Author of The Garden Primer Encourages Growing Food Year-Round

Barbara Damrosch, author of the recently revised The Garden Primer, writes a weekly column for The Washington Post and has designed display food gardens at Stone Barns Center in Westchester. She will discuss growing food year-round as part of the From the Ground Up Lecture Series on February 18.

The anticipation of flavor is the best appetite stimulant, as all kitchen gardeners know. It’s one thing to look forward to a meal, or a favorite dish. But a favorite crop in the ground is even more tantalizing.

The global supermarket cornucopia dulls the appetite by making every food available. Cooks can make any recipe, at any time, just by tossing ingredients into a cart. As a result, they rarely know seasonal tastes like those of garden peas, sown in early spring and harvested after long anticipation, bursting with sweetness as only fresh-picked peas can. Or the juiciness of the first red, ripe tomato, warm on the vine. Or the first corn, the first melon, the zing of sprightly fall greens such as arugula or mache. read more »

Landscape architect Susan Cohen, ASLA, is Coordinator of the Landscape Design Program and organized the Landscape Design Portfolios series.

For gardeners everywhere, the visiting of gardens is a purposeful, delightful, and somewhat addictive pastime. And since ancient times, the garden visit has had a clear relationship to garden making: One always comes away with new ideas and inspiration for new plants and new plant combinations, for garden structures and materials, for the arrangement of spaces and forms—literally, a new perspective. (Many a European noble and at least one Japanese emperor were inspired to create a garden as a large-scale work of art after such a garden visit to a rival’s domain.)

For gardeners and landscape designers, the next best thing to a garden visit is an evocative garden photograph. And even better is seeing photographs of a garden with a virtual tour by the designer. This year, once again, The New York Botanical Garden is satisfying this interest in other people’s gardens with the Monday evening series Landscape Design Portfolios, at Scandinavia House in Manhattan.

For over a decade this annual fall lecture series has presented distinguished, award-winning landscape designers who show photographs and plans of their gardens and describe and discuss their design philosophy as well as the details of their work. We see their gardens, and we learn how and why they were made.

Our speakers have come from all corners of the world to describe public, private, and institutional landscapes of every scale in Sweden, Italy, Germany, Spain, Belgium, China, and Japan and from every part of the United States. Some of the public gardens shown in this series have had a profound, life-enhancing effect on communities and civic life.

This year’s series takes place beginning at 6 p.m. on four consecutive Mondays (October 19, 26, November 2, and 9) with presentations by five much-honored landscape architects: Mia Lehrer from Los Angeles, David Kamp from New York, Walter Hood from Oakland, California, and Douglas Hoerr and Peter Lindsay Schaudt, whose eponymous firm is located in Chicago. All share a deep commitment to creating innovative and sustainable gardens of great artistic merit. Come, and be inspired.

NYBG Hosts Free Presentation on the History of Amateur Mycology

Brian M. Boom, Ph.D., is President of the Torrey Botanical Society and Director of the Caribbean Biodiversity Program at The New York Botanical Garden.

Founded in 1867 in New York City, the Torrey Botanical Society is the oldest botanical association in the Americas. Throughout its long, distinguished history of promoting interest in botany and in disseminating information about all aspects of plants and fungi, among the most important of the Society’s activities is its lecture series. Each year, a lecture is presented in October, November, December, March, April, and May, and the schedule is posted through the Society’s Web site. The lectures are free and open to the public. Refreshments precede each lecture.

The first Torrey lecture of this season is on Tuesday, October 6, at 6:30 p.m. in the Arthur and Janet Ross Lecture Hall at The New York Botanical Garden. David W. Rose, archivist, writer, and past president of the Connecticut-Westchester Mycological Association, will present Great Goddess of Decay! A History of Amateur Mycology in the United States. You can read his abstract online.

In addition to hosting the lecture series, the Society publishes a scholarly journal (The Journal of the Torrey Botanical Society), organizes numerous field trips to local sites of botanical and mycological interest, and offers a series of grants and awards to support field work and seminars. I invite you to come to the October 6 lecture and to meet fellow plant and fungi enthusiasts.