How often do your kids get a free pass to play in the dirt? It’s probably not a daily event. But beginning Wednesday, May 2, the NYBG kicks off children’s gardening programs at the Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden that won’t leave you scrubbing muddy footprints off the kitchen floor.

Garden Sprouts introduces three- to five-year-olds and their accompanying parent to garden exploration, from digging for earthworms to planting seeds. Sprouts enjoy seasonal gardening tasks, the opportunity to sample garden-fresh produce grown in their own plots, and activities especially crafted for the young green thumb. It’s a fun and productive way to get them out of the house.
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There are many scientific textbooks around that will tell you all you ever cared to know about soil analysis, plant physiology, and propagation techniques. These tomes all have their place if you have the endurance to plow through them chapter by chapter.

If we are to conjecture what an antipodean approach would look like, then perhaps gardening to lunar cycles would fall at the opposite end of the spectrum from scientific research. The reality of the situation is that information, from whatever quadrants of learning it stems from, is just information–it all tends to intersect at some level. I find all types of knowledge useful. Ultimately, it is about cultivating your own gardening philosophy.
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Matthew Pace, an expert with the NYBG through 2011, is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in botany at the University of Wisconsin.

The next time you’re outdoors, take a moment and look around. What plants do you see growing nearby? Have those species always been there? Might there be plants that once grew in that area but are no longer found there? How can we help to protect the plants that we find in a given area? These are questions that many botanists and horticulturalists think about and strive to understand every day. They are central to the issues of conservation and restoration–issues which are also central to the mission of The New York Botanical Garden.

A real-world example of these issues is the case of Anemone quinquefolia and the NYBG. Based on founder Nathaniel Lord Britton’s first list of species originally found on NYBG grounds; field work in the Forest; and herbarium work I had conducted (looking through hundreds of dried plant specimens of species found in the NYC metro-area), I thought Anemone quinquefolia was just one of the 100+ native plant species which have been extirpated since the founding of the Garden (“extirpated” is a word which describes species which were once found in a location, but are no longer found there, a.k.a. local extinction). The last herbarium collections of Anemone quinquefolia were from 1898. Little did I know that I was in for the surprise of the year!
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