John Suskewich is Book Manager for Shop in the Garden.
NYBG’s Farmers Market, which rolls in here every Wednesday through summer and fall, is a feast and a fanfare of fresh fruits and veggies. As beautiful as jewelry but full of thiamin and riboflavin, the produce glistens when the tents are first unfurled, and this year the tomatoes—Black Cherry, Sungold, Brandywine, Bicolor—seemed to glimmer like a Tiffany’s window of semiprecious stones.

Ah the tomato! This, the cynosure of the Solanaceae, is sweetly celebrated in an excellent new publication, The Heirloom Tomato, by our board member and chair of Seed Savers Exchange, Amy Goldman. The book is all about selecting, growing, and eating tomatoes, but the heart of the volume is a 150-page gallery of the fruit, a museum of Lycopersicon, with photographs by Victor Schrager, who turns even homely “Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter” into a Vermeer. The descriptions by Dr. Goldman include specs for each variety on size, weight, shape, color, and texture, and her interpretative material includes archival research and nuggets of oral history that illuminate our lost rural history as evocatively as a tintype.

The Heirloom Tomato is a book for anyone who loves gardening, plants, food, tomatoes, art and/or language. It is the third volume in the Goldman/Schrager collaboration. They created a template with two works on cucurbits: Melons for the Passionate Grower and The Compleat Squash, and they have now brought it to such a state of perfection I wouldn’t be surprised if they next turned their attention to okra, or maybe kohlrabi.

A selection of images from the book is on display in the Botanical Garden’s Arthur and Janet Ross Gallery in The Heirloom Tomato: An Exhibition of Photographs by Victor Schrager—Portraits of Historic Tomato Varieties from the Gardens of Amy Goldman.

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.

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