Tai Montanarella is the Manager of School and Family Programs at The New York Botanical Garden.

How do plants in the rain forest survive? This was the question on the minds of Prospect Hill Elementary School students as they explored the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory. It was here at the NYBG that they became first-hand field scientists for a day, embarking on their own botanical expedition through the diverse tropical rooms of our glasshouse.

While they did not have to get on a plane to visit these rain forests, these third graders did have to travel through extreme biomes before they could reach them. This is a museum of plants, after all. Their journey began when they got off the bus, where they were not only greeted by GreenSchool educator Pilar Okeson, but by a fantastic Zelkova tree (Zelkova serrata). Hailing all the way from Japan, this deciduous tree does equally well in the temperate climate of New York City, and can reach 100 feet tall. It was only the first of many exotic plants the children would encounter.
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Suppose you really can’t draw, but always wished you could…especially when it comes to drawing those gorgeous blooms in your backyard. Well now’s your chance to make your wish come true: Botanical Drawing I is just one of the new summer intensive classes offered by NYBG starting in July. Think of it as a summer camp experience designed for grown-ups.

With the botanical drawing class, in just one week you’ll learn specific techniques for drawing accurately, including professional standards of form, measuring, foreshortening, and perspective. The classes are offered in July (9 through 13) or August (6 through 10), at NYBG and the Midtown Manhattan Center, respectively.
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My only run-in with the legacy of Pythagoras lies in a mathematical theorem: A²+B²=C². One of those familiar formulas you’re smacked around with in middle school geometry, something most of us had to suffer. (“Suffer” being relative to whether or not you’re as mathematically stunted as I am.) But in the shadow of this Greek philosopher’s lauded contributions to the number game, what else do we find?

Beans, actually–the same delicious, colorful family of foodie favorites we were talking about only recently. It’s thanks to the obscure (dare we say esoteric?) knowledge of Matthew Wills that we were clued into the rather demented history of the legume.

Bear with me here. I’m not running off on a mad tangent about the piddling dietary habits of a long-dead philosopher. Or maybe I am. It was during Pythagoras’ lifetime as a renowned Greek thinker and teacher that he seeded a bushel of ideas far above and beyond his maths. He also created a religion of sorts. And within the guidelines of that religion, supposed dietary restrictions. I say “supposed” because Pythagoras never wrote anything down himself; it was owed to his followers in succeeding generations that anything the man thought or declared was ever saved for posterity. In and among reflections on the transmigration of the soul and the importance of music, we find the humble bean.
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Joyce H. Newman is the editor of Consumer Reports’ GreenerChoices.org, and has been a docent with The New York Botanical Garden for the past six years.

One of the most wonderful native trees in our area is the Shadbush (Amelanchier arborea), which is sometimes called the Serviceberry, Shadblow or Juneberry tree. It’s an all-season beauty, especially in a natural landscape setting, and just one of the many native plants you can learn about in the upcoming class, Gardening with Native Plants.

The small tree features lovely grey bark and showy flowers, as well as terrific berries for pies and gorgeous fall color. But equally beautiful are the stories and folktales that have been associated with this tree for hundreds of years.

One story is that the first settlers in the New England area often planned funeral services at the same time that the tree bloomed. Its blooming was a sign that the ground had thawed sufficiently to be able to dig graves. So the tree became known as the ‘serviceberry tree.’
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It’s easy to help the planet and explore your greener side with the NYBG‘s programs. There are loads of Saturday and one-day programs offered at the Midtown Education Center in Manhattan and there’s even outdoor Yoga and Tai Chi offered at the Garden in the Bronx.

Browsing the new Spring-Summer Catalog, you can find one-day and half-day Saturday programs on everything from Beekeeping Basics and Vegetable Gardening, to new Earth-Kind® Roses and terrific Urban Tree Pits. You can discover the healing power of plants or the best choices for a city container garden. Plus, there are a wide range of new cooking classes for romantics to consider, among them, The Art of Cooking in the French Garden–For Couples.
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Daniel Atha is an Associate Editor of NYBG‘s systemic botany journal, Brittonia, and a researcher specializing in floristics, taxonomy, and economic botany. He has taught classes in anatomy and systemics at the Garden’s School of Professional Horticulture and is currently working on a project to develop identifying DNA barcodes for plants of the Northeastern United States.

Nothing to Fear, but Fear Itself

Reynoutria japonica Houtt. (Japanese knotweed)

Godzilla-like, swaggering through our communities, Japanese knotweed is choking our waterways, breaking apart foundations, consuming whole houses and costing our cash-strapped economy millions of dollars per year in repair and mitigation. Ranked among the World’s 100 Worst Weeds, it is illegal to propagate the plant in England. It’s banned in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Oregon and is considered a noxious weed in Alabama, California, Vermont and Washington.

What to do? Eat dessert! Yes, that’s right: dessert! Enjoy a beautiful lime-green parfait and do your part to halt Godzilla in her tracks (the plants are mostly females). Here’s how:

You’ll need about a dozen knotweed canes, harvested when they’re only about two feet tall–the thicker the better. Use a sharp knife and cut them off at the soil line. And don’t tell me you can’t find any! The plant occurs in 39 of the 50 states and is especially abundant on the east coast. No one will begrudge you for cutting them down. You can’t even mistake them for anything else. No other plant in North America grows six feet tall from thick, hollow, fleshy stems that are swollen at the nodes, has large, green oval- or heart-shaped leaves and produces numerous sprays of off-white flowers and small, winged fruits late in the season.

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Ed. note: This is a guest post from Andrew Hill, Senior Scientist at Vizzuality, a small company specializing in data, GIS, and the Web. As an organization that is deeply concerned with biodiversity and conservation, the Garden is invested in using technology as a scientific tool, and I feel EcoHackNYC is an event worth sharing with the rest of the New York-area scientific community. If you’re a scientist or researcher, please consider joining this event. — Ann

This weekend, for the second time in under a year, we are throwing an event to bring together scientists, developers, designers, and others to work collaboratively on environmental projects that matter. We call this event EcoHackNYC. It is a free (un)conference where a small group of people present projects, problems, or data they think need to be developed, and then larger groups of enthusiasts and experts work tirelessly to develop solutions (also check out last year’s event here). For us, this is a special event.

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Daniel Atha is an Associate Editor of NYBG‘s systemic botany journal, Brittonia, and a researcher specializing in floristics, taxonomy, and economic botany. He has taught classes in anatomy and systemics at the Garden’s School of Professional Horticulture and is currently working on a project to develop identifying DNA barcodes for plants of the Northeastern United States.

“I knew a man, a common farmer, the father of five sons,
And in them the fathers of sons, and in them the fathers of sons.”

–Walt Whitman, “I Sing the Body Electric,” from Leaves of Grass, 1855

Urtica dioica L. (stinging nettle)

If told there was a substance promising that each of our five sons, and each of their five sons would grow up to be “massive, clean, tan-faced, handsome,” would we approach that substance with caution, treating it with respect and gratitude? Or would we rush out, blindly gathering as much as we could? Well… Mother Nature must have seen us coming because, while she created just such material, she cleverly devised a way to ensure we respect it.

The “substance” of course is stinging nettle. And of all the matter on earth, nettles come closest to providing our every need in one convenient package. Nettles help us grow strong and they keep us healthy and happy for life. Along the way they feed us, clothe us, transport us, soothe our pains and they even make us beautiful. Want more? They give it, body and soul, sacrificing all for the next generation.

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Under the glass of the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory‘s Palm House grows an iconic tree, commonplace to most tourists of the tropics. In the wild, the fruit dangles in lumpy clusters from a familiar silhouette, bending like an elbow toward the sea, a thin pole with a spray of long green leaves at the peak. Visit any beachside farmer’s market in the islands of the Caribbean and you may see the ubiquitous coconut held out in the hands of stall hawkers, a straw stuck through a bored-out husk for passersby to taste.

But beyond the frosty lip of a piña colada glass, the coconut earns a mixed reputation in the culinary circuit. It clutters cake frosting, makes an appearance in the occasional creme pie, lurks in the most innocuous-looking candy bars–yet how many people do you know who go gaga for the pulpy flesh of this tropical mainstay? I defer to a readily available explanation for the widespread dislike: “It’s not the taste, it’s the consistency.” And with that, I will never again have an opportunity to quote Zombieland, much less Woody Harrelson.
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Daniel Atha is an Associate Editor of NYBG’s systemic botany journal, Brittonia, and a researcher specializing in floristics, taxonomy, and economic botany. He has taught classes in anatomy and systemics at the Garden’s School of Professional Horticulture and is currently working on a project to develop identifying DNA barcodes for plants of the Northeastern United States.

Despite their reputation for having less-than-perfect breath, dogs do tend to have shiny white teeth, no matter what they eat. But dogs aren’t able to brush their own teeth to keep them shiny, so the next time you’re helping Rover with his dental hygiene, give them a good look, and then dig up a dog’s tooth violet–a beautiful native wildflower now in bloom–remove the bulb coat and note the perfect semblance to Rover’s canines in vegetal form!

Erythronium americanum Ker. Gawl. (Liliaceae) dog’s-tooth violet

These plants are so beautiful it seems a shame to eat them. But we gleefully eat strawberries, squash blossoms … and lamb for heaven’s sake, so why avoid these delicate, delicious plants? Dog’s tooth violets grow naturally in huge colonies, so rooting around and pulling out a few slender bulbs is actually just thinning–what every bulb fancier does lovingly. Go ahead, dig a few out of your woods and try them. You’ll be glad you did.
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