Inside The New York Botanical Garden
Lansing Moore
Posted in Adult Education on December 26 2013, by Lansing Moore
Vincent Simeone is a well-respected horticulturist who teaches a number of plant-related courses in the Garden’s Horticulture Certificate program. He just released a new book, Grow More With Less: Sustainable Garden Methods (Cool Springs Press, December 2013), that offers the home gardener detailed and practical ways to create a sustainable home landscape with less work, less water, less money, and better results. Vincent graciously offered to share with us some tips from this valuable resource.
Proper plant selection is very important. What will your book cover and is there one general tip you can share?
There is an entire chapter in the book dedicated to properly selecting the right plant for the right place and it encourages gardeners to think outside the box. This chapter offers some popular, tried and true favorites such as flowering dogwood and winterberry, along with some lesser-known species plants and new cultivars that extend seasonal interest and are low maintenance once established. The resurgence of native grasses such as Little Blue Stem and Switch Grass have raised the bar in the horticultural industry giving us many new possibilities that we didn’t necessarily have before. The key is to do your homework and purchase plants from a reputable plant source.
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Posted in Adult Education on November 27 2013, by Lansing Moore
For someone who is a tireless entrepreneur, the owner of YL Event Design, and an NYBG Floral Design Instructor, Yolanda LaGuerre still knows how to enjoy life. Not surprisingly, she finds it to be a strong advantage in the party business! Here she shares with us her trend predictions going into 2014, industry advice, and how she came to discover a career in flowers.
You say you started your floral design career at age 15?
That’s correct. I lived in the city and took full advantage of living so close to one of the best flower markets in the world! With a sheet of oak tag, a pair of scissors and a marker I made myself business cards with my name, beeper number, and tag line, “Designer willing to do anything,” and passed them out all over the New York Flower Market at 5 a.m. every day! After a while I got my first break and freelanced with many designers for a few years before attending NYBG.
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Posted in Adult Education on November 21 2013, by Lansing Moore
Visitors to the Adult Education classrooms on Garden grounds may have noticed a recent addition to the walls of the Watson Building in a series of framed, vintage botanical posters. These treasures were discovered in storage while refurbishing the botany lab, and we could not bear to dispose of such a colorful glimpse into the history of botanical science. While the paper had begun to yellow, the ink was flaking, and a few of the posters were beyond saving, Center Art Studio in Manhattan graciously took on the challenge of restoring ten of these double-sided instructional posters as a gift to the NYBG.
This series was originally the work of Father Hilary Jurica O.S.B., as published by A. J. Nystrom & Co., Chicago. Born in 1892, Jurica was a monk and a priest who earned a doctorate degree in biology from the University of Chicago in 1922. He was also the first monk of St. Precopius Abbey to attain this academic honor and the first American Benedictine to receive a doctorate from a secular university. Partnered with his young brother Fr. Edmund, a zoologist, Fr. Hilary the botanist spent forty years traveling around the country to gather many of the specimens on display in the Jurica Nature Museum in Illinois.
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Posted in Adult Education on June 27 2013, by Lansing Moore
People all over the country will soon be able to appreciate NYBG instructor Dick Rauh’s work alongside that of other accomplished botanical illustrators in the American Society of Botanical Artists’ current traveling exhibition, Following in the Bartrams’ Footsteps.
The exhibit showcases illustrations from a wide variety of botanical artists of the plants grown, sold, and introduced by John Bartram (1699–1777) and his son William (1739–1823), pioneers of American naturalism. Knowledgeable and worldly, John and William Bartram ran a thriving business in Philadelphia shipping seeds and plants across the Atlantic for the gardens of English aristocrats, where the nature of unspoiled North America was in fashion. William continued the family business and became the first American-born botanic and natural history artist, as well as a prolific travel writer in his own right. His 1791 nature book Travels was a foundational influence for great Romantic writers such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Emerson.
In the course of their career, the Bartrams introduced many previously unknown species, including Franklinia, a tree William named for his friend Benjamin Franklin. Alongside Bartram’s beautiful 1788 painting of the tree’s flower—illustrating all of its component parts—is Dick Rauh’s own watercolor of the same species. We loved this illustration so much, we even used it for the cover of our Fall/Winter catalog in 2011! Bartram’s Garden felt the same way, and awarded Rauh’s painting for “encapsulating the Bartram spirit of discovery and passion for nature.”
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Posted in Adult Education on June 4 2013, by Lansing Moore
This month we feature Elaine Yellen, a Westchester-based landscape designer and NYBG graduate who now runs her own firm in Scarsdale, where she continues to build upon her Garden education.
“I completed the Horticulture Program and the Landscape Design Program,” Elaine said. “Both provided essential preparation that let me feel like a true professional when I presented myself to clients as an expert in my field. Many of my teachers were working professionals and were so helpful in all aspects of project design and implementation. They were always very generous with advice to a budding designer.”
Elaine first came to the NYBG because she wanted to turn her love of gardening into a profession: “It was my creative outlet… so I decided to study it formally and see where that would lead.” In addition to many residential projects in lower Westchester, local golfers might be familiar with her work for clubs and courses such as Winged Foot, Brae Burn, Fenway, Sunningdale, Fairview, and Scarsdale.
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