Laura Collier is Marketing Associate at The New York Botanical Garden.
Since I started working at the Garden, my friends, family, and acquaintances assume I instantly acquired all sorts of plant-related knowledge. I have to politely explain that, while I love being at the Garden, my position doesn’t provide me with a wealth of horticultural learning. But, times arise when it’s time to step up and get some hands-on training. And that’s exactly what I’ve done with The Orchid Show: Cuba in Flower.
Besides regularly stopping by the Conservatory on my lunch break to check out the show and all its blooms, I’ve decided to purchase an orchid from Shop in the Garden, to bring a bit of the show to my home in Queens. Luckily, I’m not expected to be an expert at the Shop when picking out flowers. Along the shelves full of orchids are signs with great tips about orchid care and details about each type. (For more great tips, click here)
At Shop in the Garden we celebrate the 2010 edition of The Orchid Show with two
marvelous books that show the fascination these charismatic plants have had on artists, horticulturists, and botanists over the years.
Surely one of the most useful orchid books to come down the pike in a long while is Bloom-Again Orchids by judywhite (sic. for that is indeed the way to spell her name, all lowercase, like a specific epithet).
Here is a book designed to correct an all-too-common condition: orchids that sit on windowsills and sulk without either growing or dying. By emphasizing plants that normal human beings can cajole into bloom and are likely to encounter in the marketplace, i.e., big-box stores, supermarket shelves, mall kiosks, florist windows, and of course, botanical garden gift shops, Bloom-Again Orchidsis accessible and unique. It demystifies home orchid-growing in a very concise way, with an A-to-Z of 50 beautiful varieties, each one annotated with an easy-to-understand, 12-point checklist.
The second book is one that is good to have available again: Volume 17 of The Works of Charles Darwin: The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids are Fertilized by Insects. In this work the controversial naturalist continues his investigation of adaptations in the natural world. His astonishing powers of detailed observation combined with his sense of something larger at work are conveyed with an ease and naturalness that is pure poetry.
Both books, of course, are available at Shop in the Garden.
Check Out These New Titles on Plants and Gardening
John Suskewich is Book Manager for Shop in the Garden.
Will these 10 books stop me from ordering seeds I probably won’t get around to sowing until 2018? Will they prevent me from having a six-foot-tall Panicum come up in front of an eight-inch-tall Catananche? Will they convince me not to try growing Rhododendron yakushimanum for the third time in 10 years in my yard with heavy clay soil and a high water table? Probably not; but here are 10 new books—on plants and gardens and nature and why it all matters—that were recently published or are coming out later this year and that I’ll be reading anyway, no matter what benefit I may or may not get from them!
A Landscape Manifesto,
by Diana Balmori
Innovative and influential landscape architect Diana Balmori writes on the theory, practice, and future of her profession.
Ken Smith Landscape Architect,
by Ken Smith This imaginative practitioner, who has changed our idea of what landscape architecture can be, looks at his most important projects.
Garden Guide: New York City,
by Nancy Berner and Susan Lowry
From Gotham’s horticultural Baedeker comes a new edition—it’s always amazing to see how many gardens you can visit here in NYC!
The Japanese Tea Garden, by Marc Peter Keane No American interprets Japanese garden history and practice better than our colleague Marc Peter Keane.
Larry Lederman’s Images on Display; Available as 2010 Calendar in Shop
The form and beauty of trees drew Larry Lederman into landscape photography nine years ago, when he began visiting the Botanical Garden weekly in all kinds of weather. For Lederman, a member of the Board of Advisors, the Garden is a beautiful and diverse landscape where he can follow the growth and seasonal changes of the trees, each occasion offering singular enchantments.
Some of his resulting images are currently on display in an exhibition, The Presence of Trees, in the Arthur and Janet Ross Gallery, through April 11.
“The presence or absence of trees often defines a landscape,” Lederman has said. “In art, forests signify wilderness and clearing, its loss. The trees in these photographs are in the so-called cleared places, nurtured to be part of our lives. Growing either alone or one in relation to others, they respond to the seasons, invest the landscape with their permanence and character, and connect us to nature. They influence our moods, affect our behavior, and shape our lives. These photographs view trees as expressive presences evocative of the diversity and wonder of life.”
His images take a fresh look at trees in the landscape and reveal their beauty and structure during all seasons, underscoring their character and influence in the natural world.
In 2003 the Botanical Garden published his first calendar, Woodland Creatures, which led to his annual series, Trees. Copies of his 2010 calendar, which include several images from the exhibition, are available at Shop in the Garden.
Authors of Old Penn Station History and Children’s Tale Visit
John Suskewich is Book Manager for Shop in the Garden.
A replica of the late, great Pennsylvania Station is new this year in The New York Botanical Garden’s Holiday Train Show. I remember that building at the end of its life. My family used to go by train to Philadelphia to visit my aunt who was actually born in Russia and scared us kids by removing her false teeth. Penn Station seemed like a ruin even when it was intact. It was grim and grimy and as you got pulled downstairs and yanked down corridors, it loomed overhead like a cliff or a cave. During demolition the building sat on its city block with broken columns and cornices and clocks hanging in midair like Valhalla after the gods had left.
The rendition of Pennsylvania Station that designer Paul Busse has created for the train show imagines it as it was in its heyday and is impressively colossal even at reduced scale, with bark colonnades, acorn capitals, pine cone clocks, and sugar-water windows.
In Old Penn Station, author William Low traces the history of the great depot from its inception as a monumental gateway to Gotham to its glory days as a transportation hub and its decline and destruction in the name of progress and profitability. His muscular, colorful illustrations, lit like an elegy and pictured from every conceivable angle, bring this fallen monument to life and will turn even a tot into an ardent preservationist.
The thoroughfare, modeled after Paris’s Champs-Élysées, was completed in 1909 and saw the arrival of many Art Deco structures housing upwardly mobile Jews in the first five decades of the 20th century, followed by waves of Irish and Italian immigrants.
While Rosenblum explores various aspects of Jewish communal life near the boulevard, she also dissects the rivalry between the affluent West Bronx and the working-class East Bronx, and the racial tensions that led to white suburban flight and the decline and neglect of the area. The first major book to document the rise, fall, and current revival of this century-old Bronx landmark is a must-read for those interested in the cultural history of New York City, urban history, Jewish-American life, and yes, even baseball and the Lindbergh baby kidnapping.
Designer of NYBG’s Rose Garden a Real “Artist and Hero”
John Suskewich is Book Manager for Shop in the Garden.
In Beatrix Farrand: Private Gardens, Public Landscapes, Judith Tankard avoids the pitfall of turning a historical figure into a waxwork and brings to life this pioneering woman who was one of the first important American landscape gardeners. As someone who designed an important feature of The New York Botanical Garden, the magnificent Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden, Beatrix Farrand (1872–1959) is of particular interest to us here.
Hers is a great “little Old New York” story. Farrand’s aunt was Edith Wharton, she herself was one of Mrs. Astor’s “Four Hundred,” and Henry James was often a household guest, so she could have coasted. Instead, to a great talent Farrand added diligent study and travel, hard work, a facility for networking, and—for that time and place—a kind of courage. The commissions she attracted after 1900 included some of the most notable country places of that era: Crosswicks in Pennsylvania; the Fahnestock estate in Lenox, Massachusetts; Bellefield, the Newbold family property in Hyde Park, New York; and a slew of blue-blooded landscapes on Long Island.
The author’s chapter on Farrand’s assignment at The New York Botanical Garden is especially noteworthy. This involved creating an elegant design for a public rose garden out of a tricky site while developing a collection of roses that would have aesthetic and educational merit. The ups ands downs and ups of this rose garden reflect in a way NYBG’s own story, and of the difficulties that make landscape gardening such a complicated art, as time takes its toll. But time also tells, and in a volume that contains pages of marvelous photography, this garden is beautifully pictured, here and now, in its current state of grandeur.
Garden Horticulturist Appears for Booksigning as Co-Author
John Suskewich is Book Manager for Shop in the Garden.
The publication of Botanica Magnifica: Portraits of the World’s Most Extraordinary Flowers & Plants gives us an occasion to really celebrate the career of our wonderful orchid curator, horticulturist, and all-around plant enthusiast Marc Hachadourian, the book’s co-author.
As Manager of the Nolen Greenhouses here at The New York Botanical Garden, Marc helps provide the spectacular range of material for the flowering displays that amaze and astonish visitors to our 250-acre Eden in the Bronx. This season, thanks to his propagation skills, the discerning observer would have seen Meconopsis in the Ladies’ Border, the towering Echium pininana from this year’s Dutch Bulbs spring flower show, and the usual killer show of waterlilies and lotuses in the Conservatory Pools.
But of all the plant families, Marc seems to have the greatest kinship for the Orchidaceae. This relationship is beautifully expressed annually in the work he does curating The Orchid Show in the Haupt Conservatory, in the displays he puts on throughout the year in the Library building Orchid Rotunda, and now between the covers of the quite striking new book, Botanica Magnifica. But he doesn’t stop there; he goes beyond orchids and has written more than half the text for the book.
It is an understatement to call this a luxurious volume of flower photography. Botanica Magnifica contains 250 portraits of rare and exotic plants taken by Jonathan Singer “in a manner evocative of Old Master paintings” (ARTnews). He is a Hasselblad Laureate Award winner—like an Oscar for shutterbugs—and his orchid images are especially memorable: the cymbidiums, dendrobiums, and Polyradicion, better known as the ghost orchid, float and fly and drip and droop against their black background with a sculptural quality that belies their transient beauty.
The Art and Impact of Lynden B. Miller’s Public Gardens
John Suskewich is Book Manager for Shop in the Garden.
New York City, famous around the world for its great art, is the site of more masterpieces than you can shake a stick at. The Metropolitan Museum has Monet’s Terrasse a Ste.-Addresse; the modernist icon Lever House graces Park Avenue; you can ponder Louise Nevelson’s Sky Cathedral at MOMA. Here at The New York Botanical Garden there is a masterpiece of garden design, the Jane Watson Irwin Perennial Garden designed by Lynden B. Miller. It is a work of art.
For flower power alone it is astonishing, especially during its current late-summer and fall climax of anemones, astilbes, asters, and mums; of kniphofias, hydrangeas, phlox, and lilies. But like all great gardens it combines its inspired planting with strong design. There are axes and cross axes, themed rooms, grace notes, structural elements, repeated elements, and even whimsical elements like the three banana trees that have appeared this year in the “Hot Color Room.”
It’s all a painting really, a painting made of plants (I believe Ms. Miller was indeed trained as a painter). Look closely and it dissolves into its component plants, but step back and all the parts resolve themselves into one unambiguous image: a classic but unique mixed border that would be at home in the Cotswolds if it weren’t for its very American insistence on being individualistic, eclectic, almost impromptu, and diverse, ready to encompass the whole world with its exotic elements.
In a new book that is a summation of her long career as a public garden designer, Lynden Miller spells out the ethos of this garden and of her whole body of work, without which living in New York City in the 21st century would probably be unendurable.
Since I started working at the Garden, my friends, family, and acquaintances assume I instantly acquired all sorts of plant-related knowledge. I have to politely explain that, while I love being at the Garden, my position doesn’t provide me with a wealth of horticultural learning. But, times arise when it’s time to step up and get some hands-on training. And that’s exactly what I’ve done with The Orchid Show: Cuba in Flower.
