The Botanical Garden’s living collections is among the greatest in the world and contains more than 1 million plants. Jon Peter, Plant Records Manager, periodically will shine the spotlight on a particular species that can be found within our 250 acres.
Botanical Name: Liquidambar styraciflua
Common Name(s): Sweetgum
Family Name:Hamamelidaceae (Witch-hazel family)
Native Range: USA—Massachusetts to Florida, west to Illinois and Texas; California;
Mexico to Nicaragua
USDA Hardiness Zones: 5B through 10A
Location(s) within NYBG: Library building lawn, Forest, Native Plant Garden
Site Requirements: Sun to partial shade; well-drained, moist acidic soil; can tolerate extended periods of flooding
Interesting Note: The glossy star-shaped leaves turn a range of colors in autumn, from purple and red to orange and yellow. The tree forms a park-like conical shape and develops thick, deeply furrowed bark. On some trees the twigs grow strange-looking corky bark ridges that add to its winter interest. The unique fruit of the sweetgum attracts an array of birds and other wildlife.
Garden Cleanup Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education at The New York Botanical Garden.
The season is slowly starting to wind down. Many of your annuals and tropical plants that have lived happily through the summer and into the fall are starting to dwindle. Add spent annuals to the compost pile and clean up and store tropical plants that can be either over-wintered on a sunny windowsill or stored in a dormant state in a cool garage.
You will find that you are left with used terra-cotta pots. Rather than being lazy and placing them aside with the unfulfilled promise that you will clean them in the spring, take the time to clean your pots now, while the gardening season is winding down.
By cleaning your pots, your ensure that no disease problems are carried over to the next year. Often, it is as simple as filling the laundry room sink with hot, soapy water (dish soap is fine) and letting them soak. Buy a good, stiff scrub brush for the specific purpose of cleaning your pots, and you will be all set to go.
If you have encountered some serious disease problems over the season, you can sterilize your pots with a 10 percent bleach solution (one part bleach to nine parts warm water). Let them soak for 30 minutes. Gardeners have their own favorite recipes. The important things is that you clean the pots in the fall so that pest and disease problems don’t sit and fester until the spring.
Once you have finished, dry and stack you pots upside down in your garage.
Debbie Becker leads a free bird walk at the Garden every Saturday from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., beginning at the Reflecting Pool in the Leon Levy Visitor Center.
Now that the trees are shedding their leaves, I’ve begun taking the weekly Bird Walk group through the Forest in hopes of seeing the resident great horned owls. Sure enough, a couple of weeks ago we discovered a large great horned owl (GHO) perched on a low branch.
At first we could not decided whether it was the adult male or the adult female of the regular pair. (The male is at left in the photo, taken last year during their courting phase.) Upon closer inspection we decided it was neither; it was one of their offspring. It has been months since the babies fledged the nest. So what was this immature owl still doing in the Forest? Great horned owls reach sexual maturity after two years, but their territoriality begins almost immediately after they learn to feed themselves.
Could it be that the mature male has reached the end of his reign as the only male owl in the Forest? He is, after all, more than 20 years old. That is a long life span for a wild owl (captive GHOs can live up to 30 years), although the owl pairs in Pelham Bay Park and Van Cortlandt Park have been breeding for almost the same amount of time. Human encroachment has given them a unique domain: The highways and complexes around our forests have created a closed habitat, ensuring enough food, safety from many predators, and a long life span.
The time comes for all creatures when they get too old to go on or they are pushed out by the next generation. Observing the younger owl in the Forest saddened me and the birders on the tour, as we know it could only mean one thing: Our resident great horned owls may be pushed out by a more vibrant male that will take over the Garden’s Forest and begin looking for his own mate. It is a somber time for the resident birders. We are all getting older and in danger of being replaced by someone fresher and younger. Sadly, to everything there is a season, even for the great horned owls of The New York Botanical Garden.
Join us on Saturdays at 11 a.m. to look for the great horned owls and other birds of the Garden.
Learn more about the Garden’s resident great horned owls after the jump.
The polls have closed and the final results are in. Voters have made their choice. Time to announce the results of…our Kiku Poll!
Two weeks ago, we asked visitors to select their favorite kiku style and the race was tight. It seems all four display styles have their fans. In an extremely close survey, the dramatic single-stemmed ogiku pulled an upset, coming from behind for the win, earning 30 percent of the votes. In a very close second place was the dome-shaped ozukuri, with 28 percent. The new style, shino tsukuri, and the cascading kengai were tied for third, both with a respectable 21 percent.
Thanks to everyone who took the time to vote in our fun little election. Be sure to see the displays in real life by visiting Kiku: The Art of the Japanese Chrysanthemum, which runs through November 16. This video gives you a preview of what you’ll enjoy.
Love of Plants Is Natural for this Author John Suskewich is Book Manager for Shop in the Garden.
We’ve always wanted to salute the body of work of Ken Druse, one of our very best garden writers; so the upcoming release of his latest book, Planthropology, was all the trigger we needed to schedule a booksigning here at Shop in the Garden on November 8, from 2 to 4 p.m.
Through his lectures, journalism, books, and designs, Ken has advocated a style of gardening that combines the beautiful and the ecological in a unique and important way. Long before the concept of “green gardening” was born, he was emphasizing an earth-sensitive design and horticulture that has increased in relevance exponentially over the years. Look at the titles of his books as he created this template: The Natural Garden, The Natural Habitat Garden, The Natural Shade Garden. He makes his case with an elegant, accessible prose voice and his own beautiful photography.
Planthropology: The Myths, Mysteries, and Miracles of My Garden Favorites is more plant centered and personal than his previous books. It encompasses history, botany, folklore, horticulture, and medicine, and illustrates the concept behind the neologism with a series of stories about plants and explorers, scientists, neighbors, artists, lost relatives, obsessive-compulsives, insects, and the author himself. Some of the plants he studies are the poppy, dove tree, fig, orchid, daphne, ginkgo, and one of my current favorites, the lore-laden Franklinia.
He emphasizes the “plantyness” of gardening in this book, because I think he senses with some alarm that, as technology and culture develop, the bonds that have always tied people and nature together are being pressured and pulled and might snap permanently. Toward the end of the book, he refers to the metastasizing condition of “plant blindness.” He recalls in a story about a Victorian girl’s childhood that not so long ago kids encountered nature naturally, as part of their daily lives, but especially in their play. In other books he has recollected his own ’50s suburban youth of walking in the woods and finding plants and building forts in oak trees. (That you inevitably fell out of and scraped your elbow and your mother sprayed you with vermilion Mercurochrome.) How differently we grow up today! Instead of becoming a naturalist and writer, Thoreau could have been joined to a joystick playing Grand Theft Auto for hours on end.
The New York Botanical Garden is a plant museum with a mission, and that is to make sure we preserve and protect not just the physical world of plants, which we do through our programs of research and conservation, but also to show that love of nature (what the naturalist Edward O. Wilson calls biophilia) is a fundamental part of our humanity. And that we do through our visitor experience of which Shop in the Garden (all the staff here are proud to say) is very much a part. So it is fitting that we have our fellow plant lover Ken Druse and his new book Planthropology here this season. We look forward to seeing you when you come to meet him on November 8!
Fall Container Candidates Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education at The New York Botanical Garden.
The classics for fall containers tend to be mums (Minnesota has come out with a wonderful series of cushion mums) and ornamental grasses. If you would like to spice them up with something new, why not add some Bergenia (pigsqueak) or winter heaths and heathers?
Heathers (Calluna vulgaris) have wonderful foliage that comes in many shades of green, gray, gold, copper and orange. Heathers tend to flower in summer through the late fall and love full sun and good drainage. Winter heaths (Erica carnea)—as the name suggests—flowers in the winter months. The foliage tends not to be as spectacular as heathers but still come in colorful choices. They can handle partial shade but prefer full sun like their counterparts.
A good candidate for bergenias is a cultivar called Bergenia ‘Bressingham Ruby’. It has burgundy fall foliage and fares well in sun or shade. Pair it with a colorful sedge such as Carex oshimensis ‘Evergold’ for a striking container arrangement. If you are looking for some height in the container, Sedum ‘Autumn Fire’ is a slightly more compact version of the ubiquitous Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’, whose spent blooms remain standing for most of the winter for great late-season interest.
The polls have closed and the final results are in. Voters have made their choice. Time to announce the results of…our Kiku Poll!
We’ve always wanted to salute the body of work of Ken Druse, one of our very best garden writers; so the upcoming release of his latest book, Planthropology, was all the trigger we needed to schedule 
