The Holiday Train Show is just the beginning of the holiday fun at the Botanical Garden.

New this year, a world of buildings from Applied Imagination, the creative force behind the buildings of the Holiday Train Show. In the expanded Artist’s Studio, kids of all ages will have the opportunity to peer inside the inspired artistic process that goes into creating each meticulous miniature, along with the myriad plant-based ingredients that make them up.

In more train-related fun, the classic tale of The Little Engine That Could™ will be told through puppets, and after the New Year, Thomas the Tank Engine™ and friends will be at the Garden to help celebrate the arrival of 2011. (For a full schedule, click here.)

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Can you blame me for the flood of kiku imagery hitting Plant Talk lately? Well, you could, but I’m willing to bet that you understand my motivations on sight alone.

Photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen

So the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory is buzzing. Really buzzing–with the sound of Paul Busse and his team hurrying about, setting the scene for this Saturday’s opening of the Holiday Train Show; the rush of miniature trains barreling along tiny tracks; and, now and then, the familiar noise of appreciation when an NYBG staffer sees a new model for the first time. After over 20 years as one of New York City’s most beloved holiday traditions, this exhibition still makes us a little giddy.

As it so happens, Ivo just walked in with a camera full of Holiday Train Show setup shots, and we see absolutely no sane reason to continue sitting on them–especially when giving you a sneak peek would be much more fun. So without further ado, have a look at some of our favorite miniatures, both classic and new, and see if you can put a name to the facades.
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Remember: it only lasts until Sunday, November 18!

Photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen

Captured under glass in an intimate snapshot of a generations-old artform, this year’s Kiku collection is now up and running in the Bourke-Sullivan Display House, a wing of the Nolen Greenhouses for Living Collections at the NYBG. And as exhibitions go, this one–as always–is a vital testament to the heights of beauty and expertise that horticulture can reach.

Like so many of our exhibitions, Nolen’s master horticulturists have spent months behind the scenes, sculpting and training otherwise commonplace flowers into shapes unlike anything seen in a workaday home garden. Thousands of chrysanthemum blooms across a rainbow of colors now take on the forms of Ogiku, Ozukuri, and Shino-Tsukuri. Now, those names may strike mysterious chords at first, but they’re easy enough to understand–if not recreate–once you spend a little time with our handy, dandy primer.
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Sonia Uyterhoeven is the NYBG‘s Gardener for Public Education.

For centuries, water lilies have been thought of as emblems of purity and beauty. Philosophers marveled at how a stunning, symmetrically perfect flower–sometimes with a sweet, subtle perfume–was capable of arising from such muddy waters. But if the pristine blooms and large, glossy lily pads give the illusion of cleanliness, every gardener who has ever reached down into a pond to deadhead a spent bloom will attest to the fact that underneath the façade of exquisite beauty is a slimy mess.

As we approach the end of our Monet’s Garden exhibition (Sunday, October 21), the water lily display–one of the centerpieces of the show–is still in its full glory. But while this exhibition took its inspiration from Monet’s garden at Giverny, the artist found his love of the flower elsewhere. Monet’s water garden was transformed when he met Joseph Bory Latour-Marliac, the son of a wealthy, landowning French family. After studying law in Paris, Latour-Marliac returned to his home near Bordeaux to help his father manage his property. As an avid botanist, he soon developed a vast network with horticultural societies and botanists throughout the world.
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Nothing drives home the sheer enormity of our latest exhibition, Manolo Valdés: Monumental Sculpture, like seeing it built from the ground up. Over the course of two weeks, dozens of people and at least a few multi-ton machines were on the scene to put the final strokes on a work many, many months in the making. Naturally, we couldn’t pass up capturing some video.

From the first sketch put to paper in Valdés’ Manhattan studio, to the foundry in Madrid, and back across the 4,000 miles separating Spain and New York City, this production has proven nothing short of a massive undertaking. Carrying the collection of sculptures from the docks required a fleet of seven flatbed trucks. Once at the Garden, towering cranes were called in, gingerly rolling onto our lawns to settle each piece into its chosen site. And at 50 feet across and weighing nearly 20 tons, shipping any one of these sculptures as a single piece was out of the question; assembly called for even more precision cranework, with muscle on the ground to ensure everything was arranged to specification.
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We’re suckers for a good surprise (as long as we’re the ones behind it). But it’s a spot more difficult to keep the main event under wraps when it comes to exhibitions this impressive. Manolo Valdés casts a formidable shadow, sparing nothing to create some of the most striking–and colossal–visuals for our upcoming Monumental Sculpture exhibit; for the uninitiated, that’s our next major show here at the NYBG. And this week we jumped headlong into preparation for the September 22 opening.

All told, we couldn’t exactly sneak these sculptures into the Garden. Some of them, such as the Alhambra piece, weigh in at 40,000 pounds with spans reaching nearly 50 lateral feet; they’re not what you’d call statuettes. Arranging these monoliths has proven a spectacle in itself, drawing streams of visitors and employees alike, all snapping away with their cameras as we uncrate and maneuver massive heads and latticework by truck-mounted cranes. It’s a careful and dramatic process that we were able to capture a bit of in the last couple of days.
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Long before Lost Generation icons like Hemingway and Stein held court with Joyce and Fitzgerald, another cadre of artists called Paris home: “Les Mardistes,” named for the Tuesdays (in French: mardi) on which they often met. Imagine stepping into a parlor with Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, W.B. Yeats, Oscar Wilde, and none other than the Impressionist himself, Claude Monet–you get the idea. When it rains, it pours, and late 19th-century France saw a veritable flood of the creative spirit. At the NYBG, we’re hoping you’ll join us in recreating it through The Garden Anthology, and all poets are welcome!

More than an homage to Giverny or an exhibition of Monet’s art, Monet’s Garden is a seasonal celebration of that prolific muse. No static thing, it moved fluidly between the arts, touching the Impressionist painter just as it inspired the Symbolist poets. In the Perennial Garden‘s Poetry Walk, you can see the work of Monet’s lyrical forebears and contemporaries proudly displayed among our summer blooms. Better yet, the Salon Series regales visitors with the words of the French writers–Verlaine, Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Rimbaud–as recited by some of the finest New York poets to have studied them.
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Ed. Note: While Monet’s Garden continues to enamor thousands of visitors to the NYBG through the fall, we’re always preparing for new and intriguing exhibitions. This includes our latest artistic explorations, which will culminate with a long-awaited unveiling in late September: the renowned sculptures of Manolo Valdés. As our Director of Exhibitions and Seasonal Displays, Karen Daubmann offers an advance glimpse into the artist’s creative process.

A few of us were lucky enough to have the opportunity to visit the New York studio of artist Manolo Valdés a few weeks back. We were working on a plan for exhibiting his maquettes in the Orchid Rotunda of the Library Building during the course of his exhibition, Manolo Valdés: Monumental Sculpture. Though the exhibit on the grounds opens on September 22, the maquette display will open on November 3.

Maquettes are small-scale models of artworks which help an artist to develop an idea. You can think of it as a rough draft, or a sort of “sketch” of a sculpture, which helps the artist to visualize and test shapes and ideas without incurring the costs and effort necessary to produce the full-sized piece. You can see from the photos below the variety of ways in which Valdés has explored the butterfly motif in his work.
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