George Shakespear is Director of Science Public Relations.

One of the pleasures of working at The New York Botanical Garden is meeting scientists from around the world and learning about their fascinating botanical exploration, biodiversity research, and conservation projects. The Garden is a nexus of international plant science, where scientists come to consult the incomparable collections in our herbarium and library, to confer with the Garden’s staff scientists, or, as happened the week before last, to accept a well-deserved award and to share information on current projects.

I attended the presentation by distinguished economic botanist and former Botanical Garden scientist Sir Ghillean (Iain) T. Prance on two current (and very different) projects. In the largest tract of rain forest in northern Argentina, he has been studying the ethnobotany of the Guaraní people, documenting their use of plants. The Guaraní are threatened by the expanding timber extraction industry. One result of his team’s documentation has been the purchase of more than 12,000 acres of land by the World Trust Fund to return ownership to the Guaraní. Sir Prance also talked about his systematic studies of Barringtonia, a genus of flowering plants.

Prance was in New York to receive the Gold Medal of The New York Botanical Garden. The medal, the highest honor conferred by the Botanical Garden and awarded very infrequently, acknowledges contributions made by individuals in the fields of horticulture, plant science, and education. Iain Prance served for more than a quarter century at the Garden, arriving as a post-doctoral researcher and departing as Senior Vice President for Science. In 1988, he returned to his native Great Britain to become Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (1988–1999). He was knighted in 1995.

Prance is perhaps the most prominent scientist in botanical exploration of Amazonian Brazil and is vitally interested in the documentation of the use of plants by indigenous peoples in Amazonia. That led him to found in 1981 the Garden’s Institute of Economic Botany, whose programs continue to thrive and grow.

Recent media coverage of Sir Prance includes “A Talk with Iain Prance” on Newsweek magazines’s Lab Notes blog and the Earth Watch column in the Journal News.

Nick Leshi is Associate Director of Public Relations and Electronic Media.

According to Technorati, the leading blog search engine, millions of entries are posted every day in the interconnected, online world of Web logs known as the blogosphere. As the world of journalism continues to evolve from the dominance of traditional print and broadcast media to the growing user-generated content of the Internet, The New York Botanical Garden has earned the attention of the growing new medium.

Many of the writers have been longtime friends of the Garden. Judy Glattstein writes for the Bellewood Gardens Gatehouse and recently shared news with her readers about Moore in America and Kiku: The Art of the Japanese Chrysanthemum. Garden writers Ellen Spector Platt and Ellen Zachos recently debuted a new blog called Garden Bytes from the Big Apple and featured the Botanical Garden.

Many mainstream print publications are making the leap into the new digital frontier. One of the more popular blogs is City Room at The New York Times Web site, where Tina Kelley wrote about Kiku in a blog entry called “Shaping the Chrysanthemums, a Rare Art,” sparking some fun comments from the public. National Geographic’s News Watch blog posted a review by David Braun of Liverworts of New England: A Guide for the Amateur Naturalist, published by The New York Botanical Garden Press. (Order at 718.817.8721 or online.)

Journalists such as Bill Cary of The Journal News, garden writer Irene Virag, and many others have their own blogs. Even some of the Garden’s own staff have ventured into the blogosphere. Check out the personal journal of Chuck Peters, one of our top scientists, for some thought-provoking ruminations. Bookmark them all!

Looking for more? Check out OffManhattan.com, which describes itself as “a travel guide for native New Yorkers and tourists alike, in an effort to promote a ‘greener’ lifestyle,” or the popular BoogieDowner, a great portal for all wonderful things the Bronx has to offer.

There are blogs about art, like Studio-Online, which wrote about Kiku and Moore in America on October 27, and blogs about crafts, like Quaint Handmade, which also spotlighted the Garden in a glowing review about Kiku. Pick a topic and there’s bound to be someone out there blogging about it.

If you have a favorite blog or if you come across one that mentions The New York Botanical Garden, let us know about it. You can e-mail me or just post a comment below. The key to the explosive growth of the blogosphere, I believe, is the line of communication between fellow bloggers and the people reading them. So let us know what you think.

Nick Leshi is Associate Director of Public Relations and Electronic Media.

Art fans, rejoice! Moore in America: Monumental Sculpture at The New York Botanical Garden , the largest outdoor exhibition of Henry Moore’s artwork ever presented in a single venue in the United States, is being extended through January 11, 2009.

The show, a collection of 20 major pieces, opened at the Botanical Garden on May 24, during the height of the spring flowering season. It garnered critical acclaim from the media and the public alike during the summer months. Now nearly all of these magnificent works by one of modern art’s greatest icons can be seen during fall and early winter, providing audiences with the chance to experience the sculpture for the first time or return again to witness them in contrasting seasons. The monumental pieces are positioned throughout the Garden’s 250 acres and among its 50 gardens and plant collections, complementing the historic landscape during nature’s changing cycles.

The extension of Moore in America through the holiday season guarantees that visitors to The New York Botanical Garden will be able to enjoy the outdoor sculpture while simultaneously experiencing the Garden’s other major exhibitions—Kiku: The Art of the Japanese Chrysanthemum through November 16, the Library gallery art exhibition The Chrysanthemum in Japanese Art through January 11, and the Holiday Train Show from November 23 through January 11. The Henry Moore Foundation, which is dedicated to furthering the understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment of Moore’s work, is co-curating Moore in America with the  Garden.

If you still haven’t had the chance to see Moore in America, now is the perfect time. And if you’ve seen it already, now you have even more time to see it again with friends and loved ones, discovering anew the combination of Henry Moore’s fine sculpture and the spectacular Garden settings in changing seasons.

Here’s a video in which Educator Anabel Holland tells us a little more about a few of the sculpture.

NYBG Henry Moore 2008 from The New York Botanical Garden on Vimeo.

Sarah Richardson is Special Events Coordinator at The New York Botanical Garden.
If, like me, you’re a Project Runway fan, then you saw the episode a couple of weeks ago that featured The New York Botanical Garden as the stunning location for one of the show’s fashion challenges—designing an outfit inspired by nature.

Finally, I’m able to tell the secret I held for over three months.

I knew this first-hand information since the end of June, when scouts for the immensely popular show contacted our Special Events office after viewing all the amazing images of the Garden on our Web site. They were looking for a place for a “Bravo reality competition show” (they hadn’t yet revealed to us which one) with colorful, abundant flowers and plantings, in combination with a landmark that epitomized New York. Of course, the Botanical Garden and our iconic Enid A. Haupt Conservatory fit the bill, and we were in business—show business, that is.

That’s also when they told us they’d be filming Project Runway, and I was sworn to keep things under wraps, so to speak.

Find out how the day unfolded after the jump. read more »

Nick Leshi is Associate Director of Public Relations and Electronic Media.

Imagine my surprise this summer when I received a handwritten postcard from Academy Award-winning actress Joan Fontaine.

The story began in June when I received a phone call from a visitor to The New York Botanical Garden who was delighted to discover in the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden a white modern rose named after a friend. That friend happened to be Joan Fontaine, best known for her roles in the Alfred Hitchcock thrillers Rebecca (1940) and Suspicion (1941), for which she won an Oscar. Ms. Fontaine also appeared in many other film classics from Hollywood’s golden age, including Gunga Din (1939), The Women (1939), Jane Eyre (1944), and Ivanhoe (1952).

I sent an image of the Joan Fontaine rose to the caller and was delighted to learn that she forwarded the photo to the legendary actress. Needless to say, Ms. Fontaine’s resulting note of appreciation made my day.

The episode inspired me to think of other roses named after celebrities. To paraphrase Peter Kukielski, Curator of the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden, walking through the Beatrix Farrand-designed beds is like stumbling upon a tea party of the famous. The soft apricot flowers of the ‘Marilyn Monroe‘ rose are near the deep pink blooms of another hybrid tea named after Elizabeth Taylor. Also nearby is the ‘Julia Child’ floribunda, the 2006 All-America Rose Selections winner, with its buttergold petals and licorice candy fragrance. Watching over them all with its double pink flowers is the hardy grandiflora ‘Queen Elizabeth.’

Other roses are named after artists such as ‘Rembrandt‘ Portland or the floribunda ‘Henri Matisse‘ or the standard rose ‘Auguste Renoir‘ or the ‘Audubon‘ shrub. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has at least two roses with his moniker, the Hybrid Musk ‘Mozart‘ and the climber ‘Amadeus.’ Famed scientists also have their rose doppelgangers, including Charles Darwin and Madame Marie Curie. And still other roses honor Amelia Earhart, George Burns, and Johann Strauss. Famous names pop out from the world of fiction as well, such as ‘Othello,’ ‘Falstaff,’ and ‘Betty Boop.’

The Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden is a delightful destination full of surprises, with wonderful color and fragrance right up until the first frost of the season.

Autumn in the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden from The New York Botanical Garden on Vimeo.

Nick Leshi is Associate Director of Public Relations and Electronic Media.

In the few months since its opening, Moore in America, the exhibition of monumental sculpture on display at The New York Botanical Garden, has generated quite a bit of positive media reaction. One of the highlights was Channel Thirteen’s SundayArts feature, which included the Moore exhibition as the lead story in its news segment.

Host Christina Ha visited the Botanical Garden and shared with viewers some of the 20 artworks by Henry Moore that are placed throughout the Garden’s 250 acres, including Reclining Mother and Child in the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden. The SundayArts program airs weekly on Thirteen/WNET-TV, the flagship public broadcaster in the New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut metro area. The program showcases local arts news about gallery and museum exhibits and world-class performances. Its Web site is rich with artist profiles, blogs, calendar listings, multi-media content, and more.

In addition to covering Moore in America, PBS has featured other stories about the Botanical Garden as well.

New York Voices, the weekly half-hour newsmagazine program and Emmy-winning series that presents in-depth stories unique to the lives of New Yorkers, documented the Garden’s Plant Research Laboratory and last spring’s popular exhibition Darwin’s Garden: An Evolutionary Adventure, hosted by Rafael Pi Roman.

One of my favorite PBS programs in recent memory was “A Walk Through the Bronx,” in which award-winning documentary-maker David Hartman and historian Barry Lewis explored the history of our fine borough, including a fascinating look at the early history of The New York Botanical Garden.

David Hartman later returned to the Garden for a behind-the-scenes look at what goes into making NYBG’s crowd-favorite Holiday Train Show, filming a documentary about Paul Busse and his team at Applied Imagination.

As the Botanical Garden continues to attract the attention of an ever-growing landscape of traditional and new media, public television continues to be a source of thought-provoking and engaging content not easily found elsewhere, sharing with its millions of viewers topics about education, science, culture and the arts, and much, much more.

Kate Murphy, a junior at Fordham University, interned in the Communications Department this summer.

The summer blockbuster has become as much a staple to the season as sunshine and warm weather. And this summer is no different, bringing a continuous buzz of “must-see” movies. If you can’t decide whether you’d like to spend an afternoon at the Garden or at the movie theater, why not combine the two?

The 250-acre enclave in the Bronx has played host to many film shoots due to its convenient location, its beautiful grounds, and the lush interior of the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory. Following is a list of movies featuring scenes at the Garden. Rent a few of them and see if you can spot NYBG!

The Manchurian Candidate (the 2004 version) includes scenes shot in the Haupt Conservatory, the nation’s largest Victorian-era glasshouse. The all-star cast, featuring Denzel Washington, Liev Schreiber, Meryl Streep, and Vera Farmiga, attend a gala in the Conservatory in this political thriller.

Autumn in New York (2000), a sad, romantic film starring Winona Ryder and Richard Gere, utilized the Botanical Garden’s colorful autumnal grounds.

Age of Innocence (1993), a period piece chronicling the love triangle of three 19th-century New York aristocrats, also has scenes that featue the iconic Haupt Conservatory. The movie stars Michelle Pfeiffer, Winona Ryder, and Daniel Day-Lewis.

Other films shot at the Garden include Awakenings (1990), starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams, and The Seven-Ups (1973), starring Roy Scheider.

Ellen Bruzelius is Director of Special Projects, Garden Retail and Business Development.

Shop in the Garden has been garnering attention lately in the blogosphere with a variety of garden-inspired goods that have struck the fancy of bloggers around the world. From a Chicago-based shopping blog that featured our green bicycle basket (also mentioned on Glamnest.com) all the way across the pond to Berlin where a New England-born journalist noted our Summer Pleasures melamine plates on her blog, Tidepooler.com, nybgshop.org has been piquing interest near and far.

Back on our own shores, in New York the Today show and Cookie magazine picked up on new NYBG products developed with licensing partner Lunt Silversmiths. Using glorious images from works in the Rare Book Collections of our LuEsther T. Mertz Library, Lunt has developed a tabletop collection that ranges from elegant silver tea sets inspired by 18th-century designs for Chinoiserie garden follies to garden plant trays and marvelous Mark Catesby-inspired glasses and barware and more.

The Peak of Chic (check out the July 15 and August 6 posts) loved the Lunt Silversmiths products as well as NYBG fine art prints sold through Artaissance.com. These archival quality reproduction prints also stem from historic botanical illustration in the Mertz Library collections. Some are presented in their original form, while others are given a modern sensibility with color and creative cropping.

This Old House featured one of our stainless steel birdfeeders, and Glamnest.com loved our array of colorful imported flower pots.

Not surprisingly, this interest in Shop in the Garden goods reflects the enormous effort put in by Shop staff to develop and find items that are design-driven and not ubiquitous. We’re adding new things all the time, so be sure to visit often.

Nick Leshi is Associate Director of Public Relations and Electronic Media.

In the September 2008 issue of Outside, a health, fitness, and travel magazine, Eric Hansen wrote a two-and-a-half page feature chronicling his quest to find the Bronx’s elusive José the Beaver. Named as a tribute to Congressman José Serrano, the beaver has garnered an urban legend mystique with sightings along the Bronx River. The writer visited The New York Botanical Garden while researching his story and dubbed our institution “a biologically diverse oasis.”

Reading this article made me think of all the other amazing wildlife one can see here on a given day. Yes, the Botanical Garden prides itself as a museum of plants with extensive flora in its 50 gardens and plant collections. But visitors might be surprised at the diversity of fauna they could also stumble upon during a visit here. Our neighbor across Fordham Road may have lions and tigers and bears, but a stroll through NYBG reveals an unexpected variety of life from the animal kingdom.

Birds are abundant, from majestic hawks circling overhead to families of ducks ambling along a path. On the Garden’s popular guided Bird Walks, held Saturday mornings September through June, people seek out robins, blue jays, cardinals, sparrows, and even owls. I’ve been amazed to see wild turkeys, blue herons, plump pheasants, and even what looked like an ibis swooping to grab a koi from one of the pools in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory Courtyards.

If you look closely enough, birds aren’t the only wildlife you’ll see. Chipmunks scurry in the Forest. Frogs belch their songs in the ponds of the Rock Garden, while Italian wall lizards dash across nearby stones. From rabbits and turtles to muskrats and squirrels, it’s incredible to realize how many species of life call our 250 acres “home.”

View our Flickr set of some of our animal friends and more!

Nick Leshi is Associate Director of Public Relations and Electronic Media.

Over 40 years ago, Andy Warhol famously turned a can of tomato soup into a pop culture icon. Now photographer Victor Schrager has turned his camera lens on the tomato itself, elevating it to a high art. The September 2008 issue of Veranda magazine features two articles written by Tom Woodham, gloriously illustrated by Schrager’s stunning images of tomatoes from the gardens of Amy Goldman, a member of The New York Botanical Garden’s Board of Managers.

The pictures give justification for one of the magazine’s headlines, “Tomatoes: The Most Beautiful Fruit.” If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I imagine anyone viewing such a variety of shapes and colors would agree that this bountiful produce captured on film is beautiful indeed.

Read the rest after the jump read more »