New Members of NYBG at the Holiday Workshop. Photo by Melanie J. Patterson

2010 was an awesome year here at The New York Botancial Garden. I had the great opportunity to join Members on so many wonderful, enriching trips and programs–a great side-benefit to Membership. We enjoyed guided tours of New York City cultural hot spots, like The Cloisters and the High Line; were given exclusive, behind the scenes tours by NYBG curators of the Conservatory, the Nolen Greenhouses, and the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden.

Longwood Gardens at Christmas. Photo by Nicholas Perdikos, Member since 1992

I asked a few of our photo-savvy Members to share their pictures of a special trip we took down to Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Pa. The Conservatory was beautifully decorated in holiday flair and the water fountain show was tons of fun.

Most recently, at the kids’ holiday workshop, Members and their children created holiday houses in the fashion as those in the Holiday Train Show, using natural ingredients like dried cedar, cinnamon sticks, pine cones, and magnolia leaves.

The water fountain show at Longwood Gardens. Photo by Nicholas Perdikos, Member since 1992

Already scheduled for the New Year, Members will be able to go on guided historical walking tours of New York City, take mansion and garden tours across New York state, and attend the 2011 Philadelphia International Flower Show.

More Member trips and programs are being added all the time. Here’s to a great 2011!

Scott A. Mori, Ph.D., Nathaniel Lord Britton Curator of Botany, has been studying New World rain forests for The New York Botanical Garden for over 35 years. He has witnessed an unrelenting reduction in their extent and, as a result, is concerned about their survival.

Deforestation followed by fires for creating agricultural fields and pasture releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at such an accelerated rate in the tropics that it is a major contributor to global warming. Photo by Scott Mori

There are many different types of vegetation in the New World tropics. But rather than being a homogeneous whole, what grows where and when in these tropics is determined to a large extent by water availability and temperature variation. Climate change could potentially have a drastic impact on this region, especially on the rain forests. Liebig’s Law of the Minimum states that plant or animal growth is controlled by the scarcest resource in the environment; this is known as a limiting factor. For example, if a soil possesses all nutrients needed for plant growth except potassium, then the paucity of that nutrient will limit the potential growth of all plants except those that can grow in potassium-poor soils. Potassium is therefore a limiting factor for that soil.

More on the application of Liebig’s Law to the destruction of Amazonian rainforests below.

For preening, don’t you think?

Red-Tailed Hawk on the roof of the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory (photo by Ann Rafalko)