Both Battle Cold, Damp Weather in New York to Perform at Peak

The grounds crew in Yankee Stadium has not been the only team compensating for Mother Nature’s freakishness this month.

Across the Bronx at The New York Botanical Garden, the horticulture team is also doing some fancy footwork due to the weather—manipulating the Japanese-style chrysanthemum “sculptures” in the spectacular exhibition Kiku in the Japanese Autumn Garden.

For this year’s eagerly awaited flower show, cold temperatures and overcast skies have NYBG staff gardeners giving the mums needed extra light and warmth by bringing them back into the greenhouse.

Specific amounts of light and heat are needed to bring the chrysanthemums into flower. Those needs in this, the final year that the Garden is presenting its most elaborate show, are in direct contrast to what was needed in the first two years of the exhibition. Then, warm, late-summer temperatures persisted through October causing staff gardeners to scramble in order to shade and cool the plants to be presentable for the show.

Always anticipating change and preserving flexibility, the gardeners have grown a backup set of Kiku mums, keeping them outside in the chill all the time. This backup mum set can be moved into the show to replace the first set in case warm weather and bright sun send their flowers past peak before the show ends.

Visitors can appreciate this marvelous manipulation of Mother Nature and see the fruits of the horticulture team’s labor now through November 15. Kiku in the Japanese Autumn Garden showcases the spectacular autumn landscapes of Japanese gardens, with scarlet maples and golden bamboos against the backdrop of emerald conifers and, when the sun cooperates, clear blue skies. More chrysanthemums than ever are on display in traditional and contemporary display styles, with bonsai providing another fabulous element to the exhibition. On weekends, participate in guided tours, autumn gardening demonstrations, and taiko drumming performances.

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Susan Fraser is Director of the LuEsther T. Mertz Library.

Paradigm shifts have altered the way knowledge is communicated—from the written word to the printed word and now to the digital word. The proliferation of electronic resources and rapid changes in technology require increased flexibility in how libraries acquire and disseminate knowledge. One remarkable example is the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), a consortium of natural history libraries that are digitizing and making freely available the world’s literature on biodiversity. Collectively, the 12-member consortium holds most of the recorded knowledge of the natural world, over 2 million volumes.

The Botanical Garden is a founding member of the BHL, which began in 2006 and is expanding to include a BHL Europe and partners in China and Australia. It has rapidly become an international sensation.

The project saves immense hours of research time for both information seekers and library staff. The Mertz Library research staff can now refer to the BHL portal to fill interlibrary loan requests or research inquires. Previously, staff would photocopy pages of books or journal articles upon request. Now, if a scientist in South Africa needs to reference The Grasses and Grasslands of South Africa (1918) for instance, she can do so on her own and from her own computer.

By cooperating in this multi-institutional effort, BHL members can perform bulk digitization with limited risk of duplication, lack of standardization, or loss of intellectual integrity while providing a huge amount of biodiversity material online. To date, the Mertz Library has scanned over 6,000 volumes amounting to over 3 million pages. The BHL portal currently contains almost 15,000 titles and 16 million pages, and it continues to grow. read more »