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.

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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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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 »

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 »

Designer of NYBG’s Rose Garden a Real “Artist and Hero”

John Suskewich is Book Manager for Shop in the Garden.

In Beatrix Farrand: Private Gardens, Public Landscapes, Judith Tankard avoids the pitfall of turning a historical figure into a waxwork and brings to life this pioneering woman who was one of the first important American landscape gardeners. As someone who designed an important feature of The New York Botanical Garden, the magnificent Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden, Beatrix Farrand (1872–1959) is of particular interest to us here.

Hers is a great “little Old New York” story. Farrand’s aunt was Edith Wharton, she herself was one of Mrs. Astor’s “Four Hundred,” and Henry James was often a household guest, so she could have coasted. Instead, to a great talent Farrand added diligent study and travel, hard work, a facility for networking, and—for that time and place—a kind of courage. The commissions she attracted after 1900 included some of the most notable country places of that era: Crosswicks in Pennsylvania; the Fahnestock estate in Lenox, Massachusetts; Bellefield, the Newbold family property in Hyde Park, New York; and a slew of blue-blooded landscapes on Long Island.

The author’s chapter on Farrand’s assignment at The New York Botanical Garden is especially noteworthy. This involved creating an elegant design for a public rose garden out of a tricky site while developing a collection of roses that would have aesthetic and educational merit. The ups ands downs and ups of this rose garden reflect in a way NYBG’s own story, and of the difficulties that make landscape gardening such a complicated art, as time takes its toll. But time also tells, and in a volume that contains pages of marvelous photography, this garden is beautifully pictured, here and now, in its current state of grandeur. read more »

Garden Horticulturist Appears for Booksigning as Co-Author

John Suskewich is Book Manager for Shop in the Garden.

The publication of Botanica Magnifica: Portraits of the World’s Most Extraordinary Flowers & Plants gives us an occasion to really celebrate the career of our wonderful orchid curator, horticulturist, and all-around plant enthusiast Marc Hachadourian, the book’s co-author.

As Manager of the Nolen Greenhouses here at The New York Botanical Garden, Marc helps provide the spectacular range of material for the flowering displays that amaze and astonish visitors to our 250-acre Eden in the Bronx. This season, thanks to his propagation skills, the discerning observer would have seen Meconopsis in the Ladies’ Border, the towering Echium pininana from this year’s Dutch Bulbs spring flower show, and the usual killer show of waterlilies and lotuses in the Conservatory Pools.

But of all the plant families, Marc seems to have the greatest kinship for the Orchidaceae. This relationship is beautifully expressed annually in the work he does curating The Orchid Show in the Haupt Conservatory, in the displays he puts on throughout the year in the Library building Orchid Rotunda, and now between the covers of the quite striking new book, Botanica Magnifica. But he doesn’t stop there; he goes beyond orchids and has written more than half the text for the book.

It is an understatement to call this a luxurious volume of flower photography. Botanica Magnifica contains 250 portraits of rare and exotic plants taken by Jonathan Singer “in a manner evocative of Old Master paintings” (ARTnews). He is a Hasselblad Laureate Award winner—like an Oscar for shutterbugs—and his orchid images are especially memorable: the cymbidiums, dendrobiums, and Polyradicion, better known as the ghost orchid, float and fly and drip and droop against their black background with a sculptural quality that belies their transient beauty. read more »

The Art and Impact of Lynden B. Miller’s Public Gardens

John Suskewich is Book Manager for Shop in the Garden.

New York City, famous around the world for its great art, is the site of more masterpieces than you can shake a stick at. The Metropolitan Museum has Monet’s Terrasse a Ste.-Addresse; the modernist icon Lever House graces Park Avenue; you can ponder Louise Nevelson’s Sky Cathedral at MOMA. Here at The New York Botanical Garden there is a masterpiece of garden design, the Jane Watson Irwin Perennial Garden designed by Lynden B. Miller. It is a work of art.

For flower power alone it is astonishing, especially during its current late-summer and fall climax of anemones, astilbes, asters, and mums; of kniphofias, hydrangeas, phlox, and lilies. But like all great gardens it combines its inspired planting with strong design. There are axes and cross axes, themed rooms, grace notes, structural elements, repeated elements, and even whimsical elements like the three banana trees that have appeared this year in the “Hot Color Room.”

It’s all a painting really, a painting made of plants (I believe Ms. Miller was indeed trained as a painter). Look closely and it dissolves into its component plants, but step back and all the parts resolve themselves into one unambiguous image: a classic but unique mixed border that would be at home in the Cotswolds if it weren’t for its very American insistence on being individualistic, eclectic, almost impromptu, and diverse, ready to encompass the whole world with its exotic elements.

In a new book that is a summation of her long career as a public garden designer, Lynden Miller spells out the ethos of this garden and of her whole body of work, without which living in New York City in the 21st century would probably be unendurable. read more »

The Year’s “Must-Reads”

John Suskewich is Book Manager for Shop in the Garden.

To somebody who’s really into plants, February finds the cosmic garden center always filled with five-pints of that herbaceous perennial called hope, so I’m thinking ahead. I’m looking forward to that lengthening daylight. I’m thinking about those first snowdrops, about mud and muck, about witch-hazels and Rijnveld’s Early Sensation and seed orders and Lenten hellebores and unpaid credit card balances because of plant purchases, and then there are books.

Here are several new books that will tell me what I’m doing wrong and what plants that I don’t have that I gotta have, books about other gardens and other gardeners, books that are celebratory and books that are valedictory, books that are encouraging and books that are alarming. Some of these are out now and some will be published later in the year, but here is a selection, 9 for ’09, of books about plants and the people who are mesmerized by them.

The Edible Schoolyard by Alice Waters
At the acclaimed restaurant Chez Panisse, founder and chef Alice Waters created a style of cooking that is seasonal, market based, plant centered, and not just nutritional but nurturing. The Edible Schoolyard takes this template and applies it to education to reinvent the way we teach our kids. Her goals are our goals here at The New York Botanical Garden: to inject nature into our lives in a transformational way.

William Robinson, The Wild Gardener by Richard Bisgrove
William Robinson is one of those transcendent figures that everyone has heard of but whose achievement has been so long unstudied that newbies like me aren’t quite sure what he accomplished. One of the finest garden historians, Richard Bisgrove, reexamines the life and achievement of this icon who popularized the wild garden and the cottage garden and in whose works one finds the first intimations of a holistic view of gardening.

Listening to Stone by Dan Snow
What an inspired use of feldspar! If you need a dry stone wall with poetry as the mortar, Dan Snow is your mason. Listening to Stone is a look at his profession and an appreciation of his medium as well as a study of some of his recent constructions, which turn something weighty and substantial into works of art that are arrestingly enigmatic.

The New Terrarium by Tovah Martin
I was in college during the ’70s, the heyday of macramé plant holders, the original cast recording of Pippin, beanbag furniture, and terrariums. (A terrarium was something you made when you got tired of netting dead neon tetras out of your 20-gallon fish tank.) Tovah Martin, one of our best garden writers, rethinks the concept with new containers and new plantings and reminds us that it is still one of the best methods for bringing and keeping nature indoors.

Read about John’s other selected books after the jump.

read more »

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.