Inside The New York Botanical Garden
Posted in Around the Garden, Photography on October 28 2012, by Matt Newman
Breaking up the Halloween…ness? …with some refreshing fall finds from the Native Plant Garden. We’re still photographing these behind a closed gate for now, but you can trust in my promise that this complex collection of displays and environments will be bliss central when it opens in 2013.
Photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen
Posted in Around the Garden, Photography on October 27 2012, by Matt Newman
Oh, why hello there witch-hazel. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?
Hamamelis virginiana — Photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen
Posted in Around the Garden on October 26 2012, by Matt Newman
Thanksgiving has it so easy. It’s on the same day every year, and close enough to the weekend that you can plan to party around the table until the wee hours (barring a completely bonkers Black Friday schedule). But Halloween? Not so much. We’re usually left to the mercy of the calendar, and this October’s schedule lands the night of spooks and specters square in the middle of the work week. Hump day isn’t exactly party central for most New Yorkers, and it’s a school night for your mini monsters. But that shouldn’t dampen your spirits! This weekend, October 26 through 28, the NYBG holds its own ghoulish galas to mark the occasion a little early.
Our Spooky Nighttime Adventures ramp up as of this Friday night, marking the start of trick-or-treating, arts and crafts, and exploring the creepiest aspects of the Garden after dark–all in a safe environment for your kids to romp around. The Haunted Pumpkin Garden will be in its element, and that’s not to mention the horde of skulking harvester zombies carved into life by Ray Villafane this past weekend. Don’t forget to register for tickets–we’re extremely close to selling out for every single evening, and our limited nightly offering of walk-up tickets is far from guaranteed with such high demand!
Posted in Around the Garden, Photography on October 26 2012, by Matt Newman
They really do laugh uncontrollably and without cause while working in the Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden. Well, all right, Ivo was probably telling a patently terrible joke at the time this photo was taken. Here’s a big thanks and hello to Annie Novak and Toby Adams, whose tireless efforts have kept us knee-deep in vegetables all through the summer and into fall. They’re buttoning up the Family Garden’s edible options until spring, but we’ll be waiting patiently for the next harvest!
Photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen
Posted in What's Beautiful Now on October 25 2012, by Matt Newman
We gush over green for so much of the year that a quick break from the norm is more than welcome. So this week, I’m shifting focus for something a little more in line with the exuberance of the Halloween season, a hue that our resident photographer, Ivo Vermeulen, is all too willing to champion–at least if his favorite pair of garish pants has anything to say about it. I’d show you a picture but I’m under the impression we had to put a ban in writing to keep him from blinding visitors (though it certainly doesn’t stifle this Dutchman’s nationalism). In any case, it’s tough to live year-round in the northeast and not have at least the shadow of a soft spot for the fiery orange of autumn.
The changes around the NYBG are not always subtle. The tulip trees have slipped into their lemon yellows, and the boughs fringing the Forest follow suit with a citrus spectrum of their own. In the Home Gardening Center, neon orange chrysanthemums carry the torch for the flowers. It won’t be long now before we’re walking the Garden trails beneath an entirely different canopy, one splashed with all the painted warmth that winter tends to be so stingy with. But for now, we’ll take in all this early orange wonder while the weather’s still playing nice enough to leave our galoshes and down coats stuffed in the closet.
Posted in Around the Garden on October 25 2012, by Matt Newman
Elbow deep in a mound of pumpkin guts, wrenching out the last of that stringy pulp you’ll spend the next day fishing out of your hair? Probably not the best time to ponder the history of the jack o’ lantern. But once your squashy horror is grinning from your porch, peering out the kitchen window, or waiting for some hooligan or other to smash it on the driveway, take a moment and think: who actually came up with this bizarre Halloween tradition? While the NYBG is rolling out its own orange horrors courtesy of Ray Villafane, carving out this story means hopping a boat across the Atlantic to greener pastures, a place older and somewhat more partial to ghost stories (and dark, delicious stouts) than the United States.
If you guessed Ireland, you’ve got the pumpkin pegged. Or should I say turnip? As historical records tell it (there are still plenty of arguments on who inspired what), the holiday tradition of carving up starchy vegetables dates back generations in Ireland. But there was no train of cargo ships itching to haul the North American pumpkin to the shores of the Emerald Isle, as I’m sure you can gather. Instead, the Irish hollowed out their local root vegetables, adorned them with frightful faces, and lit them with embers or candles, a fall tradition brought out during Samhain–or “Sawin,” a fanciful celebration to mark the end of the fall harvest and the beginning of winter in the British Isles.
Posted in Around the Garden, Photography on October 25 2012, by Matt Newman
Meanwhile, the evergreens prep for their stint in the winter spotlight. Our Forest doesn’t need Photoshopped lens flares to look this good.
Photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen
Posted in Around the Garden, Photography on October 24 2012, by Matt Newman
November’s Fall Forest Weekends aren’t far off. Flip your calendar to next month and block off November 3, 4, 10, and 11 to join us in exploring what makes autumn in New York such a poignant experience. That said, you might want to register for our featured canoe trips through the Garden’s stretch of the Bronx River sooner, rather than later…
Photo by Pat Gonzalez
Posted in Programs and Events on October 23 2012, by Matt Newman
Ahhh, the comforting vignettes of fall’s arrival: the Grand Allée‘s tulip trees tinged with gold, families touring the Garden in matching jackets, a ravenous horde of pumpkin patch ghouls dragging themselves up from their earthen tombs.
Er, yeah, we place the blame firmly on Ray Villafane and his cadre of spooky sculptors for that last one.
In the midst of our Halloween month (because why would you ever celebrate the most frightful holiday of the year for only a single night?), we continue on with another fall tradition that hits each week through November 21: the Wednesday Greenmarket! Bearing in mind the ongoing creepfest in the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden and elsewhere at the NYBG, you’ll of course find piles of pumpkins and seasonal gourds to decorate your porch. But there are also plenty of fall favorites to keep on your list that you’re not obliged to carve into jack o’ lanterns, because one cannot live on pumpkin pie alone–at least not for more than a week or two.
Posted in Around the Garden, Photography on October 23 2012, by Matt Newman
We once said that the mustachioed orchids of the Paphiopedilum genus remind us of the Swedish Chef, but official names occasionally give other impressions.
Paph. Pinocchio — Photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen