Father’s Day Celebration Also Features BBQ and More
Bob Heinisch is Vice President for Site Operations at The New York Botanical Garden.
When people think of the Bronx, the thought of first-class institutions comes to mind. Two of the biggest in the borough, The New York Botanical Garden and the New York Yankees, have enjoyed a good relationship over the years. We’ve had appearances at our annual Holiday Tree Lighting ceremony by former Yankees such as Willie Randolph, Joe Pepitone, John Flaherty, and Bernie Williams, and most recently, the display of the 2009 World Series Trophy on Mother’s Day at our Shop in the Garden. (That’s me holding the trophy in the photo.)
On Father’s Day this year, Sunday, June 20, we’ll add another player to our roster as former Yankee Roy White comes to the Garden, from 1 to 3 p.m., for a casual talk and to sign copies of his book Then Roy Said to Mickey…: The Best Yankees Stories Ever Told, which will be available for sale.
A two-time member of the American League All-Star Team and a member of two world championship teams, Roy has been characterized as “a quiet, dignified man who led by example…[and] achieved popularity with fans and peers alike due to his classy, respectful, team-first attitude, and his subtle, momentous achievements.”
During an incredible 15-year career (1965–79) with the Yankees, he bridged the gap between the era of 1960s superstars Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, and Elston Howard and the superstars of the 1970s, Thurman Munson, Willie Randolph, and Reggie Jackson.
Don’t miss this opportunity to meet Roy White, whose appearance coincides with The Edible Garden’s first festival weekend, Get Out and Grill. This two-day celebration also features a Sunday BBQ perfect for Father’s Day.
Discuss Research, Learn About Plant World in Casual Setting
James S. Miller, Ph.D., is Dean and Vice President for Science and Rupert Barneby Curator for Botanical Science.
During The Edible Garden, which opens this weekend and runs through October 17, visitors will have the opportunity to gather with some of the Botanical Garden’s scientists in a casual setting known as Café Scientifique. Begun in Leeds, England, in 1998, Café Scientifique is an informal meeting that brings together the public and scientists to discuss science in familiar terms.
Today the Café Scientifique idea has spread well beyond the borders of the United Kingdom. The Garden has presented these in the past, and this summer and fall will host 18 such events over four weekends, with the first set scheduled this Saturday and Sunday at 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. both days in the Garden Cafe.
Garden research staff, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students will talk about the research and conservation they pursue worldwide—from Latin America to Micronesia and our own backyard—and share with those who attend a greater understanding of the plant world and the efforts under way to conserve plant diversity. They will discuss a wide variety of research topics, such as the exploration of poorly known regions to discover, describe, and name new species of plants; how various plant groups are related and their evolutionary history; and the genetic basic for why plants have different structural features.
Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education. Join her each weekend for home gardening demonstrations on a variety of topics.
Every year around Memorial Day weekend or shortly thereafter we observe the ritual of rooting through our kitchen drawers on a mission to find and inspect the condition of our barbeque paraphernalia. We locate the barbeque fork, the long-handled tongs, the broad spatula, and the tattered basting brush.
For gardeners the ritual starts well before Memorial Day, and by the end of May or early June preparations for the seasonal grilling fests are in full motion. Garlic was lovingly planted in the fall, perennial herbs were groomed in mid-April, and annual herbs and vegetables were started from seed indoors around February or March and popped into the ground as transplants starting in April and running into June.
If you’ll be spending weekends and evenings standing over the grill, you will want to grow plants that aid in this culinary endeavor. Sometimes the choices are easy. Sometimes the choices are easy. Gilbertie’s Herb Gardens has come out with a line of herbs that were destined for marinades and skewers. (Herb plants from Gilbertie’s are sold at Shop in the Garden).
On the front line is the rosemary with the cultivar name ‘Barbeque’. It is a handsome, deep-green, upright, and incredibly tasty specimen. Other good options are ‘Sal’s choice’ (named after the owner) and ‘Tuscan Blue’. Oregano is also an essential herb for the grill. I grew a cultivar named ‘Hot and Spicy’ last year whose kick was phenomenal.
Celebrated poet Joyce Carol Oates and biographer Lyndall Gordon are among the esteemed poets and authors who will read their favorite Dickinson poems and discuss how she inspired their own work in the last installment of the poetry series My Emily Dickinson, co-sponsored by the Poetry Society of America.
Visitors can participate in a marathon reading of themed Dickinson’s poems relating to death, bees, roses, flowers, birds, and trees.
Dickinson scholar Judith Farr, author of The Gardens of Emily Dickinson, presents a lecture and slide show, Emily Dickinson in “Eden”: The Spring Garden.
Tour Dickinson’s Victorian Homestead re-created in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory and stroll along garden paths reading some of Dickinson’s most famous works near the flowers that inspired them in the Perennial Garden. This video gives you a peek at the exhibition.
And remember, the Gallery exhibition in the LuEsther T. Mertz Library, which gives an interactive perspective of Dickinson’s life through photographs, watercolors, manuscripts, her virtual herbarium, and her white dress fis on through August 1.
New Varieties Shine as English Grower and Garden Awarded this Weekend
Michael Marriott is Technical Director at David Austin® Roses, where he has worked for over 25 years.
The Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden is quite simply one of the very best rose gardens in the world, and so I am always very keen to have our new varieties planted there. The curator of the rose garden, Peter Kukielski, has been very generous with his allocation of space to the David Austin English Roses, with long stretches of them in the beds on either side of the garden’s entrance.
Each year David Austin Roses introduces several new varieties, and, hopefully, Peter will find space for three or four plants of each variety. Our latest introductions are Princess Alexandra of Kent, Young Lycidas, Wisley 2008, Sir John Betjeman, and Munstead Wood.
Princess Alexandra of Kent (above, right) is a particularly impressive variety with very large, full-petaled flowers that are a warm, glowing pink. They have a wonderful tea fragrance, which develops into lemon and, later, hints of black currant. It makes an attractive bushy shrub of about four feet tall.
Young Lycidas also has large impressive flowers but they are a much deeper color, being a wonderful blend of deep magenta, pink, and red. The outer petals tend toward light-purple, although, interestingly, this is in contrast to the outside of the petals, which are quite silvery. The growth is bushy, the stems tending to arch in a most attractive way. There is delicious fragrance that starts as pure tea but then changes to a blend of tea and old rose, with intriguing hints of cedarwood.
Wisley 2008 (left) has smaller flowers, but they are perfectly formed, the petals arranged in a rosette. The color is absolutely pure soft-pink, the color fading perhaps just a little toward the outside. It is quite vigorous and very bushy and makes a very good landscaping rose. The fragrance is fresh and fruity with hints of raspberry and tea.
Sir John Betjeman is quite modern in appearance, the color being a bright deep-pink and intensifying with age. It flowers particularly freely and has a very bushy habit. The fragrance is light and rather “green.”
Munstead Wood is arguably the most obviously attractive of the group. The flowers are large and a deep-velvety crimson, with a strong old-rose fragrance with hints of blackberry, blueberry, and damson. It will stay a compact rose even in the warmer parts of the United States.
Please do visit the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden—it is superb. You can see the whole range of roses, and they are most beautifully looked after.
This weekend in New York, at its 10th annual conference, the Great Rosarians of the World™ will honor world-renowned hybridizer of English Roses David Austin and present its 2010 Rose Garden Hall of Fame Award to the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden. Come to the Botanical Garden on Saturday, June 12, for a lecture series on growing sustainable roses and for a reception in the Rose Garden. Through July 1, 2010, vote for the Rockefeller Rose Garden as American’s Best Garden.
See Life More Leisurely Through Botanical Illustration Study
Rose Marie James is an instructor in the Garden’s Botanical Art and Illustration program.
What started me thinking about what I call “slow art” is my affinity for “slow food” (I must confess to a McDonald’s fix on occasion). Engaging in the preparation of food is a more meaningful experience for me than driving through a pick-up window or popping something into the microwave.
Knowing what a bean looks like before it gets cut up, handling a whole head of lettuce that needs washing and tearing into bite-size pieces, trimming the greens and roots from a beet before cooking remind me that I am connected to and rely on plants to thrive. Additionally, eating food that is carefully prepared is both satisfying and delicious.
That same kind of connection between process and result is the reason I love working as a botanical artist, and have, therefore, come to see it as “slow art.”
It contrasts with the work I have done as a graphic designer in promotional advertising, where everything has to be done in a hurry. Using the computer to this purpose just amplifies the frenzy, leaving time for little but making things look good.
Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education. Join her each weekend for home gardening demonstrations on a variety of topics in the Home Gardening Center.
Many cool or early season crops such as radishes, beets, lettuces, and peas are easy to sow from seed.
In mid-May I harvested the radishes I’m shown sowing in early April in the video. I recently completed a second sowing for harvest in 4-6 weeks.
“A step like a pattering child’s in entry & in glided a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair . . . in a very plain & exquisitely white pique & a blue net worsted shawl.” This description Thomas Wentworth Higginson sent to his wife in 1870 has been pinned to Emily Dickinson for nearly 150 years. Mabel Loomis Todd heard about “the character” of Amherst almost as soon as she set foot in town in 1881: She “seems to be the climax of all the family oddity. . . . She dresses wholly in white, & her mind is said to be perfectly wonderful.” (Photo: Emily Dickinson dress, ca. 1878–82; white dress (reproduction), Emily Dickinson Museum Collection. Original, Amherst History Museum collection)
These contemporary accounts have fixed a compelling image through the decades of, well, oddity. Poetic genius is different from the norm. But odd, isn’t it, that the only full garment known to have belonged to Emily Dickinson and surviving to the present day is one white dress? This iconic garment belongs to the Amherst Historical Society, an exact replica is always on display at the Dickinson Homestead (now part of the Emily Dickinson Museum) in Amherst, and now one is on view in the LuEsther T. Mertz Library Gallery as part of the exhibition Emily Dickinson’s Garden: The Poetry of Flowers.
Gallery Exhibition Delves into Poet’s Love of Nature
Judith Farr is Professor Emerita of English and American Literature at Georgetown University and author of The Passion of Emily Dickinson and The Gardens of Emily Dickinson.
It is not widely known that our great American poet Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) was a practiced gardener before she became an accomplished poet. She joined her gentle mother tending the classic contents of a cottage garden—roses, cyclamen, lobelia, tulips, and more—at only 12 years of age while her training under the famous New England educator Edward Hitchcock taught her the elements of botany in childhood.
Indeed, nearly half of Dickinson’s lyrical letters to family and chosen friends and over one-third of her brilliantly idiosyncratic poems appeal to nature for the images and themes that render them incisive and unforgettable. Only a few of Emily Dickinson’s poems were printed during her lifetime but many people remembered receiving one of them, often tucked into an exquisite bouquet that she had grown and arranged herself.
Therefore, it is fitting that The New York Botanical Garden presents Emily Dickinson in her reciprocal roles as Poet and Gardener in its exhibition Emily Dickinson’s Garden: The Poetry of Flowers. While an array of the flowers about which she wrote blooms outdoors at the Garden, the LuEsther T. Mertz Library Gallery showcases materials designed to introduce visitors to the life and art of Emily Dickinson. The Gallery Exhibition, which will run to August 1, is built around several significant themes in Dickinson’s life, such as her childhood, her gardening, and her poetry.
When people think of the Bronx, the thought of first-class institutions comes to mind. Two of the biggest in the borough, The New York Botanical Garden and the New York Yankees, have enjoyed a good relationship over the years. We’ve had appearances at our annual Holiday Tree Lighting ceremony by former Yankees such as Willie Randolph, Joe Pepitone, John Flaherty, and Bernie Williams, and most recently, the display of the 2009 World Series Trophy on Mother’s Day at our Shop in the Garden. (That’s me holding the trophy in the photo.)
A two-time member of the American League All-Star Team and a member of two world championship teams, Roy has been characterized as “a quiet, dignified man who led by example…[and] achieved popularity with fans and peers alike due to his classy, respectful, team-first attitude, and his subtle, momentous achievements.”
