From time to time I teach flower arranging. It gives me the opportunity to play with color and exercise my artistic side. It is also rewarding to teach Garden visitors simple tips and techniques for producing colorful displays for their homes. With Monet’s Garden in full swing, I decided last weekend to focus on French floral arrangements.
I wasn’t terribly successful in uncovering the art of French floral design. It seemed like it’s become trendy to designate a floral design as being French, and I have had a hard time deciphering between those who were simply jumping on a marketing bandwagon and the true Francophiles.
I did discover a few sources that discussed the art of French floral design, however, and their bouquets and centerpieces were breathtaking. They were too elaborate for me to recreate, but they provided me with some principles that I could replicate in my simpler renditions.
As a former Broadway performer, professional garden photographer, and writer, Ellen Zachos is a very talented NYBG instructor whose container gardening class comes alive with gorgeous slides and dynamic presentations.
Ellen’s career as a gardener began when she got her very first plant–rather than a bouquet–as an opening-night gift, after performing in a Florida dinner theater production of Fiddler on the Roof.
“It was a Spathyphyllum, an ordinary peace lily,” she says, “but to me it was wonderful. I was intrigued, and I had never grown anything. My desire for knowledge just took over. My apartment filled with houseplants and books.”
She went on to study Commercial Horticulture and Ethnobotany at NYBG. After receiving her certifications, she authored several gardening books and founded Acme Plant Stuff in 1997, a company that designs, installs, and maintains both interior and exterior gardens.
Liz Neves is an herbalist, permaculturist, and compost turner living in Brooklyn, NY.
While both rose and lavender are revered for their beauty and aroma, they also have the ability to prove profoundly healing for the body in a variety of applications. Much of this is due to their appealing sights and scents, but there is much more than meets the eye–and nose–when it comes to lavender and rose.
“If you wish,” wrote the 16th century Azerbaijani poet Fuzuli, “you can find a cure for all of your problems in the rose garden, in curative rose water in the pot of the bud.” In hindsight, he was onto something.
Sonia Uyterhoeven is the NYBG‘s Gardener for Public Education.
Today I would like to tackle a few problems that we commonly encounter in the vegetable garden. How do we maximize space? How do we prevent the feast or famine cycle where we either have nothing to show for our labor, or too much? If you are working with limited space, as most of us are, organizing your vegetable garden in such a way that you maximize productivity and get the right bang for your buck is important. There are several strategies that can help you plan your garden creatively and effectively.
The first thing we need to do is to take a look at how our vegetables grow. Are we planting a vegetable that will, once it reaches the age of maturity, produce consistently throughout the season? Tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers fall into this category. You will just need to add a few of these vegetables into your garden to get a steady supply throughout the summer. Or are we planting crops that either grow quickly or produce one large harvest? I am thinking now of head lettuce, beets, radishes, carrots and turnips.
When I think of companion planting, color, creativity, combinations and good garden fun come to mind. The premise behind companion planting is that some plants give off substances in their leaves and roots that affect other plants. It is true that plants have unique and complex chemical properties that help them fend off attack from pests and diseases.
It makes sense to extrapolate that they are capable of influencing other plants that are grown in their vicinity. Some people swear by the principle of companion planting and others eschew the concept. This blog is for those who embrace it or for those who simply like beautiful vegetable gardens.
Sonia Uyterhoeven is the NYBG‘s Gardener for Public Education.
Monet’s garden was a living canvas. In this space he experimented with his love of color and form. His knowledge of color theory and his artist’s eye informed the choices he made in his garden design. In turn, they offer good suggestions for the homeowner who is about to embark on their own planting project.
Last week we mentioned how one of Monet’s prominent concerns was capturing light and atmosphere. His garden was no different from the scenes he painted on his canvas. The color sequences that he created in his garden echoed changes in light and weather that he observed in the space. He used his artist’s eye to accentuate these changes and enhance the atmospheric quality of the place.
There are many scientific textbooks around that will tell you all you ever cared to know about soil analysis, plant physiology, and propagation techniques. These tomes all have their place if you have the endurance to plow through them chapter by chapter.
If we are to conjecture what an antipodean approach would look like, then perhaps gardening to lunar cycles would fall at the opposite end of the spectrum from scientific research. The reality of the situation is that information, from whatever quadrants of learning it stems from, is just information–it all tends to intersect at some level. I find all types of knowledge useful. Ultimately, it is about cultivating your own gardening philosophy.
I walked by a restaurant in my neighborhood and realized it was closing down. Large industrial-sized pots, pans, and trays were piled up on display in the window to be sold off for a bargain the next morning. My eye caught a colander in the midst. I stared longingly at the colander and sighed, knowing that I wouldn’t be around when the doors opened for the sale.
I love collecting good, sturdy cookware for my own kitchen, but my motives that night were different. The large colander would have made a perfect planting container–perhaps as a hanging basket or a round, squat container that would have added an elegant touch to an intimate terrace garden. Unlike the small ones that I buy at retail stores for draining my pasta, this industrial colander was about 16 to 18 inches in diameter. It was crying out for a collection of herbs, sedums, hens and chicks, strawberries or colorful cascading annuals. It even could have become a home to mesclun mix.
If you haven’t already gone out to buy your seeds for your vegetable garden, now is the time to do it. I have been reading Steve Sando’s ‘The Rancho Gordo Heirloom Bean Guide’ and would like to talk today about an overlooked topic: heirloom beans.
Some of you may sigh and think, “Oh, beans! Why doesn’t she talk about heirloom tomatoes or peppers?” But beans are one of the easiest things to grow in the vegetable garden; as legumes they are nitrogen fixers, so they don’t deplete the soil of nutrients, and they come in a delicious variety of mouthwatering flavors when you grow them from seed (I’m not kidding). Some are nutty, some are buttery, some are starchy, some are creamy and some are meaty.
Your vanity garden is scarcely the first place you look for salad toppings. Instead, most turn to the leafy standbys–lettuce, cabbage, kale, spinach. Throw in a few slices of zucchini or a handful of cherry tomatoes, maybe sprinkle the bowl with a few herbs to push the salad toward “exotic.” But what if I told you that eating the florid, elegant blooms that might otherwise end up in a vase is as natural as dousing your Caesar with dressing?
I’m not saying you should go right out and make a trial-and-error buffet of your window planter. There are only certain flowers that you would have any desire to eat, as many are poisonous or taste beyond awful. And that’s all the disclaimer I can give: don’t eat anything unless it is properly identified.
From time to time I teach flower arranging. It gives me the opportunity to play with color and exercise my artistic side. It is also rewarding to teach Garden visitors simple tips and techniques for producing colorful displays for their homes. With Monet’s Garden in full swing, I decided last weekend to focus on French floral arrangements.
