Wilde-Menozzi will lead students throughout Garden grounds, including the Thain Family Forest, Azalea Garden, and the newly opened Native Plant Garden to encourage students to ask questions like, “What are the messages of spring, ‘the cruelest month,’ and yet, what does the message of transformation elicit How can it be put into words?”
Wilde-Menozzi is the author most recently of two books. The first, The Other Side of the Tiber, is a memoir of her many years spent living in Italy. That experience also serves as the backdrop for her second new book, Toscanelli’s Ray, a novel set in Florence.
She shared her thoughts on writing, nature, and a life spent abroad.
Tours will focus on the diversity of plants to be found in the garden and the birds that are already calling it home. Everyone is encouraged to borrow a palette and watercolors and let the Native Plant Garden inspire you or your children to create a masterpiece en plein air. Enjoy folk tunes and bluegrass from the very popular Milton. Shop for native plants and learn from the experts in a series of demos and author book signings.
There’s so much to do in the Native Plant Garden you might be inclined to just stay there and enjoy this beautiful new landscape, but you would be missing out on a wealth of other stunning vistas! Though there are only a few blooms, the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden is once again open for the season, and just above it you will find blooming tree peonies and fragrant stands of lilac. In the Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden, Mario Batali’s Kitchen Gardens have just been planted, and every child is encouraged to plant and play in the rest of the garden beds. In Cherry Valley a few tenacious blooms hold on, while tulips are everywhere in the Perennial Garden, Home Gardening Center, and along Seasonal Walk. In the Herb Garden you will be greeted by a “theater” of adorable and fascinating auricula primroses. The Azalea Garden is just beginning to glow in rosy hues of magenta, shocking pink, and seashell blush. Along Daffodil Hill the daffs are fading a bit, only to be outshone by gorgeous (and fragrant) crabapples. Basically, everywhere you turn there’s another stunning vista!
I love this tree, a crab apple, near the Mosholu Gate entrance, but I am always worried someone will think I have mistyped its name when I post pictures of it. But I assure you, it’s not a typo. I have checked and checked again and this tree’s name really is ‘Burgandy.’
Scott A. Mori is the Nathaniel Lord Britton Curator of Botany at the The New York Botanical Garden. His research interests are the ecology, classification, and conservation of tropical rain forest trees. His most recent book is Tropical Plant Collecting: From the Field to the Internet.
Portrait of C. F. von Martius
Botanist Alex Popovkin was inspired to carry on the tradition of botanical field work–photographing and collecting plants in Brazil–by one magnificent book , Flora Brasiliensis.
The Native Plant Garden‘s transformation over the last two weeks has put up a spectacle, for sure, but when I ran into Ivo yesterday, he only had eyes for these tiny “pantaloons.” And if his love of these Dutchman’s Breeches didn’t get the point across, his bright orange shirt laid his national pride out for anyone within a mile to see.
Dutchman’s Breeches (Dicentra cucullaria) — Photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen
I was out in the woodland area of our soon-to-open Native Plant Garden and found myself overwhelmed by the beauty of all the different species of trillium we have planted there. Trilliums bloom in early spring, taking advantage of the time on the forest floor before the trees grow leaves and cast shade upon them. Trilliums, much as their name might suggest operate in threes: three leaves, three sepals, and three petals. The leaves are arranged in whorls wrapping around the stem from a single point. The result is a graceful zygomatic symmetry. Triullums are undoubtedly one of the most showy and elegant trichotomous woodland native plants.
There are two types of trillium, sessile and pedunculate. The flowers of sessile trilliums rest on the leaves without a flower stalk while pedunculate trillium flowers are elevated by a stalk. Sessile trillium tend to have mottled leaves that are spotted with silver or maroon coloring while pedunculate trillium have green foliage. Trilliums are slow to grow on their knobby rhizomes, but will slowly spread and form a nice clump, though it may take up to seven years before they flower if you plant them from seed. But, the pay-off is that once a clump is established in your garden it will live for decades.
