community supported agriculture (CSA), produce exchanges, and farm stands are all manifestations of this concept. So, too, are celebrations like The Edible Garden, our summer into fall exhibition here at The New York Botanical Garden that is showcasing a number of chefs who create healthful recipes using harvest-based, seasonal, and organic ingredients.
Throughout The Edible Garden, Shop in the Garden is featuring a number of works by authors who believe that transforming our diet is critical not just to our own health but planet Earth’s health, too.
Louisa Shafia’s Lucid Food: Cooking for an Eco-Conscious Life is a cookbook with integrity. The first thing the author does is share all her “tried-and-true methods for putting a beautiful meal on the table while keeping a clear conscience.” Humane, seasonal, and sustainable are not bandied about like buzzwords but are used with passion and commitment. All this does not lead to cream of boiled water soup: the food is lovely, flavorful, and exotic, with concise recipes that don’t require specialized equipment or hard-to-find ingredients that need a flight to Damascus to get. The red-as-rhubarb jacket design is especially alluring. Louisa Shafia presented cooking demos at our Conservatory Kitchen and signed copies of Lucid Food this past Sunday (July 18).
Our grandparent’s secrets of putting food by (yes, we ate their homemade pickles that came out of a dubious-looking, scum-covered barrel set like a secret in a curtain-covered pantry—and lived to tell about it) are revealed by Eugenia Bone in Well-Preserved: Recipes and Techniques for Putting Up Small Batches of Seasonal Foods. Sure I can freeze my own blueberries, but after that I’m all thumbs and a bit of a nervous Nellie, as I’m a little afraid of sending a houseful of dinner guests to the emergency room even if they have health insurance. Eugenia Bone describes even difficult techniques like water bath canning, curing, and smoking in a reassuring way so that even a novice will be turning out house-made gravlax in no time. Eugenia Bone will show how to do it and sign copies of her book this Sunday, July 25.
The Locavore’s Handbook: The Busy Person’s Guide to Eating Local on a Budget, by Leda Meredith, is an introduction and guide to eating locally for everyone, but seems especially geared for budget-minded city folk. The virtue of this book is that it actually is practical, showing you how to consume sustainably without breaking your (grass-fed, humanely raised) piggy bank. It has very useful money-saving tips on menu planning, growing and harvesting (even when your back 40 is that many inches of balcony), bartering, even packaging. Leda Meredith, an instructor here at NYBG, will be talking about her life as a locavore and signing copies of her book on Sunday, August 15.
Get Your Tickets
Posted in Shop/Book Reviews on May 20 2010, by Plant Talk
John Suskewich is Book Manager for Shop in the Garden.
Emily Dickinson was a poet and a gardener, so there is no better place to celebrate the world of words she created than here at The New York Botanical Garden. The exhibition Emily Dickinson’s Garden: The Poetry of Flowers illustrates the many ways in which her horticultural life inspired her poetry, using an evocation of her actual garden, a digital reproduction of her personal herbarium, manuscripts, artifacts, and other material to bring this point into bloom.
At Shop in the Garden we are featuring a number of books that show how the poet used plants and flowers as metaphor and image in her art.
The Gardens of Emily Dickinson, by Judith Farr, with a chapter on how to grow Dickinson’s flowers by Louise Carter, is a gardening biography, a florography, of the “Belle of Amherst.” With scholarship and insight, the Farr re-creates the arcadian context of life in small-town America during the mid-19th century, where nature came right up through the picket fence to your front door. The author looks at the poems and letters to see what specific flowers Dickinson gardened with and what specific meanings they had for her. From Indian pipes to jasmine vines, everything in nature could be a symbol. and part of Dickinson’s greatness comes from her ability to distill what she observes into something eternal.
Two volumes of her poetry show with what mastery and beauty she was able to do this. Poetry for Young People: Emily Dickinson, edited by Frances S. Bolin, selects some of the best loved poems and sets them to charming illustrations by Chi Chung. There is an especially good selection of the riddle poems (but why not “A narrow fellow in the grass…”!)
The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, prepared by Ralph W. Franklin, is a definitive one-volume edition of the extant poems, 1,789 in all, presented with Dickinson’s idiosyncratic spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. What a pleasure to have this great achievement concentrated into an object you can bring anywhere. Short of facsimiles of fascicles, this is the Dickinson volume to own.
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Get Your Tickets
In addition to being the creator of BronxMama, Nicole Perrino is also a full-time graduate student. Having been in college for the past five years and only working part time, Nicole prides herself on her ”frugalista” skills–throwing birthday parties, holiday gatherings, and decorating her house–all on a small budget. Friends love turning to her for help when it’s their turn to plan an event.
