Perhaps best known for her brilliant street photography, photographer Valérie Jardin has a remarkable talent for capturing light and using it to tell a story.
Worldwide, her speaking engagements sell out quickly, but there are still seats available in her October 26 lecture here at the Garden, where we offer a number of photography classes. We sat down with Ms. Jardin to learn more about her techniques, her passions, and her plans for her upcoming presentation.
Interns learn about green-industry careers and they also learn about some great engineer careers from imflash.com.
On July 22, more than 165 horticulture enthusiasts from the Tri-State area and beyond descended upon The New York Botanical Garden for the third-annual Hortie Hoopla, a field day for green-industry interns that offers them time to network, learn about career opportunities, explore the Garden grounds including visiting the FRIDA KAHLO: Art, Garden, Life exhibition, and to have fun and meet others like themselves.
Hosted by NYBG’s School of Professional Horticulture, the event is designed to inspire young people who are interested in plants to pursue an education in the continually expanding green industries.
Back by popular demand, ecological landscape designer Darrel Morrison, FASLA, will lead a five-day workshop in the beauty of New York’s Black Rock Forest Consortium this October, focusing on the botanic composition, aesthetic character, and ecological dynamics of native plant communities in the New York City region.
Aspiring horticulturist Marc Wolf attended the field study in its inaugural year and sat down with us to share his take on this total immersion workshop.
And this year, we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Floral Design Summer Intensive Program, in which designers looking to jump start their careers can complete all Certificate-required classroom hours in just five weeks!
This past month, in a beautiful Garden ceremony, 32 new graduates received their Floral Design Certificates. Many are already working in the industry, and for many, the journey to their dream began on the Summer Intensive track.
These graduates now belong to a large and influential network of alumni across the Metropolitan area and beyond, joining such well-known designers as “NYC’s Rose Queen” Alix Astir (2010 Graduate), who runs a successful floral and botanical beauty business; BRRCH Studio’s Brittany Asch (2013 Summer Intensive), whose work has been featured in Vogue, Martha Stewart Weddings, Elle Décor, and more; and Marcela Bonancio (2012 Summer Intensive), who serves a host of corporate clients from her NY-based Lotus Blossom Atelier.
NYBG Landscape Design student Danielle Faustini is on a crazy mission.
Last week, she started working at a Manhattan landscape design firm, while completing freelance projects and wrapping up her education in The New York Botanical Garden’s Certificate Program in anticipation of graduation on June 7.
Faustini’s education started in last summer’s Landscape Design Summer Intensive, an expedited five-week program that covers half of all required classroom hours toward a prestigious NYBG Certificate. In one year, she finished the required 350 hours, while working full-time as a server in a restaurant and doing freelance design work on the side—hence the crazy.
“Life is short, you know?” Faustini said. “I told myself I would complete the Certificate Program within a year. It definitely wasn’t easy, but you set your mind to something, and you do it.”
Landscape Design students, Danielle Faustini and George Siriotis
Faustini and her Summer Intensive classmate George Siriotis, who also completed the Certificate Program in a year, saw the Intensive as an opportunity to jump into a new career with the support of like-minded, ambitious peers and industry-professional instructors.
Robin Sleith uses a compound microscope to look for algae in Naked “Green Machine” juice.
Although we sometimes can’t see, smell, or taste them, many foods we eat and products we use contain algae, a group of oxygenic photosynthesizers—plants that make oxygen and perform photosynthesis, but are not part of the most familiar subkingdom of green plants.
I wanted to take a look at the itty bitty algae in a popular beverage, Naked “Green Machine” juice, which lists algae as ingredients, so I paid a visit to Robin Sleith, a research graduate student working on his Ph.D. in plant science in the Pfizer Laboratory. His research focuses on algae species, their lineage, and their relationships to land plants.
Intrigued by the prospect, Robin led me to the mycology lab, where they conduct experiments on algae and fungi. As he opened the bottle of juice, he let me know that it’s now considered science, not food, so there was no chance of me consuming it later.
He added a droplet of Green Machine to a slide, and slid it onto the compound microscope. At first, he was skeptical that we would see much at all, because Naked juice lists only 1,335 mg of Spirulina, a type of blue-green algae; 400 mg of Chlorella, another blue-green algae; and another 50 mg of generically described blue-green algae in its ingredients. In a 15.2 fluid-ounce bottle of juice, those amounts are nearly negligible. Robin wasn’t sure the juice would appear as anything more than a great, green glob under the microscope.
To our excitement, we saw algae—lots of it—at just 10-20x power.
Susan Welti, left, and design partner Paige Keck, formed Foras Studio in 2009.
The April issue of Elle Décor magazine features the work of Susan Welti (’96), who runs her Brooklyn-based Foras Studio with NYBG School of Professional Horticulture alum, Paige Keck. A former dancer, Welti now finds a different sort of choreography in gardens and landscapes. We caught up with her to talk about design, careers, and the personal satisfaction that comes from actually changing clients’ lives.
‘For me, Landscape Design is the perfect segue from choreography,” Susan said. “It has space, time, and movement.”
Her Landscape Design classes at the Garden—which she said were “beyond fun”—were humbling and prepared her for an internship with Lynden B. Miller after she completed her Certificate in 1996. She opened her own company, Susan Welti Landscape Design, and started small, but grew rapidly as news of her talent spread.
“I think it’s an amazing field to be in because people here are just desperate to have green, some little bit of nature,” she said. “It sounds counter-intuitive that you could have a really booming landscape design business in the middle of New York City, but it’s true.”
His career spans more than 30 years, and his portfolio includes photographs published in some of the world’s largest publications. He shot the first all-digital cover story for National Geographic, “The Future of Flying,” commemorating the centennial of the Wright Brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk. As the dust was settling after 9/11, he used what was the world’s only life-sized instant Polaroid camera to create a project called Faces of Ground Zero, which became a book and generated approximately $2 million for the relief effort.
Hillary Parker’s painting career started with a mistake.
“Serendipity has always directed the way for me,” she said.
She enrolled in college to become an elementary school art teacher. In her senior year, a schedule mix-up landed her in an advanced painting course instead of the introductory one. She was granted access to the class on the condition she could handle the work and their weekly critiques.
For her first project, she chose an artichoke, potato, a head of garlic, and green onions from her own refrigerator and painted individual studies of each of them. Then the big day came.
“True to his word, the professor started going down the row of student artwork, harshly critiquing them,” Parker said. “When he got to mine, he paused, turned and smiled at me, looked back at my little veggies, and pointed to the artichoke. He said, ‘I want to eat that for dinner.’”
“An unsung American hero,” is how film director Carey Lundin describes landscape architect and pioneering conservationist, Jens Jensen (1860–1951), who rose from street sweeper to prolific city park designer amid Chicago’s steel industry boom. On Earth Day, April 22, the Garden’s Humanities Institute hosts the New York premiere of Lundin’s award-winning documentary, followed by a panel discussion exploring ways we can honor Jensen’s legacy. We sat down with Carey to hear more about the important man behind the film.
What inspired you to choose Jens Jensen as your subject matter?
I was born in Chicago and I love a great underdog man against the machine story, and I mean that two ways, both the political power machine and the rise of the machine age. Jensen fought for humanity against both.
