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Plant Talk

Inside The New York Botanical Garden

Matt Newman

The Orchid Show Warms Up

Posted in Around the Garden, Exhibitions, The Orchid Show on March 9 2012, by Matt Newman

Much ado about the weather this week. Yesterday was a mid-spring day borrowed straight from early May, sending most of our office staff into ecstatic fits. I’m all but convinced one or two of us were out on the grass, belting out celebratory verses from The Sound of Music. Today it’s a bit cooler, of course. But with the warm sun and a promise of picturesque afternoons for Saturday and Sunday, winter seems all but out the door.

The dogwood is blooming, the crocuses are bright, and the Orchid Show is settling into the groove for its second big weekend. This is the perfect opportunity to hop a subway train to the Bronx and treat yourself to Patrick Blanc’s Vertical Gardens. But even if orchids aren’t your thing (a rare condition, albeit understandable), the schedule is packed with activities to suit.

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Neotropical Blueberries

Posted in Around the Garden, The Orchid Show on March 8 2012, by Matt Newman

Ceratostema silvicola (Photo courtesy of Meri Shaffer)

Far south in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, where the sandy flats aren’t struck through with creeks, you’ll find parcels of land dedicated to row upon row of scraggly bush. It’s the antithesis of a tropical landscape; like large-scale agriculture in the midwest, the skies over these tended fields are big and empty, with the occasional conifer contorting itself under and around a telephone wire near the bordering dirt roads. The pine woods sit further off.

In the winter it’s a vacant space save for the blueberry bushes. But these berries have a relative of a more tropical disposition. Perhaps not down in southern Jersey, but here in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, certainly.

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Eye of the Needle

Posted in Around the Garden, People, Photography on March 7 2012, by Matt Newman

The blog staff first happened upon Joel Kroin crouched at the entrance to the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden, a coffee pot in hand, cutting a peculiar figure as he went about his work so intently. Not only an NYBG Member but a horticulturist and artist, Joel’s interests carry him often between the greenhouse and the studio. He recently reconnected with us to share some of his latest photography.

His coffee pot (actually a makeshift pinhole camera) has since been replaced with a purpose-built wooden model, one that resembles an old-fashioned camera well enough to avoid any suspicion. “Certainly, the Garden staff have been less curious about what I am doing!” Joel says.

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Fifth Annual IGPOTY Competition Raises the Bar

Posted in Photography on March 5 2012, by Matt Newman

As we get down to brass tacks in the Caribbean Garden photography contest, our partners across the pond are already stumping for their next round of entries. And with the caliber of winning participants recently unveiled, those looking to become the next International Garden Photographer of the Year find themselves up against stiff and startlingly talented competition.

2011’s IGPOTY proceedings pulled skillful nature photographers out of the woodwork. Be it through painstaking preparation or the luck of being in the right place at just the right moment, many of the images captured by the multinational list of participants are almost unconscionable in their beauty. Gritty, ethereal, preternaturally real–the winning selections call up these descriptors among others. It’s a smorgasbord of aesthetic eye candy reaching toward the peak of the artform.

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