We’re at 90% and counting! Our road to peak fall color has been a bit of a strange one, as this autumn heat wave has made for a slow changing of the leaves. But in a sense, it’s worked out for the best—we’re essentially seeing the best color of the year just as we head into Saturday, the kick-off of our first Fall Forest Weekend.
Join us all weekend (and next!) for fall activities among the trees, like live bird of prey demonstrations from expert raptor handlers, the woodcrafting artistry of Ivan Braun, and tree-climbing demos from our arborists. Or just enjoy the incredible sight of the forest, wandering its trails under a canopy of reds, oranges, and yellows.
This is one of the most incredible times of year to see the Garden in all its autumn finery, but the warm colors of the trees won’t last forever. Head below for the full schedule of events.
We’re just beginning our Million Daffodil initiative this week! With the use of a specialized machine that allows to plant up to thousands of bulbs per hour, we’re well on our way to reaching our goal of planting 150,000 in November. And that’s just for this fall—over the next few years, we’ll continue to plant daffodils on and around Daffodil Hill until we’ve reached a total of one million!
Learn more about the initiative and how you can help here.
Planting daffodil bulbs on Daffodil Hill – Photos by Ivo M. Vermeulen
FRIDA KAHLO: Art, Garden, Lifeconcludes this weekend–if you have yet to catch the blockbuster exhibition, hurry and grab your tickets before it’s too late! And what better way to celebrate the great artist then by honoring her heritage with grand Day of the Dead (Día de los Muertos) festivities? Live performances from The Villalobos Brothers and Los Chinelos de Morelos can be seen on the Conservatory Lawn. The stilt-walkers of Los Zancudos de Zaachila, presented by Laura Anderson Barbata, will be roaming the grounds, surprising and delighting all. Inside the Conservatory, see a beautiful ofrenda, or altar, paying homage to Kahlo. Fun activities can be found throughout the grounds, such as face painting and a mask-making workshop!
And let’s not forget, it is Halloween weekend—come see North America’s largest pumpkin alongside other prize-winning gourds. Marvel at the intricate giant pumpkin carving of Ray Villafane and his team—based on a satirical illustration by Jose Guadalupe Posada in the 20th century.
This is the weekend to come if you haven’t seen Frida. And if you have, come again and celebrate the Dead of the Dead with us!
Our Day of the Dead (Día de los Muertos) festivities continue all this weekend with live music, food, dance, face painting, and all the colorful trappings of this important—and fun!—holiday. This is the closing weekend of our FRIDA KAHLO exhibition, so don’t sit home!
Face Painting in the Perennial Garden – Photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen
Bronx community activist Karen Washington remembers when there were so many vacant lots in the Bronx that the borough looked like “a war zone.”
Karen Washington smiles in The Garden of Happiness in the Bronx.
Over the years, some were turned into community gardens, primarily in an effort to beautify and reclaim neighborhoods devastated by New York’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s. Over time, the dedicated volunteers who created these urban oases realized they could provide so much more than simple beauty. Community gardens became centers for community organization, expressions of cultural identity, and sources of fresh fruit and vegetables for a population in dire need of healthy food.
Washington recently sat down with us to tell us about her experiences working to keep urban gardening alive and well in the Bronx, a mission she’s been on since 1985.
A NYBG Board member and founding member of NYBG’s Bronx Green-Up program, Washington has helped dozens of neighborhoods build their own community gardens. She joins a panel of other urban agriculture experts in our Growing the Urban Farm Symposium on November 18.
Crowd-sourcing is a term that has been popularized in recent years. One example of crowd-sourcing is the Purposeful Gaming and BHL project funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Studies (IMLS) in 2013. The Mertz Library at NYBG is one of the partners on this grant project along with Missouri Botanical Garden (the lead institution), Cornell University, and the Ernst Mayr Library of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. The crowd-sourcing component of the project involves devising ways to recruit the world-wide public to improve the accuracy of transcriptions of digitized material in BHL. Another component of the project is the digitization of previously unavailable seed and nursery catalogs from the collections of the libraries at NYBG and Cornell University.
We’re at 90% and counting! Our road to peak fall color has been a bit of a strange one, as this autumn heat wave has made for a slow changing of the leaves. But in a sense, it’s worked out for the best—we’re essentially seeing the best color of the year just as we head into Saturday, the kick-off of our first Fall Forest Weekend.
