Amy Weiss works in The New York Botanical Garden’s Herbarium, cataloging and preserving plant specimens from around the world.

Part of my job in the Herbarium of the NYBG is processing plant collections researchers have stored over the years. In general, we only mount plants that have been identified to species. That process can be quick if there is currently a specialist–we send the person a duplicate of a plant collection, and they send us the plant’s name once it has been identified. However, identifying plants to specific species can take much longer if there is no one currently specializing in a certain family or genus.

Herbaria are important because they are the depositories of such historical collections, and with our care they will still be around when a specialist is available. Once identified, we mount the plant specimen for New York, and distribute any duplicates to other herbaria around the world. The collections gathered by NYBG scientists that are still waiting for identification reside in our cold room in the meantime, where they will occasionally remain for decades before the right specialist becomes available.
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Monotropa uniflora. The scientific name isn’t particularly menacing; it suggests the singular–mono-, uni-. But on a register of local vegetation, you’d likely overlook it. It’s a passing Latin designation in a sea of other plants, many of them named after scientists. And this remains the case up until you get to know this pale, vampiric oddity of the plant kingdom.

A friend (one altogether disinterested in botany, strangely enough) happened to post an image and a scientific name on Tumblr the other day. I was hooked from that moment. What was this “plant,” with its ghostly presentation, and what other traits were so interesting that it would distract a chemical engineering student from her studies long enough to share it? With its singular, slumped flower, it looked like a tulip under the cloud of an awful malaise; from petal to stem, there was not a single blush of color.
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Gardening isn’t always a cakewalk. For New Yorkers, it can be the supreme struggle. Back yard vegetable plots are replaced with cramped fire escape terra cotta, and a window sill planter sits in for the shady garden tree. In light of the trouble with greening a studio apartment the size of your childhood closet, it’s no shock that the terrarium is coming back into vogue. And with Little Landscapes, the valedictorians of terrarium design are bringing the craze to The New York Botanical Garden.
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As a world-renowned neurologist and author, as well as a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, Dr. Oliver Sacks suffers no shortage of credentials. And yet, in 2000, an encounter with a group of dedicated fern enthusiasts at The New York Botanical Garden welcomed him into an arena where his relative inexperience proved a boon. Written during a two-week expedition in Mexico, Oaxaca Journal blends the esoteric minutiae of one of the world’s oldest plant groups with an exploration of culture, history, and modern adventure.

Oaxaca Journal overcomes the din of scientific jargon through the ease of Sacks’ prose. Even its simplistic approach to storytelling plays to the experience through the self-effacing charm of the author’s pen. His is a travel narrative without any particular direction, admittedly and unapologetically listing sidelong into the native–and at times gritty–reality of Mexican life, just as it charts a course for botanical relevance.
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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.

Walking by the NYBG Library Building yesterday, we spotted a huge Red-tailed Hawk as it swooped across the trees and sailed to the top of a giant oak. During the daytime, these hawks are the top avian predators in our area and very impressive to behold (at night, the Great-horned Owls reign supreme). A group of bird watchers on the path gazed upward with large binoculars and telescopes.

Maybe this bird is a distant cousin of Pale Male, the famous Red-tailed Hawk who settled in Manhattan in the 1990s, defying hazardous urban living conditions and continuing to produce young hawks to this day. Or it could be a cousin of last year’s celebrity Red-tailed Hawk, Violet, who enchanted the residents of Washington Square Park in Manhattan before succumbing to a heart condition. Or perhaps it is one of the Garden’s own celebrity hawks, Rose and Vince, or one of their many, many offspring.
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Sonia Uyterhoeven is the NYBG‘s Gardener for Public Education.

Doug Tallamy (Photo courtesy of the University of Delaware)

Doug Tallamy’s lecture started from a basic and logical premise: if you take away the places for wildlife to live and feed, you will lose your wildlife. We are all aware that habitat destruction leads to a loss of species, but very few of us believe that we can make a difference or that we are directly linked to the process. I mean this in a non-judgmental way and from a place of empowerment.

Some of you may think that this is an early case of ‘election fever,’ but alas it is not. Last month I sat in an auditorium and listened to a very convincing and lucid proponent for environmental restoration and species diversity. Regardless of his own political views, with respect to the biome Tallamy is definitely not a democrat. “All plants,” he asserts, “are not created equal in their ability to support wildlife.”
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Meet Thomas Christopher, an expert on sustainable gardening practices, who will speak about “The Backyard Revolution” Thursday, March 15, 10 a.m. to 12 p.m.

Thomas Christopher has been covering sustainable gardening practices as a writer and editor for more than 25 years, with articles in nationally-read publications including The New York Times and Martha Stewart Living. He is also a hands-on gardener who has started his own sustainable lawn consulting business, Greener Grasses/Sustainable Lawns, near Middletown, CT.

“I was staggered to learn the area of turf in the United States is as big as Virginia, Connecticut and two-thirds of Rhode Island. Grass is our largest irrigated crop, more than corn,” said Christopher in a recent Chicago Tribune article. “Grasses are a resource-soaking nightmare, but they don’t have to be.”
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Ginkgo biloba 'Pendula'

Look at the maidenhair tree and you’ll see nothing worth taking to the salon. You may see “duck feet” in the leaves, as some Asian cultures have, but certainly no flowing mane of vegetal locks. Botanical nomenclature is a lot like the horse racing circuit in that regard–every so often you stumble over a designation that makes not even a whit of sense. Thus, to explain the common name of Ginkgo biloba, we need to think smaller.

“Fern” small, actually. The humble maidenhair fern (Adiantum aethiopicum happens to be sitting on our window sill), with its cascades of dainty green leaves, is the true point of origin for the towering ginkgo’s street moniker. And if you compare the two, you’ll see what many would call a family resemblance (if the ginkgo were directly related to anything else on this planet; it’s not). Each has leaves resembling the foot of a waterfowl. So why aren’t they named as such? To answer that, we look even further down.
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Exploring the Conservatory during Caribbean Garden weekends becomes a study in the music of the islands. While you walk along the paths beneath the palm fronds, see if you can spot the “living instruments” that create the rhythms of salsa, a Caribbean tradition that springs from the very plants growing around you!

Drums, or congas, are traditionally made from the wood of the versatile mahogany tree (Swietenia macrophylla). Be on the look-out for a perfect specimen of this warm climate hardwood as you enter our Tropical Rainforest Gallery on a tour of the exhibition.

While you’re there, perhaps you can also find the gourd-bearing trees known as calabash (Crescentia cujete), the fruit of which was once dried and used to create food and water vessels. But cultivators also use it for other purposes, many of them far more creative.
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Meet Doug Tallamy, an expert on the importance of native plants in our landscape and how to care for them — Thursday, February 16, 10 a.m. to 12 p.m.

Photo courtesy of Lisa Mattei.

Doug Tallamy knows how important a diverse native plant community is for other living creatures, especially insects. He has devoted much of his career to understanding the many ways insects interact with plants, creating essential food webs without which our ecosystems would fail.

His award-winning book and website, Bringing Nature Home, is a call to action for gardeners across the country to use native plants to sustain wildlife, promote biodiversity, and protect our ecosystems.

In his book, Tallamy recounts his own “epiphany” when his family moved to 10 acres in southeastern Pennsylvania, an area “farmed for centuries before being subdivided and sold.” He discovered that “at least 35% of the vegetation on our property consisted of aggressive plant species from other continents that were rapidly replacing what native plants we did have.” And he noticed something else: the alien plants on the property, such as the Norway maples and the mile-a-minute weeds, had “very little or no leaf damage from insects.”
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