Happy Friday! Once again it is time for our weekly roundup of weekend programs and activities at the Garden. June 6 & 7 is Rose Garden Weekend!
This popular highlight of the season’s Spring Weekend offerings at NYBG is when we invite you all to enjoy the seasonal beauty of the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden‘s nearly 700 rose cultivars! According to Rose Watch, they are now at 75% of peak color, and and rapidly climbing toward full bloom. Admire the vibrant blooming season with live music, refreshments, and expert-led tours and talks—a beautiful experience for everyone from casual rose admirers to experienced rosarians. You can even take part in a rose gardening demonstration.
Read on for full details about this weekend’s programming in the Rose Garden and beyond! Plus delicious cooking demonstrations and activities for kids.
NYBG is pleased to continue its partnership with Whole Foods Market for another season of fresh, nutritious, and delicious family food activities. Through September, hundreds of local families and school children will visit the Whole Foods Market Family Kitchen in the Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden for daily hands-on cooking and tasting events hosted by NYBG Staff. Whole Foods Market will also host seasonal demonstrations and tastings by the Reflective Pool on the last Wednesday of June, July, August, and September from 1 to 3 p.m., coinciding with NYBG’s fan-favorite Greenmarket.
The Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden—and its groundbreaking programming—is at the heart of the Edible Academy and the future site of a new, state-of-the-art building that will serve as the hub for edible education at NYBG. Together, the Edible Academy and the Family Garden bring plenty of fun for adults and kids alike, with cooking demonstrations in the Whole Foods Market Family Garden Kitchen and daily, hands-on gardening activities. Bring the family to the Garden this summer for wholesome and yummy learning experience!
Ecological restoration, or “the process of assisting in the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged, or destroyed” (SER, 2004), is what the Forest staff, interns, and volunteers do in the Thain Family Forest every day to reduce invasive plants and increase native plant regeneration in managed areas through planting.
We start with an inventory that samples nearly 250 plots that are 10 meters by 10 meters squared. The sampling involves measuring all trees and shrubs, living or dead, with one centimeter or greater diameter at breast height (DBH) and collecting percent cover information for all herbaceous plants, woody plant seedlings and saplings, and non-living components such as leaf litter, coarse woody debris, and bare soil. This inventory is repeated every five years and provides a picture of forest change overtime that allows us to prioritize management and guide the restoration process: inventory, establish priorities, manage invasive species, restore native species, and repeat. The Forest staff last carried out an inventory in 2011 and will be repeating this process in the summer of 2016.
Roses come in all shapes, sizes, and colors—some quite different from what you would expect! Follow their progress on Rose Watch as these beautiful flowers approach the peak of their seasonal color.
Left to right: Jensen Wheeler Wolfe, Bob Grese, Carey Lundin, and Darrel Morrison shared their insights on the legacy of Jens Jensen and his revolutionary urban landscape designs.
“We all need the living green or we’ll shrivel up inside. To make the modern city livable is the task of our times.”
– Jens Jensen
On Earth Day, Wednesday, April 22, The Humanities Institute hosted New York City’s only screening of the award-winning documentary, Jens Jensen The Living Green. Followed by a panel featuring the film’s director and scholars in ecological landscape design, the event attracted more than 200 people in an exploration of the work of Jens Jensen (1860–1951) and its relevance to today’s urban environmental issues. Jensen was a passionate environmental activist and now, 50 years after his death, he is hailed as a pioneer of sustainable design, an early champion of native species, and a visionary landscape designer.
Patricia Gonzalez is an NYBG Visitor Services Attendant and avid wildlife photographer.
I shot this photo in the wetlands of the Native Plant Garden on April 12 of this year. It’s great that these wetlands are attracting all manner of wildlife, including this mallard drake.
Shortly before the Native Plant Garden opened to the public, my department was given a tour. That’s where we learned that when mallards and other ducks fly into the water for a swim, they also carry in fish eggs that have stuck to their feet during visits to other bodies of water. How cool is that? The fish eggs hatch and populate the new location, and the circle of life continues.
Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) – Photo by Patricia Gonzalez
NYBG Landscape Design student Danielle Faustini is on a crazy mission.
Last week, she started working at a Manhattan landscape design firm, while completing freelance projects and wrapping up her education in The New York Botanical Garden’s Certificate Program in anticipation of graduation on June 7.
Faustini’s education started in last summer’s Landscape Design Summer Intensive, an expedited five-week program that covers half of all required classroom hours toward a prestigious NYBG Certificate. In one year, she finished the required 350 hours, while working full-time as a server in a restaurant and doing freelance design work on the side—hence the crazy.
“Life is short, you know?” Faustini said. “I told myself I would complete the Certificate Program within a year. It definitely wasn’t easy, but you set your mind to something, and you do it.”
Landscape Design students, Danielle Faustini and George Siriotis
Faustini and her Summer Intensive classmate George Siriotis, who also completed the Certificate Program in a year, saw the Intensive as an opportunity to jump into a new career with the support of like-minded, ambitious peers and industry-professional instructors.
This week may be off to a rainy start, but the weekend promises to be full of beauty at our popular Rose Garden Weekend!
The Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden is already approaching peak color, as more and more of our nearly 700 rose cultivars display their the seasonal reds, whites, yellows, and pinks.
On June 6 and 7, you are invited to stroll through the colorful and fragrant rose bushes while enjoying live music, plant care demonstrations and tours with expert rosarians, and light summer refreshments in the shade of the garden’s overlooks.
Happy Friday! Once again it is time for our weekly roundup of weekend programs and activities at the Garden. June 6 & 7 is Rose Garden Weekend!
