Creating a masterpiece takes more than simple inspiration. It requires preparation–arranging each color and readying the canvas. And as with a painting, Monet’s Garden at the NYBG is a work of art with as much going on behind the scenes as happens in the open.

Marc Hachadourian, Manager of the Nolen Greenhouses for Living Collections, takes us through the expansive collection of delphiniums, poppies, nasturtiums and other flowers that will soon embody our homage to Claude Monet’s garden at Giverny. Months of careful tending in specialized growing environments have allowed us to tease the flowers into bloom all at once, re-creating the artist’s living muse at its kaleidoscopic peak. But you won’t have to wait that long to see them.

If you haven’t reserved your tickets yet, get to our ticket page! The doors to the French master’s private paradise open to New York on May 19.

Marc Hachadourian is the Manager of The New York Botanical Garden’s Nolen Greenhouses for Living Collections, a staging area for plants for all of our gardens, yearly exhibitions, and events.

Walk through the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory and you may come upon a peculiar chandelier of a plant, with a vine spiraling right up to the roof and clusters of flowers dangling from it like upturned flamingo bills. You can’t miss the rings of vibrant, coral-red blooms.

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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 »