Jaime Morin is The New York Botanical Garden’s Assistant Curator in horticulture. She works with the plant records and curation teams to help keep the garden’s information on its living collections up to date. She also oversees the details of the garden’s Living Collections Phenology Project.
Magnolia stellata ‘Waterlily’
Late last week I brought a group of new Living Collections Phenology volunteers through the magnolia and oak collections just as the plants began hinting at spring. Of the earliest flowering species, the star magnolias (Magnolia stellata) were beginning to show off their crisp white flowers and the rarer Zen’s magnolia (Magnolia zenii) was in full flower, showing gorgeous pink watercolor streaks at the base of its tepals.
This week the magnolias are really strutting their stuff at The New York Botanical Garden. It is amazing how much things can change over the weekend! By this Monday the many saucer magnolias (Magnolia × soulangeana) in the collection were revealing their newly opened flowers and they continue to get prettier by the day.
Though you can’t go wrong with any of the magnolias here at the Garden, my favorite plant is one of the kobus magnolias (Magnolia kobus). We have a fantastic specimen just north of the Visitor Center that I believe is unparalleled across our 250 acres. This particular plant, accessioned in 1940, is over 35 feet tall and 45 feet wide. Its fragrant white flowers cover its branches like thousands of small white song birds about to take flight.
Kristin Schleiter is the NYBG’s Associate Vice President of Outdoor Gardens and Senior Curator. She oversees the wonderful gardening team that keeps our flowering gardens looking topnotch, curates the herbaceous gardens and collections, and manages the curator of woody plants. She lives and gardens in Fairfield, CT.
At very long last, spring has well and truly come to the Azalea Garden. I can tell because the Korean rhododendron, Rhododendron mucronulatum, is decorating the ridge at the top of the garden near the overlook with its delicious candy colors. My favorite is the earliest-to-bloom ‘Pink Peignoir’ in a shade of cotton candy pink that sings against our often drizzly grey skies and is cheerily visible from a long distance.
Korean rhododendron make marvelous garden plants. They prefer an acid soil (which is what most soil in the tri-state area is naturally) and at least a half a day of good light. They are hardy down to a chilly zone 4. They are deciduous and lose their leaves with a late and lasting foliage show of simmering orange, gold, and scarlet.
Jon L. Peter is the NYBG’s Plant Records Manager. He is responsible for the curation of The Lionel Goldfrank III Computerized Catalog of the Living Collections. He manages nomenclature standards and the plant labels for all exhibitions, gardens, and collections, while coordinating with staff, scientists, students and the public on all garden related plant information.
The Persian parrotia specimen located near the Benenson Ornamental Conifers
I feel very fortunate that I get to enjoy one of my favorite trees in the garden on a daily basis. I actually park my car partially underneath its canopy flanking the Benenson Ornamental Conifers parking lot. With such frequent viewing, I get to enjoy the progress this plant makes throughout the year.
Parrotia persica, commonly known as Persian parrotia or Persian ironwood (in reference to its very dense wood) is an excellent medium-sized tree that is interesting in all four seasons. It features similar leaves, twigs, flowers, and fruits to its close relative the witch-hazel (Hamamelis), but is far less common in cultivation.
Parrotia is named in honor of F.W. Parrot, a German naturalist who traveled in the Caucasus region in the early 1830s. The specific epithet persica derives from the tree’s native habitat of the northern Alborz Mountains of Iran and Azerbaijan (formerly Persia).
Todd Forrest is the NYBG’s Arthur Ross Vice President for Horticulture and Living Collections. He leads all horticulture programs and activities across the Garden’s 250-acre National Historic Landmark landscape, including 50 gardens and plant collections outside and under glass, the old-growth Thain Family Forest, and living exhibitions in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory.
For most people who anxiously await the end of winter, spring begins when the first brassy bulbs emerge from just-thawed soil. Not for me. While I am as enthusiastic about the appearance of snowdrops, crocuses, reticulate irises, and glories-of-the-snow as your average winter-weary garden watcher, what really warms my heart are early spring flowers that don’t make the evening news—those of our native red maples (Acer rubrum).
As March transmogrifies from lion into lamb, I look skyward hoping to catch a glimpse of the flowers of red maple as they peek out of disintegrating winter buds. At a distance, a red maple tree in full bloom is a tangle of gray limbs enveloped in a carmine haze. The individual flowers are quite small, but a mature tree can produce hundreds of thousands of five-flowered clusters, which together create the most ethereal of all spring spectacles.
Francisca Coelho is the NYBG’s Vice President for Glasshouses and Exhibitions. She designs and installs the major flower exhibitions in the Conservatory with a creative, hardworking team of managers and gardeners who also produce the plants for display and maintain the invaluable collections of tropical, sub-tropical and desert plants.
Each morning, I am greeted by the majestic presence of the traveler’s palm (Ravenala madagascariensis) in the Palm Dome of the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory. I planted it myself back in 1996, when the stem was just five feet tall, and I have been watching it mature into this fine specimen ever since—growing taller and stronger daily for the past 18 years. It seems to me that its main goal is to see how quickly its 10-foot-long leaves can touch the glass of the lower dome 60 feet above.
Despite its name, the traveler’s palm is not a palm at all, but instead closely related to the bird of paradise and the banana. Its native home is in the forests of Madagascar, but it can now be found growing in gardens all over the Tropics. It takes the form of an enormous green fan on a tall, robust, grey stem, with its north- and south-pointing leaves providing a makeshift compass for weary travelers. In desperate situations, it also provides much-needed water—not always palatable—that collects in the stem sheaths for those thirsty souls who might happen upon it.
Kristin Schleiter is the NYBG’s Associate Vice President of Outdoor Gardens and Senior Curator. She oversees the wonderful gardening team that keeps our flowering gardens looking topnotch, curates the herbaceous gardens and collections, and manages the curator of woody plants. She lives and gardens in Fairfield, CT.
Every February, I can be found on my knees in the Garden poking and prodding and looking for signs that my beloved snowdrops are coming up to signal the beginning of spring. Pushing aside the snow, I see small green noses forcing their way up for a whiff of warm air. Even a single sunny day can bring forth elegant white blossoms which have a lovely honey scent. The spring’s earliest snowdrops, Galanthus elwesii, are blooming now in the Perennial and Azalea Gardens. Their glaucous blue foliage and large flowers create a much nicer drift of white.
Our spate of presentations from international gardening savants continued in February with British landscape architect Kim Wilkie, who joined us for the second of our annual Winter Lectures. At face value he may seem mild-mannered, but make no mistake: Wilkie loves to play in the mud. He shifts massive amounts of soil to sculpt the landscape in a very literal fashion.
Wilkie began his discussion by explaining how he infuses his contemporary ideas with historical perspectives. One source of inspiration is Mother Nature. He paid tribute to the powerful influence of ice and water, and the role of erosion in shaping the landscape. After this long, punishing winter, most of us will remember ice and water as a combined nuisance, reflecting on the piles of snow that buried our cars and blocked sidewalks. Wilkie, however, had a much more romanticized view of nature, presenting images of graceful contours carved into the land by winding rivers and glacial erosion.
In his quintessentially British Oxbridge manner, Wilkie related the fascinating chronology of both the military and spiritual tradition of moving massive amounts of earth to create man-made fortifications and construct sites for burial, solace, and worship. His slides carried us back in history with a sublime visual tour of this Northern European landscape custom.
Tom Lawson was a massage therapist until he bought a piece of property in the Hamptons.
The land was overgrown and neglected. Tom spent years lovingly redeveloping the landscaping. Then, over time, more and more people said to him, “You need to go do this professionally.”
So he tried. As projects fell into his lap, he realized he needed a language to communicate his ideas. Words weren’t enough.
“Most people don’t have the ability to visualize something that isn’t there,” Tom said.
He needed to learn how to sketch, how to draft. Tom found his way to The New York Botanical Garden Adult Education Program, where he earned Certificates in Horticulture (’12) and Landscape Design (’13), and continues to study.
At the end of January, our 14th Annual Winter Lecture Series kicked off with the first of three presentations as given by Brian Huntley, emeritus professor, renowned conservation scientist, and former CEO of the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI). Huntley was instrumental in shaping South Africa’s most famous garden, Kirstenbosch, from the ’90s and into the ’00s, and was a key figure in post-apartheid conservation across South Africa.
The Cape Floral Kingdom populating Kirstenbosch is incredibly diverse and unique, full of color and contrast. The poster child of South African flora is the protea (Proteaceae). As the country’s national flower, it has since become a huge success in the cut flower trade worldwide, but apart from this iconic South African plant, the country is also famous for its unique collection of geophytes (bulbs of all colors and shapes), irises (Iridaceae), heathers (Ericaceae), and a variety of colorful succulents and grass-like restios (Restionaceae). A few of the internationally-known plants from this region are the ubiquitous geranium (Pelargonium), the Kaffir lily (Clivia), African lily (Agapanthus), and gladiolus (Gladiolus).
I arrived at the lecture expecting to be captivated by the many South African floral treasures discussed by Professor Huntley, but even I couldn’t anticipate such beauty. I further came away with a profound appreciation of the country’s botanical history. Huntley intertwined the famous flora of South Africa with stories of conservation efforts and a history of their premier botanical garden—Kirstenbosch. His leadership was clear as he provided us with a vivid history, mission, and vision of the famed garden.
Last week I began a discussion of some of the drivers and dynamics behind gardening trends, and I continue here with some of the trends that David Culp, author and Vice President of Sales at Sunny Border Nursery in Kensington, Connecticut, covered in a lecture during Plant-O-Rama. We have been following many of these trends for the past several years, and will continue to do so for some time.
While the enthusiasm for vegetable gardening waned slightly in the past year, it has grown in such magnitude over the past few years, and with such glamor and entrepreneurial attitude, that we can hardly call it a slip. Vegetables have always captured the hearts of homeowners due to their overall ease and impressive, family-pleasing results. The boom has been propelled even further by growing awareness and a trend towards fitness, general health, and a cooking fad that’s been boosted by the support of major television networks.
Along the same lines of thought is the “organic revolution.” Wait… haven’t we seen that one before, like in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s…? Let’s face it: we seem to be stuck in a perpetual industrial, chemical, and technological cycle where we proceed to destroy the environment and then recoil, implementing new, safer measures (which are often just old measures rehashed for the modern day). Organics is not only trendy these days, but an important part of branding, a potent money-maker, and hopefully an area where people “put their money where their mouth is.” Credibility over commercialism in this arena is always preferred.
