I have this sneaking suspicion that the spaces under “Saturday” and “Sunday” are sitting blank in your planner right now. If you’re not dashing onto a plane to escape the return of chilly weather to New York, I’m going to make a solid suggestion: get your camera. You probably have one sitting on the shelf somewhere, pitifully neglected, waiting for the day you make the commitment to get out and start learning the craft.
If you haven’t etched your plans in stone, put a few bucks on your MetroCard and head to the Bronx with your Nikons, your Canons, your Fujis or whatever else you can come up with. We’re actually going to reward you for participating in our Caribbean Gardenphotography contest, not just with the chance to come back for a course or workshop of your choosing with our NYBG educators, but for tips and tricks provided by professional garden photographers this Sunday afternoon. You can’t keep making excuses! Because who knows? Wait too long and the steamroller of technological innovation just might make your camera format obsolete.
They’re inconspicuous almost to the point of invisibility, assuming you’re looking for them in their natural habitat. You might pass an entire stand of these plants without being the wiser were you to find yourself wandering parts of southern Africa. But when a grazing animal happens by, camouflage is the best natural defense in a landscape where food comes scarce and water borders on mythological.
Picking out lithops from the patches of pebbly ground where they grow is a simple task if you’re attentive–just look for misplaced symmetry. The thick leaves of the small, bifurcated plants resemble patterned stones, as evidenced in the breakdown of the name itself: lithos means “stone” and -ops means “face” in ancient Greek. But they’re not the subjects of any geology professor. You might guess that from their sometimes vibrant patterns and strange colorations.
Many of us here in the office have been taking the opportunity to venture out now and then and enjoy this nonsensical weather we’re having (you might have noticed our squawking about it on the Twitter feed yesterday). There’s a surreal quality to wandering the “winter” landscape, seeing Fordham students in their t-shirts and basking in what amounts to a mid-April afternoon.
For my first winter in the city, this isn’t so bad. Or did I just viciously jinx myself?
The New York Botanical Garden’s Plant Information Specialists and the Home Gardening Center share a wealth of experience, enlightening visitors with their knowledge of indoor and outdoor plants, ornamentals, vegetable gardening, identification, and growing requirements–to name but a few of their specialties.
It was nearly 60 degrees here at The New York Botanical Garden yesterday, a misplaced spring day that brought with it a number of questions from our Twitter followers concerned for the future of their plants. As Sonia Uyterhoeven outlined only a few weeks ago, this strange back-and-forth with warm and cold temperatures has been wreaking havoc on the plants’ growth cycles, confusing some of them into blooming early and leaving gardeners wondering if they’ll have anything to show come spring.
For spring-blooming flowers, the bad news is that it’s a “one and done” agreement–if high temperatures now push these plants into their spring phase early, there will be no second bloom post-winter. The good news is that if we have long stretches of weather in the high 30s and low 40s, those growths that are blooming early will last for a very, very long time. At this point the long-range forecast is still looking promising. But look at your average meteorologist’s win ratio and you’ll take predictions with a grain of salt.
January 19, 2012; Chile, unnamed sound on north-central coast of Isla Hoste, approximately 55º00’S, 69º12’W
As the sky slowly darkened last night, we passed site after site that we all thought looked like great collecting localities. Today we begin finding out.
Isla Hoste
For our first collecting site, we have headed as far east as we will go on this leg of the trip. We are anchored in one of the innumerable, unnamed sounds that dot this area, on the north-central coast of Isla Hoste. Between Isla Hoste and Isla Gordon lies the Beagle Channel (named for Charles Darwin’s ship, the HMS Beagle), and we are planning to bounce back and forth across the southwest arm of the Channel.
Not long ago we introduced you to a new Plant Talk series we’re calling “Past in Focus,” in which we unearth historical photographs from the LuEsther T. Mertz Library archives and attempt to recapture the scenes as they appear today. A century-old landscape undergoes any number of changes at the hands of time, weather, and ambition, leaving us drawn in by details large and small that remain untouched. You can look at these photographs and–even if only just–make out the origins of the design beneath the carefully-tended aesthetic.
In 1916, the tract surrounding the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden was a plane of graded soil following an idea on paper:
January 18, 2012; Canal O’Brien, just south of Isla O’Brien, 54º55’S, 70º35’W
I first stepped out onto the deck of our ship around 5 a.m. today. The sun wasn’t quite up and the mountainous islands were dark shapes against a gray, cloud-choked sky. I love early mornings alone with nature. Unfortunately I was dressed only in my sleeping clothes, so the light rain and cold quickly drove me back to my warm bunk.
Barros Channel, West of Isla Gordon
We have a different ship this year, the Don José Miguel. It is relatively new and belongs to the same owner as our ship last year, the Don José Pelegrín. It is about a meter wider than the Pelegrín, making it seem much more spacious. On the Pelegrín the bunks were narrower and lower; the roomier bunks on the Miguel allow me to turn over without bumping into the bunk above me. But although the bunk room has more space, there is no place to put luggage except under the lower bunks, an inconvenient process which requires the removing of mattresses and the slats. As a consequence, most of our luggage is piled in the middle of the room, providing an obstacle course, especially in the middle of the night.
You might call it something dramatic–the “Lazarus Quandary,” maybe. It’s the scientific milestone we’re all hoping will be uncovered before we’re pitched off this mortal coil. Each year we read news articles which claim that stopping or even reversing the effects of aging is a trope of science fiction nearly within reach; it’s just beyond the next major research grant. But a simple plant–well past ancient as a species–has already cracked the code.
Calling Pleopeltis polypodioides(pronouncing it is like calisthenics for your mouth) the lazy greenthumb’s plant is an apt description. It doesn’t take much to keep it vibrant. In fact, a glass of water in the course of a century might just do the trick. And if its fronds shrivel up and seem to die off in the interim, don’t fall for the ruse–the “resurrection fern” is only playing opossum.
The first week of the Caribbean Garden Photography Contest was a well-fought match with many beautiful photographs entered. But that’s not all we’re here to tell you. We also would like to announce that the Grand Prize in each category–Sense of Place and Macro–will be receiving $100 Adult Education Gift Certificates good towards the class of your choosing at the Garden or at our Midtown Center. The certificate can be used for any class–not just photography! Now that’s a prize worth competing for.
I have this sneaking suspicion that the spaces under “Saturday” and “Sunday” are sitting blank in your planner right now. If you’re not dashing onto a plane to escape the return of chilly weather to New York, I’m going to make a solid suggestion: get your camera. You probably have one sitting on the shelf somewhere, pitifully neglected, waiting for the day you make the commitment to get out and start learning the craft.
