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Inside The New York Botanical Garden

Archive: May 2013

This Weekend: The Native Plant Garden Opens!

Posted in Around the Garden on May 3 2013, by Ann Rafalko

_IVO1776After many years and hundreds of thousand of plants, we’re opening our newest garden to the public, the Native Plant Garden! The Native Plant Garden is a spectacular, 3.5 acre showcase of the beautiful and diverse native plants of northeastern North America, and we’re celebrating all weekend with fun, festivities, music, wine, food, expert tours, workshops, family activities, and more.

Tours will focus on the diversity of plants to be found in the garden and the birds that are already calling it home. Everyone is encouraged to borrow a palette and watercolors and let the Native Plant Garden inspire you or your children to create a masterpiece en plein air. Enjoy folk tunes and bluegrass from the very popular Milton. Shop for native plants and learn from the experts in a series of demos and author book signings.

There’s so much to do in the Native Plant Garden you might be inclined to just stay there and enjoy this beautiful new landscape, but you would be missing out on a wealth of other stunning vistas! Though there are only a few blooms, the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden is once again open for the season, and just above it you will find blooming tree peonies and fragrant stands of lilac. In the Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden, Mario Batali’s Kitchen Gardens have just been planted, and every child is encouraged to plant and play in the rest of the garden beds. In Cherry Valley a few tenacious blooms hold on, while tulips are everywhere in the Perennial Garden, Home Gardening Center, and along Seasonal Walk. In the Herb Garden you will be greeted by a “theater” of adorable and fascinating auricula primroses. The Azalea Garden is just beginning to glow in rosy hues of magenta, shocking pink, and seashell blush. Along Daffodil Hill the daffs are fading a bit, only to be outshone by gorgeous (and fragrant) crabapples. Basically, everywhere you turn there’s another stunning vista!

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Morning Eye Candy: Not a Typo

Posted in Photography on May 3 2013, by Ann Rafalko

I love this tree, a crab apple, near the Mosholu Gate entrance, but I am always worried someone will think I have mistyped its name when I post pictures of it. But I assure you, it’s not a typo. I have checked and checked again and this tree’s name really is ‘Burgandy.’

burgandy1 burgandy2

Photos by Ivo M. Vermeulen

Flora Brasiliensis: How a 19th-Century Flora Continues to Inspire

Posted in Science on May 2 2013, by Scott Mori

Scott A. Mori is the Nathaniel Lord Britton Curator of Botany at the The New York Botanical Garden. His research interests are the ecology, classification, and conservation of tropical rain forest trees. His most recent book is Tropical Plant Collecting: From the Field to the Internet.

Portrait of C. F. von Martius
Portrait of C. F. von Martius

Botanist Alex Popovkin was inspired to carry on the tradition of botanical field work–photographing and collecting plants in Brazil–by one magnificent book , Flora Brasiliensis.

In 1817, the German botanist Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius traveled to Brazil with zoologist Johann Baptist von Spix as part of the wedding party of the Archduchess Leopoldina of Austria. The Archduchess had married the Brazilian Emperor Dom Pedro I, and the naturalists attached to her party were part of her dowry arrangement. Martius and Spix started their natural history explorations in the vicinity of Rio de Janeiro and traveled some 10,000 kilometers in Brazil.

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Morning Eye Candy: Going Dutch

Posted in Around the Garden, Photography on May 1 2013, by Matt Newman

The Native Plant Garden‘s transformation over the last two weeks has put up a spectacle, for sure, but when I ran into Ivo yesterday, he only had eyes for these tiny “pantaloons.” And if his love of these Dutchman’s Breeches didn’t get the point across, his bright orange shirt laid his national pride out for anyone within a mile to see.

Dutchman's Breeches

Dutchman’s Breeches (Dicentra cucullaria) — Photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen