Back in February of this year, I related my tale of Rose, the red-tailed hawk who shares a nest on the nearby Fordham University campus with Vince, her mate. Since then, the hawks have extended their family. In May, four chicks (a record for this pair and likely any other Bronx hawks) came out to the world. I knew that it was only a matter of time before these youngsters would pay The New York Botanical Garden a visit. I hoped to be lucky enough to see these raptors close up, and I recently got my wish.

It was 9:40 a.m. on a chilly October morning and I had just passed the Garden’s reflecting pool. I wanted to do some shooting of the Conservatory grounds. That’s when I noticed a hawk darting overhead, landing on the lawn by the first tram stop on Garden Way.

The tram crew hadn’t noticed it at first. The hawk was looking down at something. After watching Jr. (one of this hawk’s siblings from 2010’s brood) for so many months this past winter, I already knew what was going to happen next, so I tip-toed ahead, ducking behind one of the two nearby trees and readying my camera. I set it to shoot eight images in one burst and began firing away. It was windy and the ray of sunlight shining through the trees directly onto my new friend kept changing, making getting clear shots interesting to say the least. But I got photos of the newest member of Rose’s dynasty regardless.
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Ed. note: Larry Lederman, photographer and friend of the Garden (he’s a member of our Advisory Board), has a beautiful exhibit of large-scale tree photographs up right now in the lobby of the amazing Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan. We wanted to learn more about Larry and his amazing photographs, so we asked him a few questions.

What is the title of the Exhibit at the Four Seasons?
Spring.

How did you choose the photographs for the Exhibit?
To show the presence of trees in our lives. As you walk in the door of the Four Seasons you will first see the pleached Sycamores. It is a striking image: the Sycamores are just beginning to bud, and their severely pruned geometric structure is almost like an x-ray. There is no escaping “the hand of man” expressing a formal sense of beauty on ordinarily unruly Sycamores.

Alongside the Sycamores are the Cherry Trees of Pilgrim Hill in Central Park, showering cherry blossoms like snow. There is no constraint here, no geometry. These trees are over a hundred years old, placed on a hill by Olmsted’s plan to be seen and enjoyed. They express their longevity and the wonder of renewal. And directly opposite the photograph of the Cherry Trees is the photograph of the view of the Native Forest in The New York Botanical Garden, expressing the exuberance of spring.

The fifty-acre Forest is kept native through careful attention–as authentic as Colonial Williamsburg and as diligently cared for–to transport us to an earlier time, our American Eden. The other two images also show us spring’s joy in cultivated trees planted for pleasure. Trees reflect our culture, our communion with nature, without having to retreat to wilderness.

How did you get into taking photographs?
I was interested in and enjoyed trees. It was that interest the got me into photography; the subject preceded the medium. But once I learned how to use the camera, I expanded my subjects. For example, I have spent the last five years doing landscapes evocative of the Hudson River School of painters, among other things. Last year I had a show at Olana, the home and studio of Frederic Edwin Church, one of the founders of the Hudson River School.

When did you start and how did you learn?
I started about nine years ago with film and then moved to digital photography. I largely taught myself, which is the way I like to learn. But teaching yourself requires a lot of reading and many museum visits. It also allows you make a lot of mistakes and to develop bad habits, which you have to watch out for and correct. I find that it is necessary to take a few courses from time to time.

How did you come to exhibit at the Four Seasons?
They had seen the calendars that I have been doing for the Garden over the past five years.

Your photographs are very large, some are 6×9 feet!
Images of trees and forests show very well when they are large. Photographs help you to see structure and form in a way that is difficult to see otherwise. When they are large there is an emotional impact that informs your sense of the divine. It is the way that I see the images when I take them. For me, photography is an emotional experience.

How often do you photograph?
Almost every day, even when it rains and snows. And I am at the Garden at least two or three times a week, following the changes in the light and the seasons.

I understand that you are working on a book with the Garden?
We are doing a book to be called Magnificent Trees of The New York Botanical Garden. We expect that it will be published in 2012, in time for Christmas.

I also understand that the proceeds from the sales of the photographs at the Four Seasons will go to the Garden.
That is correct. The Garden has been an inspiration for me.

When will the exhibit at the Four Seasons begin?
It is up now through  at least June 20, possibly through the end of June. It is in the lobby, which is a landmarked room, and you can visit the exhibit without going upstairs to the restaurant.

Almost better than seeing a packed house full of smiling faces at The Orchid Show: On Broadway is seeing The Orchid Show through your–the visitors’–eyes. That’s one of the amazing things about Twitter, you can instantly show us what you love about The Orchid Show!

So we thought we would show-off some of the beautiful photos that you have been taking inside the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory. Want to be sure we see your shots in the future? It’s simple: Just tag your photo with our Twitter username @nybg. If we get enough shots, we’ll do another twitpic roundup in a week or two.

Photo by MGH500

Photo by Jim Shi

Photo by Irene Majuk

Photo by Renee DeLano

More scenes from the ice storm.

All photos by Ivo M. Vermeulen

Mondays are rough. We understand. So to help you ease into your week, some eye candy of the Garden in fall.

Learn more about spending a day in the country, without ever leaving the city, here.

Visitors to the annual holiday puppet theater production of The Little Engine That Could™, which opens this weekend in the Arthur and Janet Ross Lecture Hall, will enter through the Ross Gallery, where they will be welcomed by The Heirloom Tomato, an exhibition of bold, bright photographic still lifes. Here, Victor Schrager, the award-winning artist behind the images, talks about how he made these magnificent portraits of historic tomato varieties from the gardens of Amy Goldman. The two have collaborated on several books, including the most recent The Heirloom Tomato: From Garden to Table as well as The Compleat Squash: A Passionate Grower’s Guide to Pumpkins, Squashes, and Gourds (2004) and Melons for the Passionate Grower (2002), all available at Shop in the Garden.

Victor Schrager is the photographer featured in the exhibition The Heirloom Tomato.

The shooting to produce Melons for the Passionate Grower took one year. The Compleat Squash was done over two years. The Heirloom Tomato was planned to be much more extensive than either of those: The photographs would have to be done when the fruit were ready, so the photographs were made at all times of day in all kinds of weather. The project eventually lasted five seasons.

It was important to give the work its own unified sense of time and place—a quality I find in the best botanical illustrations and photographs, in vivid distinction to garden catalogs. To achieve this, I used a single artificial light in a studio I made in a barn near Amy Goldman’s garden. So the photographs took place in their own time.

During the first three seasons, I used an 8×10 wooden Deardorff view camera (the kind where you put a dark cloth over the back of the camera to see better to compose); the last two seasons I used a Sinar 4×5 digital view camera—the closest digital approximation to the qualities of the large-format transparencies I had made during the first three seasons and the most similar in use to my film camera. I would like to think you cannot tell which are which.

Various objects—teacups, marble blocks, colanders, spice cans, etc.—were used to put the tomatoes on a pedestal, giving each picture a unique architecture derived from the tomato’s place in domestic life in the kitchen and garden over its long history.