Inside The New York Botanical Garden
Gardening Tips
Posted in Gardening Tips on May 17 2010, by Sonia Uyterhoeven
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Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education. Join her each weekend for home gardening demonstrations on a variety of topics in the Home Gardening Center. |
Drying flowers is a wonderful way to preserve the beauty of your garden. For most people dried flowers conjure up images of lavender, strawflowers, and statice. There is, however, a wide range of flowers that can be successfully dried. Below are two techniques for drying flowers.
It is important to remember to collect flowers when they are at their peak. Avoid any excess moisture on your flowers by collecting them late in the morning once the dew has burned off.
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Posted in Emily Dickinson, Exhibitions, Gardening Tips on May 10 2010, by Sonia Uyterhoeven
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Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education. Join her each weekend for home gardening demonstrations on a variety of topics in the Home Gardening Center. |
Last week in my blog we explored the history of the language of flowers. Today we’ll look at part of a floral index Emily Dickinson had access to. It is just a sampling of what a 19th-century index of flowers and their meanings would contain, but it is enough to get you started on learning the meanings of some common flowers.
Many floral dictionaries were published in the United States in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Some were simple indexes. Others were adorned with beautiful images of flowers and supplemented with literary extracts ranging from the works of Milton and Shakespeare to popular verse.
Emily Dickinson’s source for the language of flowers was more scholarly. She owned Almira H. Lincoln Phelps’ Familiar Lectures on Botany: Explaining the Structure, Classification, and Uses of Plants, with a Flora for Practical Botanists. This book contains a section titled “Symbolical Language of Flowers,” in which Phelps explains that “besides the scientific relations which are to be observed in plants, flowers may also be regarded as emblematical of the affections of the heart and qualities of the intellect.”
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Posted in Emily Dickinson, Exhibitions, Gardening Tips on May 3 2010, by Sonia Uyterhoeven
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Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education. Join her each weekend for home gardening demonstrations on a variety of topics in the Home Gardening Center. |
This spring The New York Botanical Garden is paying tribute to the American poet Emily Dickinson in the exhibition, Emily Dickinson’s Garden: The Poetry of Flowers. Emily Dickinson was an avid gardener and an amateur botanist. She carefully pressed and dried wildflowers and slipped them between the pages of her letters and her poems. She presented flowers with a few lines of verse as a welcoming gift to the occasional visitor.
As poets did in earlier times, Emily Dickinson referred to the symbolic meaning of flowers in her poems. She saw the violet as a sign of humility, the native arbutus as an emblem of candor, and the poppy as a projection of doom.
The language of flowers, which assigns symbolic meanings to flowers and plants, was a craze in 19th-century America. Floral dictionaries flooded the market, ranging from simple indexes to elaborate texts with colorful images.
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Posted in Gardening Tips on April 26 2010, by Sonia Uyterhoeven
Botanical Crafts Series: Create a Victorian-Era Tussie-Mussie
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Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education. Join her each weekend for home gardening demonstrations on a variety of topics in the Home Gardening Center. |
Beginning Friday, this spring we will be paying tribute to the great 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson in the exhibition Emily Dickinson’s Garden: The Poetry of Flowers. Her poetry personified and celebrated the fauna and flora of her life in pastoral Amherst, Massachusetts.
Emily Dickinson was an avid gardener and an amateur botanist. She strolled through the countryside collecting wildflowers, taking them home, and carefully drying and pressing them into the pages of her poetry and correspondence, as well as creating a herbarium of over 400 specimens. When an important visitor was expected, she presented them with floral tokens and a few lines of verse as a welcoming gift.
Dickinson’s study of botany and an appreciation of the crafts associated with it was part of a well-established Victorian tradition for women of the educated classes. Over the next few weeks we will sojourn back into history and explore some Victorian pastimes that are still popular in the craft world today.
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Posted in Gardening Tips on April 12 2010, by Sonia Uyterhoeven
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Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education. Join her each weekend for home gardening demonstrations on a variety of topics in the Home Gardening Center. |
The care of your garden depends on your cultivation practices, how you are using the space, what you are growing (trees, shrubs, perennials, vegetables, annuals), and how intensively you are gardening. It is also influenced by soil conditions and your microclimate.
One of the latest trends in gardening (although not new) is that the soil is a dynamic, living system that needs to be managed, not by pouring harmful chemicals and salts into it, but by supplying it with its nutritional and cultural needs. Healthy soil means healthy plants—plants grown in fertile soil are less prone to pest and disease problems.
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Posted in Gardening Tips, People, Science on April 5 2010, by Sonia Uyterhoeven
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Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education. For hands-on demonstrations and orchid tips, join her in the Conservatory’s GreenSchool every Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m. throughout The Orchid Show. |
One of the joys of working at The New York Botanical Garden is that you are surrounded by experts, enthusiasts, and curious minds. The Garden has a large team of talented research scientist who convene on a regular basis to share their work and interests in an in-house seminar series.
Recently, we were spoiled with the presence of Robbin Moran, Ph.D., Mary Flagler Cary Curator of Botany, who specializes in the study of tropical ferns and lycophytes. But rather than his usual discussions of systematics and pteridophyte matters, he shared with us his recreational reading over the past year: the six books that Charles Darwin wrote after his publication of On the Origin of Species that pertain specifically to the study of botany. Those of you who attended our exhibition Darwin’s Garden: An Evolutionary Adventure in 2008 will remember that the celebrated naturalist was an avid experimenter and committed to the study of botany.
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Posted in Gardening Tips on March 29 2010, by Sonia Uyterhoeven
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Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education. For hands-on demonstrations and orchid tips, join her in the Conservatory’s GreenSchool every Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m. throughout The Orchid Show. |
While we revel in the wonderful fragrance of many orchids, it is important to remember that fragrance plays an essential role in their survival strategy. Just as we may wear perfume to seduce a mate, orchids spice up their lives to attract pollinators—bees, wasps, flies, butterflies, hummingbirds, moths, gnats, and beetles.
Flowers that are pollinated by insects are often brightly colored and fragrant. They are advertising the fact that they offer nectar or other substances for different creatures to feed on. Pollinators pick up the sticky pollen as they feed and transfer it to other flowers.
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Posted in Exhibitions, Gardening Tips, The Orchid Show on March 22 2010, by Sonia Uyterhoeven
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Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education. For hands-on demonstrations and orchid tips, join her in the Conservatory’s GreenSchool every Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m. throughout The Orchid Show. |
Part 3 in a 3-part series
Read Part 1 and Part 2
In the past two weeks I’ve blogged about making a potting mix for orchids, removing the orchids from their pots, and cleaning up the roots. Now let’s actually repot some Cattleyas.
You might have thought you were in charge of the process, but in reality, the plant ultimately dictates how it is repotted. For example, as Fintan O’Sullivan and I were tackling our orchids to repot, we saw that the foliage on one of the plants was badly puckered, a sign of either overwatering or underwatering. When we removed it from its pot, we discovered that most of its roots had rotted (overwatering).
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Posted in Gardening Tips on March 15 2010, by Sonia Uyterhoeven
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Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education. For hands-on demonstrations and orchid tips, join her in the Conservatory’s GreenSchool every Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m. throughout The Orchid Show. |
Part 2 of 3-part series
Read Part 1
Last week I blogged about making just one of the many types of potting mixes for orchids. But more prep work is needed before actual repotting takes place.
My colleague Fintan O’Sullivan (pictured) and I we were repotting orchids in the Nolen Greenhouses for several reasons, among which were length of time since last repotting and because some had outgrown their containers.
Some of the orchids were not very large and certainly were not pot-bound, but when we looked at their labels we discovered that they had not been repotted for several years.
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Posted in Gardening Tips on March 8 2010, by Sonia Uyterhoeven
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Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education. For hands-on demonstrations and orchid tips, join her in the Conservatory’s GreenSchool every Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m. throughout The Orchid Show. |
Part 1 of 3-part series
A few weeks ago, I spent a quiet afternoon at the Nolen Greenhouses with my colleague Fintan O’Sullivan repotting orchids. We started by preparing a free-draining mix for Cattleyas.
A large bag of coarse Douglas fir bark (white fir bark is also used) was spread out on the potting bench. Fintan then filled an empty crate first with horticultural charcoal and then with coarse perlite. The crate served two purposes: measurement (the contents amounted to about one-third to half the quantity of the bark chips) and as a temporary free-draining container.
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