The New York Botanical Garden’s Plant Information Specialists and the Home Gardening Center share a wealth of experience, enlightening visitors with their knowledge of indoor and outdoor plants, ornamentals, vegetable gardening, identification, and growing requirements–to name but a few of their specialties.

It was nearly 60 degrees here at The New York Botanical Garden yesterday, a misplaced spring day that brought with it a number of questions from our Twitter followers concerned for the future of their plants. As Sonia Uyterhoeven outlined only a few weeks ago, this strange back-and-forth with warm and cold temperatures has been wreaking havoc on the plants’ growth cycles, confusing some of them into blooming early and leaving gardeners wondering if they’ll have anything to show come spring.

For spring-blooming flowers, the bad news is that it’s a “one and done” agreement–if high temperatures now push these plants into their spring phase early, there will be no second bloom post-winter. The good news is that if we have long stretches of weather in the high 30s and low 40s, those growths that are blooming early will last for a very, very long time. At this point the long-range forecast is still looking promising. But look at your average meteorologist’s win ratio and you’ll take predictions with a grain of salt.
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January 19, 2012; Chile, unnamed sound on north-central coast of Isla Hoste, approximately 55º00′S, 69º12′W

As the sky slowly darkened last night, we passed site after site that we all thought looked like great collecting localities. Today we begin finding out.

Isla Hoste

For our first collecting site, we have headed as far east as we will go on this leg of the trip. We are anchored in one of the innumerable, unnamed sounds that dot this area, on the north-central coast of Isla Hoste. Between Isla Hoste and Isla Gordon lies the Beagle Channel (named for Charles Darwin’s ship, the HMS Beagle), and we are planning to bounce back and forth across the southwest arm of the Channel.

The first collecting site showing the Don José Miguel at anchor

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Not long ago we introduced you to a new Plant Talk series we’re calling “Past in Focus,” in which we unearth historical photographs from the LuEsther T. Mertz Library archives and attempt to recapture the scenes as they appear today. A century-old landscape undergoes any number of changes at the hands of time, weather, and ambition, leaving us drawn in by details large and small that remain untouched. You can look at these photographs and–even if only just–make out the origins of the design beneath the carefully-tended aesthetic.

In 1916, the tract surrounding the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden was a plane of graded soil following an idea on paper:

Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden -- November 16, 1916

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Also known as the Indian clock vine, brick and butter, and the lady’s slipper vine. I suppose the moniker is up to the imagination of the viewer.

Thunbergia mysorensis — Photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen