Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education at The New York Botanical Garden.
Daffodils are a harbinger of spring. They brighten up the dreary days starting in March and run through to the end of May. While they are immortalized for their cheery colors—traditionally pure yellows, now increasingly in white with orange, pink, and even green trimmings—some of these spring glories are fragrant.
The fragrance can range from peppery to citrus. The large-cupped daffodil named ‘Fragrant Rose’ as suggested has a nice rose smell. ‘Sir Winston Churchill’, a nice double, has a citrus fragrance.
Jonquilla, Tazetta, and Poeticus daffodils—divisions 7, 8, and 9 (daffodil classification is based on shape and size of the flower; the American Daffodil Society identifies 13 divisions)—tend to be the most fragrant. Among their ranks are: ‘Intrigue’, ‘Fruit Cup’ ‘Pipit’, ‘Stratosphere’, ‘Geranium’, ‘Hoopoe’, ‘Falconet’ and ‘Actaea’.
The choice is much wider and there are daffodils in other divisions that are also known for their scent: the doubles such as ‘Cheerfulness’ and ‘Yellow Cheerfulness’ in division 4; the large-cupped daffodils in division 2, boasting ‘Charlton’, ‘Sweet Charity’, and ‘Louise de Coligny’; and the pure white ‘Thalia’ from the Triandrus daffodils in division 5.
Come visit the Garden and stroll down the Daylily/Daffodil walk by the Visitor Cafe to find your favorite. We also have a beautiful display on Daffodil Hill and another collection, the Murray Liasson Narcissus Collection, behind the Watson Education Building heading toward the Magnolia Collection.
Living Orchid Chandeliers and Wall Dazzle Visitors
Karl Lauby is Vice President for Communications.
Francisca Coelho has outdone herself this time.
The Senior Curator and Associate Vice President for Glasshouses and Exhibitions is principally responsible for the creation, implementation, and management of the exhibitions that have solidified The New York Botanical Garden’s reputation as an international leader in horticultural display.
But she’s taken her work to new heights with the sensationally popular Orchid Show: Brazilian Modern, which takes its final bow this weekend.
While the whole show is her handiwork, in particular she has created a set of four massive hanging baskets of tropical aroids and descending orchids that alone are worth the trip to The Orchid Show. The baskets or chandeliers—each containing a huge philodendron, six smaller philodendrons, six grape ivies, and 120 orchids overflowing and pouring down from high overhead—embody living art with hidden engineering, creative design, and clever construction.
Fran took designer Raymond Jungles’ illustration and executed it brilliantly, using pipes, cables, and four-foot metal baskets that, once arranged with flowers, became six-foot-wide creations. In rummaging through her storeroom, Fran saw just the right-sized tree baskets—baskets usually used for moving big trees in the nursery trade—and traced the manufacturer to McKenzie Nursery Supply in Perry, Ohio. She asked the company to make eight baskets to her design and placed one basket within another and tied them together to make four strong baskets that would hold the weight of the hanging plants. A smaller, 30-inch-wide basket holding the large philodendron was then placed within the large basket on a wire frame placed six inches above the basket bottom. Each large philodendron is flanked by six more philodendrons and six grape ivy vines.
To suspend the whole apparatus, Fran rigged up crossed galvanized pipes in a square formation from which the baskets are suspended. Then the whole planter was lifted—using two lifts, one for the basket and one for the person hanging the basket—and hung from the conservatory ceiling. It took four staff members working in unison to accomplish this.
The outside of the entire large basket was then wrapped in black chicken wire. The basket-within-a-basket design left enough room for Fran’s able gardening colleagues to create the chandelier effect by edging the baskets with two types of orchids, Phalaenopsis and Dendrobium, in the pink-lavender color range and hung upside down, defying gravity, 120 orchids to each basket.
But the chandeliers are only part of the fun.
Fran also built the Orchid Wall. While it looks spontaneous, whimsical, and picturesque, in fact, the wall is meticulously designed and executed with artifice, contrivance, and calculation. The wall, 8 feet tall by 25 feet wide, is covered with 800 orchids, all Phalaenopsis, each hand-tied one by one to create a wall of flowers that mesmerizes visitors. In the center of the wall is a giant staghorn fern, surrounded by the five varieties of Phalaenopsis. Fran herself tied each of the 800 orchids onto the wall and has great stories about how she arrived at that number, tied each one, and managed to keep the entire wall seemingly in subtle motion from top to bottom as well as appearing fresh for the six-week run of the show.
Come see for yourself these magnificent, unique orchid creations in this, the final weekend of The Orchid Show: Brazilian Modern. Meanwhile, take one last chance to vote for your favorite type of orchid in our poll at right. So far, Vandas are in the lead by a large margin.
As we say goodbye to the orchids, we say hello to the Auricula Theater, a display in the Herb Garden of two types of alpine primroses in a presentation based on a centuries-old tradition.
And, of course, it’s spring all over the Garden. Walk around and see what’s in bloom, look for seasonal birds that are arriving and the recently born baby owls, participate in waking up the Family Garden, and more. Click on the daily highlights below.
Nieve Shere is Information and Collections Manager for The New York Botanical Garden’s Institute of Economic Botany.
As the Information and Collections manager for the Institute of Economic Botany (IEB), I manage ethnobotanical data and collections, coordinate the work of volunteers, and curate the Teaching Herbarium of Economic Plants, a valuable tool for education and botanical science.
The Teaching Herbarium comprises specimens that have economic value—for instance, those that are used in a commercial industry such as food production—and that are preserved in a way that allow for hands-on study. In fact, the Teaching Herbarium is used to train students in botanical identification as well as in the development of the Botanical Garden’s educational curricula and scientific exhibitions.
The Herbarium’s first specimens, in the early 1980s, were collected by Garden scientists Michael Balick, Ph.D., and Hans Beck, Ph.D., shortly after the creation of the IEB; later collections included those by Garden scientist Scott Mori, Ph.D., and longtime volunteer Dick Rauh, Ph.D. The majority of the teaching specimens are from the Arts Resources for Teachers and Students (ARTs) project, the first project initiated by IEB to develop the Teaching Herbarium.
Through the ARTs project, middle and elementary school kids on the Lower East Side surveyed plants sold in the Chinese and Hispanic markets. The students collected vegetables such as bok choy, cabbage, and taro and pressed, dried, and mounted the specimens. The specimens documented the historic and commercial data specifically about the diversity of foods sold in New York City markets. These collections, along with the specimens collected by the above-mentioned scientists, were instrumental in the development of the early Economic Botany courses that Dr. Balick taught at Yale University and at Columbia University’s CERC program.
Over the years the collection has continued to grow into a rich repository of plants used commercially such as for food, construction, and medicine. It now houses more than 600 specimens made up of 200 species from 113 different families. Dedicated volunteers reorganize and repair damaged specimens and update the database, making the collection even more user-friendly. The IEB is fortunate to have had for more than 25 years the dedication of Dr. Rauh, who has carefully assisted in the curation of this collection with the help of volunteers Connie Papoulas, Margaret Comsky, Ermgaard Clinger, Gwen Dexter, and Daniel Kulakowski.
Specimens from Dr. Mori’s Brazilian teaching collection are currently on display in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory (pictured) as part of The Orchid Show: Brazilian Modern. Additional specimens from the Teaching Herbarium will be featured and new plant material provided for visitors to make their own specimens during the Herbarium Specimen-Making Workshops to be held in the Library building each day from April 9 to 19, beginning at 2 p.m.
If you would like to get involved with the Teaching Herbarium, please contact Volunteer Services at 718.817.8564 or volunteer@nybg.org.
Jim Miller is Dean and Vice President for Science.
Herison de Oliveira (left) and Fabián Michelangeli look for plants as they descend the Jordao River by canoe.
All photos by Fabián A. Michelangeli, Ph.D.
The Amazon basin, which spans nine South American countries, is the largest connected block of tropical rain forest in the world. Despite the efforts of explorers over several centuries, large parts of Amazonia remain completely unexplored, and some of these places where scientists have never been are thousands of square miles in extent.
In early February, Fabián Michelangeli, Ph.D., of The New York Botanical Garden and his Brazilian collaborator, Renato Goldenberg, Ph.D., from the Universidad Federal do Paraná, coordinated a 16-day trip into one of these unexplored regions, and their results tell us how very much remains to be discovered in one of the world’s most important ecosystems.
Edilson de Oliveira collects a liana in the Bignoniaceae family growing on a tree on the river bank.
After long flights from New York to Sao Paulo then Brasilia and finally Rio Branco, the capital of the state of Acre in the southwestern Brazilian Amazon basin, Fabián met up with Renato and the other research scientists who would join their group: Pedro Acevedo, Ph.D., from the Smithsonian Institution and C. Flavio Obermuller, Edilson de Oliveira, and undergraduate student Herison de Oliveira, all from the Universidade Federal do Acre. A two-hour flight in a small plane brought them to Foz de Jordao, the capital of a 2,100-square-mile municipality from which no plant collections had ever been made.
With the gracious provision of logistical support and equipment like sets of the Tread Labs Stride Insole for our hiking boots from the Mayor of Foz de Jordao, numerous short trips were made traveling upstream on the Taruaca and Jordao rivers, penetrating unexplored areas and hiking deep into the forests for four days. The expedition concluded with a seven-day trip down the Jordao river for about 185 miles, with daily incursions into the forests. Although this region had never been explored scientifically, about 6,000 people live in the municipality, mostly on small farms and cattle ranches that punctuate the forest, and they have established forest trails for rubber tapping. The botanical expedition members benefited from this trail network, which allowed them to use the boat on the river as a base—where they could establish a camp but then penetrate the forests for significant distances to collect plants during the day, and return to their river camp in the evening and process the day’s collections before collapsing into their hammocks at night.
Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education at The New York Botanical Garden.
Successful gardening is about being in sync with nature. Plant your peas on St. Patrick’s Day is the old adage that has been passed down to gardeners in the tri-state area. While this works for some, I have often found the ground to be too soggy and wait until April 1.
We add compost and aged manure into the beds in the fall so that we are all ready to go in the spring. Remember to mulch your peas with straw before the weather gets too hot, or alternatively, shade their roots with lettuce to keep them cool; the cool, moist soil helps to lengthen the harvest.
Fresh peas are as sweet as candy. Harvest the peas before they get too old, otherwise they will become starchy. Look for swelling pods where the peas are just starting to fill up but before the pod is completely full. Hold the plant with one hand and gently pull off the peas. Once the peas mature, it behooves you to harvest daily.
Early in the season is not only the time to grow shelling peas but also snow peas and snap peas with their edible pods. Once you have harvested your peas, you can replant the area with the pole beans that will fill the space and provide you with another delectable harvest.
Remember that all legumes are great team players in the garden; they are experts at capturing atmospheric nitrogen and storing it in their roots. This nitrogen will eventually be released into the soil for other plants to use.
Peas love to grow on trellises. Last year we experimented with several different kinds. For one pea we used pea stakes. In England, they generally coppice birch or hazel to get pliable stems with a good branching structure. I didn’t have that available so I tried the long stems of my butterfly bush (Buddleja) that I cut back every April. The stems were more brittle than I would have liked, but they worked well and provided the support the peas needed.
Another support that I use in the garden is the arbors that decorate the raised beds. The peas climb up the sides of wire cloth wrapping their tendrils around the wire framework and hoisting themselves up to the top. This system always works well as it gives the peas plenty of light, air circulation, and space to grow.
I also tried some wonderfully decorative trellises purchased from a Vermont-based catalog company called Gardener’s Supply Company. They were inexpensive and elegant. My favorites for the peas were the expandable willow trellises. They scampered up the sides only to be replaced mid-season with morning glories (Ipomoea), bitter melons (Momordica), and a host of other summer vines.
Some nice pea varieties to try are ‘Mr. Big’, ‘Maxigolt’, ‘Amish Snap’ (snap pea), ‘Sugar Snap’ (snap pea), ‘Oregon Giant’ (snow pea), and a delightful dwarf cultivar called ‘Tom Thumb’.
This year I am dabbling with some colorful heirloom varieties. ‘Golden Sweet’ has two-toned purple flowers and lemon-yellow pods. It is an edible podded pea that is excellent for stir frying. ‘Blue Podded Shelling’ is another stunner that is used in soups. Both of these heirlooms reach 5-6 feet in height and will need good trellising
Included in the mix is ‘Green Arrow’, a reliable English variety that reaches 2-2.5 feet tall. I am growing this shelling pea, a heavy producer, to add some flavor to my pasta dishes this spring. This is a great variety for hungry homeowners with limited growing space.
Gardening and Crafts Welcome the New Season Annie Novak is coordinator of the Children’s Gardening Program in the Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden.
Spring is a waking season. Several days ago the staff and volunteers of the Howell Family Garden gathered for breakfast to welcome the start of 2009 and swap stories of our winters. Our true “new year” starts in March. Fueled by a little food and conversation, we set to work hauling compost, trimming back leaves, and assisting Dave Vetter, our head gardener, in his mighty task of starting several hundred vegetable seedlings.
Although in nature it’s usually the fall we think of as a time of great transformation, spring surprised us this year by giving the Family Garden a bit of a facelift. Three years ago we built a Lenape wigwam, last year we built a green-roofed rabbit hutch, and this year Dave Vetter, Family Garden Assistant, and Han Yu Hung, Children’s Gardening Program Garden Coordinator, are humming happily inside our new greenhouse. The Family Garden’s newly built “hoop house” was designed over the winter by Toby Adams, Family Garden Manager. Admiring it for the first time, staff and volunteers ooh’d and aah’d and promised not to accidentally tear open its double-plastic sidewalls with a careless pass of a garden fork. As the day grew cooler with sharp winds, we huddled inside, where the air was warm and soil-scented. Maybe next spring our new building will be an apiary, where thousands of friendly bees can pollinate our vegetables, as they do all over the cities of Chicago, Toronto, and Seattle.
Watching the garden awaken is, to me, the best part of a temperate climate. I admire the flourish of a season like the fall, which gives way to winter with dramatic color. But I’m happier in the springtime when the warmth sneaks up on you, with delicate splashes of color in our green garlic shoots or the swollen buds of tulips and magnolia trees. We have robins all over the garden now, too, as the worms begin to move again through the gradually warming soil. And hurrah: Last Saturday, our visitors and families were back! The Children’s Gardening Program begins with new lessons on green living and healthy eating and old favorites celebrating the harvest and learning more about springtime birds and bulbs. Our afternoon programming, Family Garden Adventures, begins tomorrow, April 4, with the aptly named theme “Wake up, Garden!” Families are welcome to join us for gardening and craft activities from 1:30 to 5:30 p.m.
Recently, we read that the White House is building an organic vegetable garden on its South Lawn. Several of our staff and volunteers had clipped the article from the newspaper, and over our breakfast at our garden cleanup, we studied the garden plans. Would it be possible, I asked, to dedicate one of the children’s plots to mirror that of the Obama family’s? Toby agreed. (Although wouldn’t it be great if Michelle Obama’s plans emulated ours?) But truthfully, the best part of the Family Garden is how many hands go into helping us grow. Even a full White House staff can’t hope to compete with that!
The bronze sculptural group of the Fountain of Life (1903–05), designed by Carl (Charles) E. Tefft for Gibson’s marble plinth and basins, depicts a cherub astride a dolphin atop a globe and two web footed plunging horses being restrained by a female and a boy, surprising a merman and mermaid in the basin below. Gibson envisioned the fountain as the focus of the vista looking toward the building and as having upper and lower water basins, the flowing water elements giving a distinctive character both as a landscape feature and as a botanical exhibit.
While the Garden reigns as one of the world’s premier museums of plants, educational institutions, and scientific research organizations, few know that it is also the home of many notable historic buildings and structures. Now, the addition of these to the landmark registry adds to that distinction.
Jessica Blohm is Interpretive Specialist for Public Education.
Peter Kukielski, Curator of the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden, stakes and prunes this tree-form shrub rose named Rosa Home Run™. Spring is the time Peter cuts back the dead wood to promote flower production. This rose begins producing beautiful red roses in June and continues to bloom all summer long.
Gardeners Ken Molinari, top, and Jonathan Riggers prepare the beds for planting David Austin roses in a new English border—just one of many new additions to the Rose Garden this year in an effort to make the collection more disease-resistant.
Amanda Gordon is a freelance writer based in New York City.
The displays in The Orchid Show: Brazilian Modern include specimens of orchids and other plants from Brazil that are stored in the Botanical Garden’s William and Lynda Steere Herbarium. The fourth largest herbarium in the world and the largest in the Western Hemisphere, it contains more than 7 million specimens of plants and fungi.
So how does the Herbarium work, and how do scientists use it? To find out, I sat down with Dr. Barbara Thiers, Director of the Steere Herbarium and the C.V. Starr Virtual Herbarium. A plant scientist specializing in liverworts, Barbara belongs to a botanical family: Her father was a botanist who ran a herbarium, and her husband, Dr. Roy Halling, is also a scientist at the Garden, focusing on mushrooms.
What is the history of herbariums?
The concept of the herbarium originated in 14th- or 15th-century Italy. Plants were collected because people figured out early on that plants could be useful in treating maladies. Reference collections were made so people would know what plant to use for what. At first the plants were kept in bundles. Then someone got the idea of pressing the plants and putting them in books. The plants are then mounted on paper. That’s how specimens are preserved to this day.
Where are the specimens stored?
It’s amazing the amount of design that goes into making a good herbarium cabinet. The specimens are kept in specially designed steel cases with good sealing gaskets that keep them flat and dry and dark and away from bugs. If they’re well maintained, they can last indefinitely.
How do scientists use the specimens in the Steere Herbarium?
There’s a lot of use by people who are documenting rare and endangered species. Others are using the data for ecological modeling so they can ask questions about how the vegetation will change and how fast temperatures will rise in order to identify areas that are endangered or that are critical habitats for animals. A user could be curious about particular groups of plants—for example, forest species that are used for timber.
We have a number of herbarium sheets that are the “first-known collections” of specimens, such as purple loosestrife and cheat grass. The sheets can help to date the invasion of a species and to understand how a plant may have moved across a country. Government agencies are also heavy users—for example, the folks at Kennedy Airport. When they confiscate plant material, they’re supposed to do the best job they can to identify the material.
Do these records become obsolete?
No. Just the opposite: The specimen in the herbarium is how you save it forever after. Even when you have a very high-resolution digital image, there are some things you can only examine by looking at the actual specimen. This is the best information on what plants grew where and when.
You’ve already digitized 1.7 million specimens since 1995. What are your objectives for online access?
We have to do our best to handle all the material and make it as available for scientific research as possible. Our goal is to digitize the whole Steere Herbarium and to constantly improve the way we do it. Electronically, we’ll take some big leaps in how we share our data online. Wherever possible, we are linking the information about the specimens to the research that’s been done here by our staff and to the library collections. We’re creating a portal to the research that’s been done here.
How much use does the Steere Herbarium get?
People who come here to look at the specimens total 1,200 days spent here each year. We also send out 40,000 to 50,000 specimens a year for people to borrow. We send and receive 350 specimens a day in our shipping office.
Can amateur botanists use the Steere Herbarium or the Starr Virtual Herbarium?
We don’t have a lot of content that interprets what we have for a general audience, but we have some evidence that general audiences use it. We get a lot of hits by state and educational Web sites. We have dried specimens, so someone has to be able to look at a dried plant and imagine what it looks like. To look up a specimen you have to know the scientific name.
Do you get a chance to enjoy the living collections at the Botanical Garden?
I really love the Rock Garden, and one of my favorite places is Azalea Way. I like them not because they’re beautiful to look at, which they are, but because I have a great fondness for the plants that grow in those spots.
Please help support the important botanical research, education, and programs that are integral to the mission of The New YorkBotanical Garden.
Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education at The New York Botanical Garden. 
Daffodils are a harbinger of spring. They brighten up the dreary days starting in March and run through to the end of May. While they are immortalized for their cheery colors—traditionally pure yellows, now increasingly in white with orange, pink, and even green trimmings—some of these spring glories are fragrant.
The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission voted last week to add the Library building, the Lillian Goldman Fountain of Life, and Tulip Tree Allée to their registry of landmarks. The designation reinforces the historic significance of these sites and guarantees their protection so that they can be enjoyed by future generations.
The displays in The Orchid Show: Brazilian Modern include specimens of orchids and other plants from Brazil that are stored in the Botanical Garden’s William and Lynda Steere Herbarium. The fourth largest herbarium in the world and the largest in the Western Hemisphere, it contains more than 7 million specimens of plants and fungi.