As I mentioned the other week, I have been making the Garden rounds to talk to different colleagues about their favorite bulbs. We often like to use tulips here at the NYBG as part of large annual displays in springtime. We plant the bulbs in November, which then flower in May. By June, they have all been dug up and recycled in the compost pile.
The reason why tulips are not often part of permanent displays is that many varieties don’t come up consistently in subsequent years. They look glorious the first year, spotty the second year, and prove fairly anemic moving into the third and fourth years. Happily, this is not true with all tulips, and many make wonderful, long-lived additions in a garden provided they have good drainage.
Breaking up the Halloween…ness? …with some refreshing fall finds from the Native Plant Garden. We’re still photographing these behind a closed gate for now, but you can trust in my promise that this complex collection of displays and environments will be bliss central when it opens in 2013.
Thanksgiving has it so easy. It’s on the same day every year, and close enough to the weekend that you can plan to party around the table until the wee hours (barring a completely bonkers Black Friday schedule). But Halloween? Not so much. We’re usually left to the mercy of the calendar, and this October’s schedule lands the night of spooks and specters square in the middle of the work week. Hump day isn’t exactly party central for most New Yorkers, and it’s a school night for your mini monsters. But that shouldn’t dampen your spirits! This weekend, October 26 through 28, the NYBG holds its own ghoulish galas to mark the occasion a little early.
Our Spooky Nighttime Adventures ramp up as of this Friday night, marking the start of trick-or-treating, arts and crafts, and exploring the creepiest aspects of the Garden after dark–all in a safe environment for your kids to romp around. The Haunted Pumpkin Garden will be in its element, and that’s not to mention the horde of skulking harvester zombies carved into life by Ray Villafane this past weekend. Don’t forget to register for tickets–we’re extremely close to selling out for every single evening, and our limited nightly offering of walk-up tickets is far from guaranteed with such high demand!
They really do laugh uncontrollably and without cause while working in the Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden. Well, all right, Ivo was probably telling a patently terrible joke at the time this photo was taken. Here’s a big thanks and hello to Annie Novak and Toby Adams, whose tireless efforts have kept us knee-deep in vegetables all through the summer and into fall. They’re buttoning up the Family Garden’s edible options until spring, but we’ll be waiting patiently for the next harvest!
We gush over green for so much of the year that a quick break from the norm is more than welcome. So this week, I’m shifting focus for something a little more in line with the exuberance of the Halloween season, a hue that our resident photographer, Ivo Vermeulen, is all too willing to champion–at least if his favorite pair of garish pants has anything to say about it. I’d show you a picture but I’m under the impression we had to put a ban in writing to keep him from blinding visitors (though it certainly doesn’t stifle this Dutchman’s nationalism). In any case, it’s tough to live year-round in the northeast and not have at least the shadow of a soft spot for the fiery orange of autumn.
The changes around the NYBG are not always subtle. The tulip trees have slipped into their lemon yellows, and the boughs fringing the Forest follow suit with a citrus spectrum of their own. In the Home Gardening Center, neon orange chrysanthemums carry the torch for the flowers. It won’t be long now before we’re walking the Garden trails beneath an entirely different canopy, one splashed with all the painted warmth that winter tends to be so stingy with. But for now, we’ll take in all this early orange wonder while the weather’s still playing nice enough to leave our galoshes and down coats stuffed in the closet.
November’s Fall Forest Weekends aren’t far off. Flip your calendar to next month and block off November 3, 4, 10, and 11 to join us in exploring what makes autumn in New York such a poignant experience. That said, you might want to register for our featured canoe trips through the Garden’s stretch of the Bronx River sooner, rather than later…
Ahhh, the comforting vignettes of fall’s arrival: the Grand Allée‘s tulip trees tinged with gold, families touring the Garden in matching jackets, a ravenous horde of pumpkin patch ghouls dragging themselves up from their earthen tombs.
Er, yeah, we place the blame firmly on Ray Villafane and his cadre of spooky sculptors for that last one.
In the midst of our Halloween month (because why would you ever celebrate the most frightful holiday of the year for only a single night?), we continue on with another fall tradition that hits each week through November 21: the Wednesday Greenmarket! Bearing in mind the ongoing creepfest in the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden and elsewhere at the NYBG, you’ll of course find piles of pumpkins and seasonal gourds to decorate your porch. But there are also plenty of fall favorites to keep on your list that you’re not obliged to carve into jack o’ lanterns, because one cannot live on pumpkin pie alone–at least not for more than a week or two.
