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Plant Talk

Inside The New York Botanical Garden

Conservatory

Morning Eye Candy: Lifting

Posted in Around the Garden, Photography on December 4 2012, by Matt Newman

I feel like fall is the ideal time for sitting and observing–for taking it in without having to fill the empty space with idle chatter. Which leads me to today’s mission: find a bench somewhere in the Garden, and spend at least 20 minutes sitting quietly. As my high school guitar teacher used to call it, see if you can “lift” the individual components of nature’s soundtrack; that is, isolate a single bird’s song, or one tree’s creaking branches among the rest. Listen to the wind a while.

Photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen

Botanical Behemoth

Posted in Around the Garden, Gardens and Collections on August 14 2012, by Matt Newman

In late summer, the NYBG‘s Enid A. Haupt Conservatory becomes the home of a botanical behemoth, one of the largest leaved plants in the world. And each year, visitors find themselves caught off guard by the delightful weirdness of this tropical oddity: Victoria amazonica. Originally from the Amazon River basin, it’s long since become an iconic display in our tropical water lily pond.

Named for Britain’s Queen Victoria in the nineteenth century, the structure of the largest of water lilies is a bit like a kiddie pool (and often as big as one). Its broad, smooth leaves can stretch to nearly ten feet in diameter, forming expansive discs with sharply upturned edges that, again, make it look as though you could drop one in your backyard with a few gallons of water and a pool noodle. At maturity, their short-lived flowers can reach 15 inches across, opening white on the first evening as females, and pink on the second as males. It’s a brief display; the flowers (hopefully) attract pollinating beetles to do nature’s work, then sink below the water’s surface almost as abruptly as they emerged.

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