Olga Massov, creator of the popular cooking blog Sassy Radish, is a true triple threat: She’s a talented writer, photographer, and cook.  Olga, a finance geek by day, writes about recipes and cooking in a way that makes you want to sit down with her and have a cup of coffee while working out what to cook for dinner. Her stories are sweet and lovely; her recipes simple, seasonal, and delicious.

When we began our “Favorite Things” campaign for the Shop in the Garden, we knew we wanted to see what Olga would pick. And just like her blog, Olga’s list of holiday gifts for friends and family is warm, genuine, and delicious.

See Olga’s picks below.

It seems hard to believe, but the holidays really are just around the corner. We love the holidays here at The New York Botanical Garden. The holidays mean the return of one of New York City’s most cherished family traditions, The Holiday Train Show in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory. It also means the arrival of beautiful new goodies at the Shop in the Garden, and on the Shop’s website. The selection of gifts in the Shop this holiday season is all about favorites, but they’re not just ours. We’re inviting some of the Garden’s most stylish, culinarily-minded, crafty, and green-thumbed friends to share a few of their favorite things with you!

So, take a spin around the Shop, whether in person while you’re visiting the giant pumpkins this weekend, or virtually. And if you happen to spot something that you’d like to call your favorite, you can use the “Tell A Friend” feature to give Santa a gentle hint.

So watch this space to see what some of your favorite bloggers will be giving as gifts this holiday season!

In the meantime, here are a few of my favorite things.

Get a jump-start on your holiday shopping list with a few recommendations below.

Authors of Books on Healthful, Sustainable Eating Come to the Garden

John Suskewich is Book Manager for Shop in the Garden.

No, “eating local” does not mean going to the Burger King that is down the block. It involves a set of conscious decisions about sourcing your chow in a way that emphasizes sustainability, nutrition, appearance, and taste, while leaving a smaller carbon trail.

Greenmarkets, community supported agriculture (CSA), produce exchanges, and farm stands are all manifestations of this concept. So, too, are celebrations like The Edible Garden, our summer into fall exhibition here at The New York Botanical Garden that is showcasing a number of chefs who create healthful recipes using harvest-based, seasonal, and organic ingredients.

Throughout The Edible Garden, Shop in the Garden is featuring a number of works by authors who believe that transforming our diet is critical not just to our own health but planet Earth’s health, too.

Louisa Shafia’s Lucid Food: Cooking for an Eco-Conscious Life is a cookbook with integrity. The first thing the author does is share all her “tried-and-true methods for putting a beautiful meal on the table while keeping a clear conscience.” Humane, seasonal, and sustainable are not bandied about like buzzwords but are used with passion and commitment. All this does not lead to cream of boiled water soup: the food is lovely, flavorful, and exotic, with concise recipes that don’t require specialized equipment or hard-to-find ingredients that need a flight to Damascus to get. The red-as-rhubarb jacket design is especially alluring. Louisa Shafia presented cooking demos at our Conservatory Kitchen and signed copies of Lucid Food this past Sunday (July 18).

Our grandparent’s secrets of putting food by (yes, we ate their homemade pickles that came out of a dubious-looking, scum-covered barrel set like a secret in a curtain-covered pantry—and lived to tell about it) are revealed by Eugenia Bone in Well-Preserved: Recipes and Techniques for Putting Up Small Batches of Seasonal Foods. Sure I can freeze my own blueberries, but after that I’m all thumbs and a bit of a nervous Nellie, as I’m a little afraid of sending a houseful of dinner guests to the emergency room even if they have health insurance. Eugenia Bone describes even difficult techniques like water bath canning, curing, and smoking in a reassuring way so that even a novice will be turning out house-made gravlax in no time. Eugenia Bone will show how to do it and sign copies of her book this Sunday, July 25.

The Locavore’s Handbook: The Busy Person’s Guide to Eating Local on a Budget, by Leda Meredith, is an introduction and guide to eating locally for everyone, but seems especially geared for budget-minded city folk. The virtue of this book is that it actually is practical, showing you how to consume sustainably without breaking your (grass-fed, humanely raised) piggy bank. It has very useful money-saving tips on menu planning, growing and harvesting (even when your back 40 is that many inches of balcony), bartering, even packaging. Leda Meredith, an instructor here at NYBG, will be talking about her life as a locavore and signing copies of her book on Sunday, August 15.

Get Your Tickets

John Suskewich is Book Manager for Shop in the Garden.

Emily Dickinson was a poet and a gardener, so there is no better place to celebrate the world of words she created than here at The New York Botanical Garden. The exhibition Emily Dickinson’s Garden: The Poetry of Flowers illustrates the many ways in which her horticultural life inspired her poetry, using an evocation of her actual garden, a digital reproduction of her personal herbarium, manuscripts, artifacts, and other material to bring this point into bloom.

At Shop in the Garden we are featuring a number of books that show how the poet used plants and flowers as metaphor and image in her art.

The Gardens of Emily Dickinson, by Judith Farr, with a chapter on how to grow Dickinson’s flowers by Louise Carter, is a gardening biography, a florography, of the “Belle of Amherst.” With scholarship and insight, the Farr re-creates the arcadian context of life in small-town America during the mid-19th century, where nature came right up through the picket fence to your front door. The author looks at the poems and letters to see what specific flowers Dickinson gardened with and what specific meanings they had for her. From Indian pipes to jasmine vines, everything in nature could be a symbol. and part of Dickinson’s greatness comes from her ability to distill what she observes into something eternal.

Two volumes of her poetry show with what mastery and beauty she was able to do this. Poetry for Young People: Emily Dickinson, edited by Frances S. Bolin, selects some of the best loved poems and sets them to charming illustrations by Chi Chung. There is an especially good selection of the riddle poems (but why not “A narrow fellow in the grass…”!)

The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, prepared by Ralph W. Franklin, is a definitive one-volume edition of the extant poems, 1,789 in all, presented with Dickinson’s idiosyncratic spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. What a pleasure to have this great achievement concentrated into an object you can bring anywhere. Short of facsimiles of fascicles, this is the Dickinson volume to own.

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Get Your Tickets

Laura Collier is Marketing Associate at The New York Botanical Garden.

Since I started working at the Garden, my friends, family, and acquaintances assume I instantly acquired all sorts of plant-related knowledge. I have to politely explain that, while I love being at the Garden, my position doesn’t provide me with a wealth of horticultural learning. But, times arise when it’s time to step up and get some hands-on training. And that’s exactly what I’ve done with The Orchid Show: Cuba in Flower.

Besides regularly stopping by the Conservatory on my lunch break to check out the show and all its blooms, I’ve decided to purchase an orchid from Shop in the Garden, to bring a bit of the show to my home in Queens. Luckily, I’m not expected to be an expert at the Shop when picking out flowers. Along the shelves full of orchids are signs with great tips about orchid care and details about each type. (For more great tips, click here) read more »

John Suskewich is Book Manager for Shop in the Garden.

At Shop in the Garden we celebrate the 2010 edition of The Orchid Show with two
marvelous books that show the fascination these charismatic plants have had on artists, horticulturists, and botanists over the years.

Surely one of the most useful orchid books to come down the pike in a long while is Bloom-Again Orchids by judywhite (sic. for that is indeed the way to spell her name, all lowercase, like a specific epithet).

Here is a book designed to correct an all-too-common condition: orchids that sit on windowsills and sulk without either growing or dying. By emphasizing plants that normal human beings can cajole into bloom and are likely to encounter in the marketplace, i.e., big-box stores, supermarket shelves, mall kiosks, florist windows, and of course, botanical garden gift shops, Bloom-Again Orchids is accessible and unique. It demystifies home orchid-growing in a very concise way, with an A-to-Z of 50 beautiful varieties, each one annotated with an easy-to-understand, 12-point checklist.

The second book is one that is good to have available again: Volume 17 of The Works of Charles Darwin: The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids are Fertilized by Insects. In this work the controversial naturalist continues his investigation of adaptations in the natural world. His astonishing powers of detailed observation combined with his sense of something larger at work are conveyed with an ease and naturalness that is pure poetry.

Both books, of course, are available at Shop in the Garden.

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Check Out These New Titles on Plants and Gardening

John Suskewich is Book Manager for Shop in the Garden.

Will these 10 books stop me from ordering seeds I probably won’t get around to sowing until 2018? Will they prevent me from having a six-foot-tall Panicum come up in front of an eight-inch-tall Catananche? Will they convince me not to try growing Rhododendron yakushimanum for the third time in 10 years in my yard with heavy clay soil and a high water table? Probably not; but here are 10 new books—on plants and gardens and nature and why it all matters—that were recently published or are coming out later this year and that I’ll be reading anyway, no matter what benefit I may or may not get from them!

A Landscape Manifesto,
by Diana Balmori
Innovative and influential landscape architect Diana Balmori writes on the theory, practice, and future of her profession.

Ken Smith Landscape Architect,
by Ken Smith
This imaginative practitioner, who has changed our idea of what landscape architecture can be, looks at his most important projects.

Garden Guide: New York City,
by Nancy Berner and Susan Lowry
From Gotham’s horticultural Baedeker comes a new edition—it’s always amazing to see how many gardens you can visit here in NYC!

The Japanese Tea Garden, by Marc Peter Keane
No American interprets Japanese garden history and practice better than our colleague Marc Peter Keane. read more »

Larry Lederman’s Images on Display; Available as 2010 Calendar in Shop

The form and beauty of trees drew Larry Lederman into landscape photography nine years ago, when he began visiting the Botanical Garden weekly in all kinds of weather. For Lederman, a member of the Board of Advisors, the Garden is a beautiful and diverse landscape where he can follow the growth and seasonal changes of the trees, each occasion offering singular enchantments.

Some of his resulting images are currently on display in an exhibition, The Presence of Trees, in the Arthur and Janet Ross Gallery, through April 11.

“The presence or absence of trees often defines a landscape,” Lederman has said. “In art, forests signify wilderness and clearing, its loss. The trees in these photographs are in the so-called cleared places, nurtured to be part of our lives. Growing either alone or one in relation to others, they respond to the seasons, invest the landscape with their permanence and character, and connect us to nature. They influence our moods, affect our behavior, and shape our lives. These photographs view trees as expressive presences evocative of the diversity and wonder of life.”

His images take a fresh look at trees in the landscape and reveal their beauty and structure during all seasons, underscoring their character and influence in the natural world.

In 2003 the Botanical Garden published his first calendar, Woodland Creatures, which led to his annual series, Trees. Copies of his 2010 calendar, which include several images from the exhibition, are available at Shop in the Garden.

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Authors of Old Penn Station History and Children’s Tale Visit

John Suskewich is Book Manager for Shop in the Garden.

A replica of the late, great Pennsylvania Station is new this year in The New York Botanical Garden’s Holiday Train Show. I remember that building at the end of its life. My family used to go by train to Philadelphia to visit my aunt who was actually born in Russia and scared us kids by removing her false teeth. Penn Station seemed like a ruin even when it was intact. It was grim and grimy and as you got pulled downstairs and yanked down corridors, it loomed overhead like a cliff or a cave. During demolition the building sat on its city block with broken columns and cornices and clocks hanging in midair like Valhalla after the gods had left.

The rendition of Pennsylvania Station that designer Paul Busse has created for the train show imagines it as it was in its heyday and is impressively colossal even at reduced scale, with bark colonnades, acorn capitals, pine cone clocks, and sugar-water windows.

In Old Penn Station, author William Low traces the history of the great depot from its inception as a monumental gateway to Gotham to its glory days as a transportation hub and its decline and destruction in the name of progress and profitability. His muscular, colorful illustrations, lit like an elegy and pictured from every conceivable angle, bring this fallen monument to life and will turn even a tot into an ardent preservationist. read more »

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