Adult Ed Classes Teach You How to Grow, Prepare Good Food
Leda Meredith is the Gardening Program Coordinator for Adult Education at The New York Botanical Garden and author of The Locavore’s Handbook: The Busy Person’s Guide to Eating Local on a Budget.
When I took on a year-long challenge to eat, almost exclusively, foods produced within 250-miles of New York City, many people thought I was crazy. That was in 2007–2008, and it’s amazing how much has changed in just these past few years. Now “local,” “organic,” and “seasonal” have become buzzwords—and for good reason.
Just bite into a perfectly ripe, locally grown strawberry and your taste buds will never again be satisfied with its out-of-season, chemically grown cousin that spent weeks in transit before you ate it.
Superb taste is just one of the reasons to celebrate local, organic food. While you’re relishing that strawberry, you’re also helping the environment and supporting small farms and the local economy. It’s a lovely win-win partnership between consumers, producers, and the planet.
Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education. Join her each weekend for home gardening demonstrations on a variety of topics in the Home Gardening Center.
While it is commonplace to invest a considerable amount of thought, energy, and pride in the design of our gardens, herbaceous borders in particular, the vegetable garden often gets overlooked and undervalued as a potential site for artistic excellence.
However, ornamental vegetable gardens have a long-standing tradition. The Persians filled their walled gardens with fruit trees and edible plants, adorning these places of refuge while providing food for the table. The Cloisters Museum & Gardens, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan’s Fort Tryon Park, is a wonderful example of how medieval courtyards were home to the cultivation of culinary and medicinal herbs while providing a place for peaceful retreat.
Inspiration can be found in many historic restorations of ornamental vegetable gardens, ranging from the Grande Potagér at Chateau de Villandry in France to England’s Lost Gardens of Heligan and the walled Victorian kitchen garden at Chilton Foliat. Closer to home, Thomas Jefferson’s historic gardens at Monticello in Virginia celebrate America’s vegetable gardening tradition.
This summer and fall, The Edible Garden: Growing and Preparing Good Food brings you locally grown, seasonal food with cooking demonstrations every day, four spectacular kitchen gardens, appearances by celebrity chefs such as Lidia Bastianich and Mario Batali, and hands-on activities for kids. You won’t want to miss this year’s celebration, with more chefs and more events than last year.
The Edible Garden kicks off tomorrow with Get Out and Grill, the first of four Festival Weekends.
Don’t miss these highlights June 19–20:
Grilling and cooking with celebrity chefs, including Daisy Martinez
A Sunday BBQ perfect for Father’s Day, with an appearance by retired Yankee Roy White, booksignings, and more
Fun activities for the whole family in the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden and Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden
Get up-to-the-minute information, tips, and pictures throughout The Edible Garden: Text “NYBG CHEF” to 56512 to find out who’s cooking this week, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Read Plant Talk regularly for blogs by presenting chefs and cookbook authors.
Buy your tickets online for Garden-to-Table Weekends and Festival Weekends and WIN!
With every online ticket purchase for The Edible Garden you are automatically entered in a monthly drawing for a chance to win one of 20 Anolon® Ultra Clad 8-inch open skillets.
See contest rules for full details.
PT: What is most important to you when choosing ingredients for recipes at Gramercy Tavern?
MA: The most important thing when choosing ingredients is that they are grown close to home (in our region), that they are harvested and handled with care, and that they are cooked and served in the shortest timeframe we can possibly manage.
PT: How do you incorporate seasonal food into your favorite recipes?
MA: An ingredient itself is the origin of inspiration and the starting point of every new dish here. We find as many ways as we can to express an idea with that ingredient on each menu, so the same ingredients will appear in more than one dish although treated differently each time.
PT: What motivated you to begin incorporating seasonal, local food into your cooking?
MA: I started cooking professionally in Japan and fell in love with the connection to the changing seasons. I then worked in France for five years and found an immense amount of pride in regional ingredients. These feelings have always been at the heart of the way I look at food.
PT: What are you going to prepare for your Edible Garden cooking demonstration on June 20?
MA: On our menu for the day are Calamari and Carrot Salad, Grilled Kielbasa, and Pulled Pork with Pickles. Since the theme is grilling, we are going to use seasonal ingredients to enhance some basic grilling and BBQ techniques.
PT: What are your favorite tips for healthful eating?
MA: Allowing vegetables to play the starring role in a dish can be interesting, delicious, and healthy. No need to exclude meat or fish, but let them play the supporting role from time to time.
Discuss Research, Learn About Plant World in Casual Setting
James S. Miller, Ph.D., is Dean and Vice President for Science and Rupert Barneby Curator for Botanical Science.
During The Edible Garden, which opens this weekend and runs through October 17, visitors will have the opportunity to gather with some of the Botanical Garden’s scientists in a casual setting known as Café Scientifique. Begun in Leeds, England, in 1998, Café Scientifique is an informal meeting that brings together the public and scientists to discuss science in familiar terms.
Today the Café Scientifique idea has spread well beyond the borders of the United Kingdom. The Garden has presented these in the past, and this summer and fall will host 18 such events over four weekends, with the first set scheduled this Saturday and Sunday at 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. both days in the Garden Cafe.
Garden research staff, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students will talk about the research and conservation they pursue worldwide—from Latin America to Micronesia and our own backyard—and share with those who attend a greater understanding of the plant world and the efforts under way to conserve plant diversity. They will discuss a wide variety of research topics, such as the exploration of poorly known regions to discover, describe, and name new species of plants; how various plant groups are related and their evolutionary history; and the genetic basic for why plants have different structural features.
Celebrated poet Joyce Carol Oates and biographer Lyndall Gordon are among the esteemed poets and authors who will read their favorite Dickinson poems and discuss how she inspired their own work in the last installment of the poetry series My Emily Dickinson, co-sponsored by the Poetry Society of America.
Visitors can participate in a marathon reading of themed Dickinson’s poems relating to death, bees, roses, flowers, birds, and trees.
Dickinson scholar Judith Farr, author of The Gardens of Emily Dickinson, presents a lecture and slide show, Emily Dickinson in “Eden”: The Spring Garden.
Tour Dickinson’s Victorian Homestead re-created in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory and stroll along garden paths reading some of Dickinson’s most famous works near the flowers that inspired them in the Perennial Garden. This video gives you a peek at the exhibition.
And remember, the Gallery exhibition in the LuEsther T. Mertz Library, which gives an interactive perspective of Dickinson’s life through photographs, watercolors, manuscripts, her virtual herbarium, and her white dress fis on through August 1.
“A step like a pattering child’s in entry & in glided a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair . . . in a very plain & exquisitely white pique & a blue net worsted shawl.” This description Thomas Wentworth Higginson sent to his wife in 1870 has been pinned to Emily Dickinson for nearly 150 years. Mabel Loomis Todd heard about “the character” of Amherst almost as soon as she set foot in town in 1881: She “seems to be the climax of all the family oddity. . . . She dresses wholly in white, & her mind is said to be perfectly wonderful.” (Photo: Emily Dickinson dress, ca. 1878–82; white dress (reproduction), Emily Dickinson Museum Collection. Original, Amherst History Museum collection)
These contemporary accounts have fixed a compelling image through the decades of, well, oddity. Poetic genius is different from the norm. But odd, isn’t it, that the only full garment known to have belonged to Emily Dickinson and surviving to the present day is one white dress? This iconic garment belongs to the Amherst Historical Society, an exact replica is always on display at the Dickinson Homestead (now part of the Emily Dickinson Museum) in Amherst, and now one is on view in the LuEsther T. Mertz Library Gallery as part of the exhibition Emily Dickinson’s Garden: The Poetry of Flowers.
Gallery Exhibition Delves into Poet’s Love of Nature
Judith Farr is Professor Emerita of English and American Literature at Georgetown University and author of The Passion of Emily Dickinson and The Gardens of Emily Dickinson.
It is not widely known that our great American poet Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) was a practiced gardener before she became an accomplished poet. She joined her gentle mother tending the classic contents of a cottage garden—roses, cyclamen, lobelia, tulips, and more—at only 12 years of age while her training under the famous New England educator Edward Hitchcock taught her the elements of botany in childhood.
Indeed, nearly half of Dickinson’s lyrical letters to family and chosen friends and over one-third of her brilliantly idiosyncratic poems appeal to nature for the images and themes that render them incisive and unforgettable. Only a few of Emily Dickinson’s poems were printed during her lifetime but many people remembered receiving one of them, often tucked into an exquisite bouquet that she had grown and arranged herself.
Therefore, it is fitting that The New York Botanical Garden presents Emily Dickinson in her reciprocal roles as Poet and Gardener in its exhibition Emily Dickinson’s Garden: The Poetry of Flowers. While an array of the flowers about which she wrote blooms outdoors at the Garden, the LuEsther T. Mertz Library Gallery showcases materials designed to introduce visitors to the life and art of Emily Dickinson. The Gallery Exhibition, which will run to August 1, is built around several significant themes in Dickinson’s life, such as her childhood, her gardening, and her poetry.
Noelle V. Dor is Museum Education Intern in the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden.
The delicate unfurling of fresh leaves…
The kaleidoscopic flowering of plants small and large…
The courtship dances of birds and bees…
The cycling of sunshine and rain to nourish new life…
There is hardly a more poetic season than spring. All of nature is waking up and bursting forth in variously colored, scented, textured, and melodic ways. It’s no wonder that we, too, are moved to find refreshment for our own lives. When immersed in a space of natural beauty and vitality, some of us are even motivated to translate those experiences into artistic expressions. Inspired by well-versed poet and gardener Emily Dickinson, the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden has seamlessly blended nature and art to spark this dynamically creative process among visitors to the exhibition Emily Dickinson’s Garden: The Poetry of Flowers.
