Everything’s that much better under a twinkling glow, and the Holiday Train Show is no exception. On Friday and Saturday nights this week, December 6 and 7, we’re turning down the lights and turning up the festivities with the first of this season’s Bar Car Nights. And if you’ve never been to one, just think of it as a chance to experience our dozens of miniature landmarks and model trains in an entirely new atmosphere—one highlighted by the cocktails and mellow tunes that make for a perfect evening in New York.
We’ll have a professional photographer on hand to capture some memories (because who wants to carry a point-and-shoot when clutch real estate comes so dear?), and new this year, you’re welcome to head outside to the Conservatory Courtyard for a live ice carving demonstration from Okamoto Studios. Their expert artists join us to turn enormous blocks of ice into all manner of holiday art, from trains to Garden landmarks and more.
Across the way in the Holiday Dining Pavilion, Stephen STARR Events will be cooking up a storm from a New York-themed menu celebrating everything delicious about historic NYC street food. Though if you’re looking to make the night last even longer, hold onto your Bar Car Night ticket stub: we’ve got partnerships with a number of gourmet restaurants offering discounts and bonuses for those who join us, all of which you can find listed here.
One step into the magical world of the Holiday Train Show should convince you of its heartwarming magic. It is a delight for children of all ages! But, should you have an interest in enjoying the Train Show‘s many splendors alongside children above a certain age, we have you covered there, too. Bar Car Nights are an adults-only way to see the Holiday Train Show at night, when the lights are twinkling and the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory‘s domes are aglow, cocktail in hand.
And this year, due to the overwhelming popularity of these delightful evenings, we are offering more Bar Car Nights than ever! Bar Car Nights are the perfect date night, or, come as a group and celebrate the season as a unique alternative to a more formal holiday party! Bring your friends, your adult children, or just come as a couple and enjoy a festive evening out. Bar Car Nights are the perfect way to indulge in the spirit of the holidays as an adult!
It’s been over two decades since we first introduced New York City to the Holiday Train Show, and in that time we’ve pieced together one of the most impressive collections of miniature architecture ever seen—a cityscape of over 150 cherished landmarks hosting a constant parade of large-scale model railway trains. But the buildings don’t come ready-made out of a box; the bridges aren’t raised overnight, and the tracks can’t find their way without helping hands. It’s an enormous undertaking to unveil this seasonal treat each year, and thanks to our friends with THIRTEEN NY, the premiere of Treasures of New York: Holiday Train Show is throwing a well-deserved spotlight on all that hard work.
From American steam engines, subway cars, and modern freight trains to the natural architecture itself—each building painstakingly assembled using natural components like leaves, twigs, and bark—Treasures leads the viewer on a tour through the entire holiday production. You’ll join artist Paul Busse in Alexandria, Kentucky, where his Applied Imagination workshop has been crafting uncanny models of New York’s famous buildings since the Holiday Train Show first opened in 1992. Back then, our collection of models barely made up a tiny neighborhood—a far cry from the dozens of models that now call the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory home, surrounded by over a quarter-mile of G-scale train tracks.
The hum and clack of miniature trains fills the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory right now. Familiar bridges made of branches and vines arch overhead, and miniature manors ring the walkways with lights glowing in their tiny amber windows. Okay, so that’s a little bit purple, but how else can you possibly describe our favorite winter exhibition? The Holiday Train Show is just about ready to throw open its doors this Saturday, November 16, and we couldn’t be more ready.
Ivo recently had a chance to peek inside and get a glimpse of the arrangements ahead of the weekend, so I thought I’d pile together some of the photographs he collected in the Conservatory and share them with everyone! With more trains than ever before, a fresh “Streets of New York” dining experience taking place in our Conservatory Tent, and all the ambiance of a perfect holiday season, you don’t want to miss this. (And did I mention Bar Car Nights are back?)
If you can imagine the distant jangle of a steam engine rounding the bend right now, you know just what time of year it is. And no, I don’t mean to suggest that the MTA is bringing back a line dedicated exclusively to old-timey trains. But for the next two months, we are. With fall well underway and the snows of winter likely headed in our direction soon, it’s once again time for that beloved yearly tradition of lights, locomotives, and masterful miniature architecture. Starting November 16, the Holiday Train Show® returns to the Garden!
Not that it’s a cakewalk assembling one of the largest train displays in the country. Far from it, in fact. Even now, our horticulturists and visiting model makers are scurrying about the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, preening plant beds, erecting familiar bridges, and making sure that every last one of our trains has enough track to make its all-important rounds. With this year’s exhibition featuring more trains than ever before, it’s worth double- and triple-checking the more than quarter mile of railway we’ll be using to accommodate all that traffic.
Among the new trains joining us this year, we’ve even got a G-scale Metro-North model soon to be zipping its way around a collection of Hudson River Valley mansions in the Conservatory’s Palm Dome pool.
Any time I pass through the Ross Gallery these days, there’s a near guarantee that I’ll run into a couple of visitors stopped by their own curiosity, admiring Allan Pollok-Morris’ prints. The images are arranged on either side of the room in a mosaic of landscapes and architecture, depicting a Scottish countryside seldom seen by those living on this side of the Atlantic. Terraced hills and labyrinthine beach tracings mingle with cottage gardens in a stirring together of different styles by myriad artists, all of which you can see on the pages of the exhibition’s inspiration, Close: Landscape Design and Land Art in Scotland, now available in our Shop in the Garden.
The book itself builds bridges across eras, capturing the old and the new in a landscape known for its mercurial weather and geography—as much rain and unforgiving stone as green pasture and sunlight. We caught up with Allan in our Native Plant Garden during his visit to New York City, part of a well-documented national tour of the country’s gardens that has taken him clear across the continental United States. In his many years photographing gardens and landscapes by renowned international artists, he’s come to his own conclusions on what makes for a grabbing landscape experience, and what will likely be most important to garden design in the future.
I haven’t traveled to Scotland yet, but in my thoughts it’s a green and airy place, textured with the golems of mountains, cairns, and foggy grasslands. Admittedly that’s a romantic generalization better left to youthful misconceptions. But there’s still something to that old notion when I view the landscapes in Allan Pollok-Morris’ atmospheric photographs, prints of which are now being hung in The New York Botanical Garden‘s Ross Gallery. From what I’ve seen so far, the opening of our visiting Close exhibition should be an escape for any visitor.
Inspired by the outdoor art installations, gardens, and sculpted landscapes that multinational artists have wrought throughout Scotland’s challenging country, Pollok-Morris’ set out over the course of five years to meet these creators and photograph their lasting contributions to the world around them. But the name of the exhibition, “Close,” might warrant a deeper explanation for those without the benefit of a Scottish upbringing.
“No one collective description can be applied to the wide variety of subjects in this group,” Pollok-Morris writes. “Instead, when choosing a name, I opted for a small, unassuming word which, in Scottish dialect, was used to describe a landscape so inspirational that heaven seemed closer to earth in that place. For example, I grew up in MacGregor country, where it is said the most famous member of this clan, Rob Roy MacGregor, was buried in Balquhidder because he had described the glen as ‘close’.”
You probably know (or at least think you know) all about bonsai, the Japanese art of growing, tending, and shaping miniature trees in trays. But do you know about kiku? Where bonsai is small, kiku is large. Where bonsai is about long life, kiku is about ephemerality. Where bonsai is about a minimal aesthetic, kiku is about color, pattern, and profusion.
Or at least that is how we interpret this tradition of shaping and tending chrysanthemums in Kiku: The Art of the Japanese Garden, opening Saturday in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory. Many of these huge chrysanthemum “sculptures” begin as one single stem, despite looking like brilliant tapestries of many flowering plants woven together. They are tended for months on end to bloom for just a few weeks. There is no way for us to extend kiku beyond their natural lifespan, so to see them in their full glory, you have got to act fast!
A couple of us hopped a golf cart over to the Nolen Greenhouses for Living Collections last Friday, hoping to catch a peek at Kodai Nakazawa’s chrysanthemum sculptures before horticulture carefully moved them off to the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory. I use the word “sculptures” because it’s the most accurate way to explain Kiku: The Art of the Japanese Garden—a simple “flower” designation doesn’t do the plants justice in the context of this exhibition.
Each mountain, or waterfall, or burst of fireworks begins as a single young chrysanthemum, tediously cared for and trained into myriad forms by Nakazawa. Some designs are original, some informed by centuries of tradition. But each one is the end result of one of horticulture’s highest arts, a discipline our visiting gardener learned from experts at Tokyo’s Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden.
Our latest exhibition had a great run, there’s no doubt there. Wild Medicine: Healing Plants Around the World has drawn thousands of visitors to its collections of botanical remedies, historical herbals, and unique Renaissance collections. But all good things… well, you get the gist. This weekend, we’re ringing the closing bell on what’s been an immense joy for us to host, and doing so with the help of Wild Medicine‘s lead curator—Dr. Michael Balick. On Saturday, September 7, he’ll take to the stage in the Ross Hall with a presentation on a topic that sits at the heart of this entire exhibition: the global landscape of medicinal botany, from traditional plant knowledge to medicine in the modern world.
Dr. Balick’s work as an ethnobotanist has taken him around the planet. He’s shown the potential of traditional knowledge and practices in the modern world, and dedicated himself to preserving the biodiversity upon which the survival of that knowledge depends. But with ecosystems being destroyed and the knowledge of these traditions fading, the work of scientists like Balick is often a race against time.
Everything’s that much better under a twinkling glow, and the Holiday Train Show is no exception. On Friday and Saturday nights this week, December 6 and 7, we’re turning down the lights and turning up the festivities with the first of this season’s Bar Car Nights. And if you’ve never been to one, just think of it as a chance to experience our dozens of miniature landmarks and model trains in an entirely new atmosphere—one highlighted by the cocktails and mellow tunes that make for a perfect evening in New York.
