This season’s Holiday Train Show® is on view through January 18, but Evergreen Express continues to provide seasonal family fun in the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden through January 24. Kids pass through station stops during their visit, each featuring a unique and educational activity designed to explore the world of evergreens.
In the cozy Discovery Center Depot, children make their own herbarium pressings of a conifer specimen and craft a miniature scented sachet to take home. The Adventure Garden is full of trails that guide children through the trees and shrubs of winter.
There is an outdoor puppet theater available for children, and on weekends and school holidays, kids can create a train puppet inspired by master puppeteer Ralph Lee and join a musical marching parade.
Evergreen Express takes place Tuesdays through Sundays in the Adventure Garden, from 1:30 to 5:30 p.m. on weekdays and Sundays, and from 1:30 to 6:30 p.m. on Saturday.
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All Aboard with Thomas & Friends™ mini-performances continue through January 24 as well, so plan a family excursion to NYBG in the next couple of weeks for winter fun!
To the delight of all visitors, two giant caterpillar topiaries—dubbed Frida and Diego—have recently been designed and planted by NYBG gardeners, Diana Babbitt and Katie Bronson, in the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden.
“We thought it would be fun to try to make a Frida caterpillar,” explains Katie. “So we looked at a lot of her pictures where she is wearing flower headdresses and we tried to make one of those.”
Frida is filled with deep purple-red coleus punctuated by bright pink Zinnia elegans that contrasts with nearly black Salviadiscolor on her body. Her raised head is softened by green ‘Round Leaf’ Hedera, and her eyes look straight ahead, portrait-style, under those famous bushy eyebrows.
Every week during the school year, more than 1,200 young children participate in specially designed school programs developed and taught at the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden (ECAG). And that number swells to about 1,600 during New York City’s school testing weeks in April when more students stream into ECAG’s gardens and facilities because upper grades are taking tests.
“During the spring we see a big uptick in the number of school field trips. Our facility can serve over 2,000 students per week, allowing us to deliver programming to more children than any other children’s venue within NYBG,” says Fran Agnone, Coordinator of the Adventure Garden.
The Mitsubishi Wetland Trail is one of a handful of places on grounds that is getting a head start on displaying its fall colors. Check our Fall Foliage Tracker to catch when peak color will arrive at NYBG!
Spring at the Garden is full of festivals! Beautiful scenery, delicious refreshments, and activities for all ages are the perfect way to spend a spring weekend. From daffodil season to tulip season and beyond, we have plenty of activities over the next three months to help make the most of the grounds as their brilliant colors return.
Our popular Culinary Kids Food Festival returns April 14 with a week-long, family-friendly food festival celebrating the relationships among plants, farms, and your favorite treats. Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden staff and the culinary team, Growing Chefs, will offer cooking demonstrations, recipes, and hands-on activities—with plenty of music and food tastings to add to the fun. Kids can fill up their Festival passports as they tinker with the science of kitchen chemistry and get to the root of foods at a variety of activity stations with themes like “The Chicken and the Egg” and “The Buzz on Bees Sweet Bees!” The daily 1 p.m. cooking demonstration will feature kid-friendly recipes and tasty samples, while local chefs will share tips and more.
But that is only the first in a full season of outdoor adventure. Read on for May and June’s exciting upcoming festivals!
While our Orchid Show, taking place under the glass of the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, is something of a giant floral terrarium in itself, the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden is currently home to a much more bite-sized variety thanks to Little Landscapes. This sibling program to our yearly orchid extravaganza offers your little ones a chance to get out of the March chill, settle into some activities in our Discovery Center, and come away with miniature terrariums of their own to take home and care for.
Anyway, how often do they get to create their own biomes? (And a messy room capable of supporting a thriving fungal diversity doesn’t count.)
The tree cookie is back! Though you’d be forgiven for having no idea what I’m talking about. As a matter of fact, very few of us around the office have seen this section of sequoia up close and personal—at least until now. But with the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden rolling out this classic display after such a long absence, I figure it makes sense to reintroduce everyone.
The history is the simple bit. We start with a brief definition: Tree Cookie — noun — A horizontal round cut from a tree trunk. It’s the cross-section that allows arborists and botanists to pin down the exact age of a tree by counting off the concentric rings in the wood. It also provides clues to the life of the tree based on the density of the rings, anomalies in shapes and patterns within the wood, and other unique signifiers pointing to a healthy or harried history. For reference, we’ve got over 1,600 rings worth of trunk data to parse in this one tree cookie alone. That places the tree’s start at around the year 223!
This season’s Holiday Train Show® is on view through January 18, but Evergreen Express continues to provide seasonal family fun in the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden through January 24. Kids pass through station stops during their visit, each featuring a unique and educational activity designed to explore the world of evergreens.
