Don Eliseo Trinidad receives the community service award
Last Wednesday, September 21, NYBG celebrated Hispanic Heritage Month at our annual Fiesta de Flores event.
Guests enjoyed tours of the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at the height of its fall bloom, while the historic Stone Mill offered food and wine tastings, live fine art painting, floral arranging workshops, artisan vendors, musical entertainment, and a Bomba dance ensemble.
The highlight of the day came when Don Eliseo Trinidad was presented with this year’s community service award. As an NYBG community partner and the owner of La 21 Division, a botanica on the Grand Concourse, Don Eliseo was honored for his dedication and caring for the well-being of the Bronx community with medicinal plants. Ina Vandebroek, Ph.D., Assistant Curator of Economic Botany and Caribbean Program Director at NYBG, presented the award.
Esther Jackson is the Public Services Librarian at NYBG’s LuEsther T. Mertz Library where she manages Reference and Circulation services and oversees the Plant Information Office. She spends much of her time assisting researchers, providing instruction related to library resources, and collaborating with NYBG staff on various projects related to Garden initiatives and events.
With photographs by Richard Hanson, Writer’s Garden is a very thoughtful and lovely book. Bennett explores the gardens and estates of 19 authors in the United Kingdom. The authors themselves—English, Irish, Scottish, or American by birth—left their marks in the form of their gardens on the British landscape. Bennett is an engaging tour-guide through the landscapes that shaped their works, inspired their art, and became their homes. Using an individual’s garden as a way of telling his or her story is indeed a popular device. At The New York Botanical Garden, there have been several garden-wide exhibitions around this theme. Most recently, FRIDA KAHLO: Art, Garden, Life in 2015, which followed Monet’s Garden of 2012, Emily Dickinson’s Garden: The Poetry of Flowers of 2010, and Darwin’s Garden: An Evolutionary Adventure of 2009.
Larry Lederman‘s lens takes you to the Garden when you can’t be there and previews what to see when you can.
This week, Lederman’s Lens takes us through the Home Gardening Center and straight on to the Ladies’ Border, stopping at the Herb Garden on the way, where contrasting elements of picturesque, playful flowers and structured foliage create a theme of order and flair. Soft-profiled dahlias and clematis complement the more rigid elements of cardoon and yucca, offering the best of both aesthetics.
Organized chaos has its charms, as the authors of Cultivating Chaos: How to Enrich Landscapes with Self-Seeding Plants are eager to extol. There is both an anxiety and a freedom that comes with allowing garden plants to live out their life cycles unmolested—setting seeds and dropping them from cradle to grave and back again. In Chaos’s introduction, Noel Kingsbury writes of using self-seeding plants to establish and encourage a more full and vibrant ecological system in the garden. In the pages that follow, the authors take up this idea and expand upon the theme.
Part of embracing “chaos” in the garden requires letting go. When planting communities that are intended to be self-seeding, the gardener should, in theory, release some control. There might be a plan in mind, but there should also be a willingness to see what the plants do when left to their own devices. The gardener might only work to remove undesirable plants and to fill in gaps when different species die off.
Chaos has a great deal of practical advice for the home gardener. The book is divided into four sections, plus a resources section. “How do you garden with self-seeding plants?,” “Let the planting begin,” “Strategies for design and maintenance,” and “Plants for self-seeding gardens” take the home gardener through the process of using self-seeding plants from start to finish. Gorgeous photographs of different gardens adorn the book’s pages throughout the narrative.
Admire the blossoms yourself this weekend as you sample craft beers and ciders to the sounds of live bluegrass and blues! Blues, Brews & Botany will explore the botanical side of beer, with expert-led demonstrations of the plant science behind your favorite beers. Visitors get a souvenir tasting Tumbler—but supplies are limited so be sure buy your ticket online in advance.
This weekend also marks the debut of Scarecrows & Pumpkins! The Everett Children’s Adventure Garden comes alive with a festive display of friendly scarecrows set among rare and unusual pumpkins and gourds. Sculptor Ray Villafane brings a spooky installation of scarecrows along the Mitsubishi Wild Wetland Trail, an entirely new display from our favorite Halloween artist.
View scenes from the Garden below and plan your first outing of the new season to NYBG!
Larry Lederman‘s lens takes you to the Garden when you can’t be there and previews what to see when
you can.
The approach of fall in the Garden brings with it the revitalization of one of our most classically scenic collections, the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden, where hundreds of cultivars revisit the colors of spring with a second bloom in September.
Together, the two collections are the perfect escape in late summer, an opportunity to soak in the best of both flowers and foliage before the transitions of fall arrive. Here, Larry Lederman spotlights his favorite aspects of each from recent trips through the Garden.
Sometimes one comes across a landscape design book that simply demands to be read from cover to cover without pause. Planting in a Post-Wild World is one such book. Part ecological manifesto, part how-to planting guide, and part artistic statement, Post-Wild is a wonderful and refreshing addition to the world of landscape and planting design literature.
Thomas Rainer and Claudia West are co-authors of Post-Wild. Rainer is a registered landscape architect, teacher, and writer, and West is a landscape designer, lecturer, and consultant. Both work in the U.S., but in the evocative preface each writes of the very different beginnings of their understanding of the wild.
Recently, The Wall Street Journal examined an obscure and surprising piece of New York’s botanical history that began right here at NYBG nearly 80 years ago—the Bronx Seedless table grape, a species of the common fruit hybridized in the 1930s by one of NYBG’s most prolific scientists, Dr. Arlow B. Stout. Sophia Hollander interviewed Stephen Sinon, the LuEsther T. Mertz Library’s Head of Special Collections, Research, and Archives, to learn more about this obscure grape species and the enormous impact it had before fading into obscurity—and near extinction.
In addition to his groundbreaking research into avocado plants and hybridizing many new daylily species that continue to delight visitors to the Garden each summer, Dr. Stout partnered with Cornell University’s New York State Agricultural Experiment Stationto make a better grape. Seedless, tasty, and hardy, the end result of “more than 20 years tinkering with grape genetics” was the Bronx grape, named for its home borough. Cultivation of this species faded over time. While not successful as a commercial crop, all seedless grapes that we enjoy today are descended from this Bronx native, the result of NYBG’s commitment to plant science and conservation that continues to be one of our core values.
Now, from the brink of disappearing altogether, this species is being rediscovered as a source of local pride and historic interest. Click here to read the Wall Street Journal article (subscription required) and learn about Dr. Stout’s remarkable life. NYBG has always endeavored to teach people about where their food comes from—sometimes the answer is closer than you think!
