Plants supply most of the world’s food, fuel, shelter and medicine, and plant specimens help us answer the most critical questions facing our planet. How many species are there and how are they related? What environmental factors control their growth? And how do plants respond to climate change? Now you can help scientists to better understand our planet by transcribing plant specimen labels in our newly released crowd sourcing effort, hosted by the Atlas of Living Australia.
Food fans! (That’s all of you, I imagine.) On site this Wednesday, the Garden offers even more than just-picked fruits and vegetables thanks to our friends at Whole Foods Market. If a $50 gift card in your pocket and a little summer grilling know-how sound like your cup of tea, we’ve got you covered and then some!
From 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, June 26, Whole Foods Market Culinary Demonstration Specialists will set up at the Reflecting Pool for tastings and cooking demos featuring the season’s freshest picks at The Peak Pick. This week’s spotlight lands on summer squash, which we expect to see stacked high during the Greenmarket, now here each Wednesday. Better yet, our visiting specialists will be making light, irresistible grilled squash and brie sandwiches with them, tailor-made for backyard cook outs and Sunday brunch.
As the icing on the cake (or the sprouts on the sandwich), there’s a $50 Whole Foods gift card up for grabs if you’re a Twitter user! Just snap a picture of the cooking demonstration in action while you’re visiting, tweet it @nybg with the hashtag #nybgwfm, and you’ll be entered to win! As soon as our one lucky winner is selected, we’ll be in touch via Twitter to get you your prize.
While you’re here, be sure to stop by the Greenmarket to pick up your week’s supply of fresh, delicious, and varied local products—not to mention baked goods. For a little more on what the Greenmarket‘s about (and what you’re missing if you skip it), watch the video below.
This past weekend, we were out in the Louise Loeb Vegetable Garden in the Home Gardening Center covering vegetable gardening basics. Knowing how to plant and grow vegetables is one thing, but the love and the labor means nothing if you don’t know what to do with the harvest. Bearing that in mind, I made the visitors a simple tomato and bread salad that was loaded with fresh herbs. Traditionally it is an old Tuscan recipe made from left-over (read: stale) bread. It is a quick and easy recipe that adds life to everyday meals.
The ingredients for the recipe toss together the most basic herbs and vegetables from the home garden:
– 4 ripe tomatoes cut into ½-inch cubes
– 3 small Persian cucumbers cut into ½-inch cubes (or one small regular cucumber, deseeded)
– Handful of basil (approx. 2 tablespoons)
– Handful of parsley (approx. 2 tablespoons)
– Small handful of oregano (approx. 1 tablespoon)
– 4 scallions chopped into small pieces
– 1-2 garlic cloves minced (optional)
– 2 tablespoons red wine vinegar (optional: tear a few basil leaves and soak them in vinegar for a few hours overnight to give the vinegar more flavor)
– ¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
– 2 cups few-days-old Italian or French bread cut into small cubes (optional: toast the bread lightly in the oven)
– Salt and pepper to taste
We’re glad summer waited until its allotted solstice to get here, but wow, did it ever arrive. It’s warm out this week, and the flowers are basking accordingly!
Aimé Bonpland, the author of the scientific name of the Brazil nut.
In our continuing discussion on botanical taxonomy, we now delve into the discovery of the Brazil nut and explain where it fits into the plant kingdom. But don’t be mistaken—when I say “discovery,” I am referring to the scientific naming and classification of the species rather than the first physical discovery of the plant by humans. Nearly all economic plants were discovered and given common names long before scientists became aware of them.
As part of their travels to the New World (between 1799 and 1804), the German scientist Alexandre von Humboldt and the French botanist Aimé Bonpland traversed the Rio Orinoco, making natural history collections and observations along the way. At one point, they subsisted for three entire months on rancid chocolate and plain rice alone. Fortunately, these explorers came upon Brazil nut collectors, allowing them to feast on great quantities of Brazil nut seeds. They were also impressed by the magnificent tree itself, and so interested in obtaining its flowers that Humboldt offered an ounce of gold to any one of the collectors who could find and retrieve them—an impossible task, as fruiting Brazil nut trees were not in flower.
Nevertheless, the expedition made collections of the leaves and fruits, and Bonpland described the species as Bertholletia excelsa Bonpl. Although the authorship of this species is sometimes attributed to both Humboldt and Bonpland, it is clear that the latter is the author of the scientific description and name for this species. Bonpland dedicated the genus to Claude Louis Berthollet, a chemist who, along with Antoine Lavoisier, developed a system of modern chemical nomenclature.
Nifty Wild Medicine factoid: it’s been found that residents of the islands east of Panama, who drink a lightly-processed cocoa beverage up to five times a day, are almost entirely free of hypertension. Researchers lean toward the chocolate as a prime suspect in this discovery, though I’m guessing most of us don’t need a peer-reviewed report to justify buying ourselves a treat now and then. Just remember to go for the real thing—at least 70% cacao!
Check out our cacao-focused table in the Conservatory when you visit, and be sure to keep an eye out for the pods growing in our cacao trees.
As Rusby and his expedition move deeper into Peru and Bolivia, the daily trials of traveling abroad mingle with fleeting moments for discovery along the way. Rusby’s fascination for all things scientific leads him to the Arequipa Hospital, where he examines ulcer patients, before taking the railroad into the mountains toward Juliaca. In between snatching up passing flowers from a train railing, struggling with altitude sickness, and sleeping through a near-death experience on the steamship, he finds time to identify the local flora, along with fruits and vegetables in city markets.
OFFICIAL DIARY of the MULFORD BIOLOGICAL EXPLORATION OF THE AMAZON BASIN
H. H. RUSBY, DIRECTOR
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 22, 1921
I made a number of purchases of things which will be needed on our expedition. I went to the market and purchased a number of samples of vegetable products and also three pairs of fully dressed figures of Quichua indians, each accompanied, the age of the later varying from infancy to eight or nine years. In the afternoon I secured an automobile and went down to Tiavaya, where the market gardens were located, charging this expense to the Botanical Garden. Here I found growing the fruiting plants of a pepino, having oblong fruits, wholly of a deep purple color like the eggplant. I also found and obtained specimens of a species of Tasconia, which yields an edible fruit sold in the market under the name of “Tumbo“; of a plant yielding another edible fruit, sold in the market under the name of “Acchocta”; of the rhacache, a delicious turnip-shaped root belonging to the parsley family, a species of Arracacia, and some unripe fruits of the Lucuma. In the evening I attended the motion picture exhibit, which was so silly that I left before it was over.
The William and Linda Steere Herbarium at The New York Botanical Garden houses over 7 million plant specimens gathered from around the world over the course of 250 years.
