As summer heats up, the Native Plant Garden moves into the height of its beauty. What makes this exquisitely designed showcase of flora native to Northeastern North America particularly stunning is that its beauty is the beauty of our own region.
This ever more colorful collection is a haven for pollinators of all stripes—and spots!—from bees to butterflies. There are many blossoms and types of foliage to admire, from the waving fronds of the shady ferns to the magenta spots of Bush’s poppymallow (Callirhoe bushii) dotting the sunny meadow.
Click through for some eye-popping images from the meadow and elsewhere in the Native Plant Garden!
Nothing beats a walk along the water on a hot day, but there’s no swimming in this pool, no matter how tempting. Beneath the sleek design of the Native Plant Garden is a thriving wetland habitat.
This humid week is finally giving way to a pleasant weekend, and it is the perfect time to visit NYBG! Groundbreakers continues to guide visitors through the monumental history of America’s gardening culture, and the summer season brings more color to the grounds each day.
Don Gabel is NYBG’s Director of Plant Health. He monitors, diagnoses, and prescribes treatments for all the plants growing on the grounds, as well as in NYBG’s beautiful gardens and glass houses. Don educates and provides horticultural advice to the staff as well as teaching the public about different aspects of horticulture. He lives in Rockland county New York.
The other day, a friend asked me how much he should water his plants. And oh boy was that a loaded question. “Sit down,” I said. “This may take a minute.”
Most plant enthusiasts would agree that this is not always such a cut and dry subject. Some plant fanatics even go as far as to us the Best Water Softener Systems in their gardens! What comes to mind is the litany of questions I would want to ask before coming to any sort of conclusion.
Who knew such a sunny flower would go by the name ‘Summer Nights’? But that’s exactly the name of this variety of ox-eye, seen here looking you right in the eye. How will you be spending these lovely summer nights? Tickets are going fast for our next Jazz Age Evening here at the Garden.
Heliopsis helianthoides var. scabra ‘Summer Nights’ along the Perennial Garden – Photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen
The audience asked insightful questions relating to the topic of women as architects and photographers—a topic linked to the Garden-wide exhibitionGroundbreakers. “Cities are the grand challenge of the 21st century, and for over one hundred years women have played a crucial, if under-celebrated, role in shaping and adapting our urban spaces,” explained Thaisa Way (University of Washington, Seattle). This award-winning landscape historian moderated the fascinating morning session that featured four experts in landscape scholarship and practice, including Susannah Drake (Founding Principal, dlandstudio, Brooklyn), Sonja Dümpelmann (Harvard Graduate School of Design), Linda Jewell (University of California Berkeley), and Mary Woods (Cornell University).
Michael Hagen is the NYBG’s Curator of the Native Plant Garden and the Rock Garden. He previously served as Staff Horticulturist for Stonecrop Gardens in Cold Spring, NY and Garden Manager at Rocky Hills, in Mt. Kisco, a preservation project of the Garden Conservancy.
Plymouth Gentian (Sabatia kennedyana)
Summer’s definitive arrival has brought bold sweeps of color across the Native Plant Garden’s Meadow, and with so much in bloom it might be easy to overlook one of the gems of the garden, the delicate pink and white open blooms of Plymouth gentian (Sabatia kennedyana).
By its flower alone, with its delicate rayed petals and yellow and red central markings, you might mistake this flower for an unusually colored Coreopsis or perhaps a daisy, but when you see its tall, upright stems growing where it’s happy—along the wet edge of the pond next to the Boardwalk, or in among bachelor’s buttons (Marshallia grandiflora) and pitcher plants (Sarracenia sp.)—it’s hard not to realize that this beauty is something very special.
Plymouth Gentian has a patchy distribution in the wild, and can be found in just a few sunny spots in wet, open ground along the sandy and peaty shores of coastal streams and lakes from Nova Scotia to South Carolina. It is one of the few species of Sabatia that is reliably perennial among the 18 or so mostly annual or biennial species that are native to North America.
As summer heats up, the Native Plant Garden moves into the height of its beauty. What makes this exquisitely designed showcase of flora native to Northeastern North America particularly stunning is that its beauty is the beauty of our own region.
