The Forest may only just now be hinting at its fall colors, but soon you’ll see all the reds, oranges, and yellows of this vivid season in action, sweeping across the canopy as cooler weather sets in. But do you really know why and how the leaves change colors? To answer that question, we put together a little video, spotlighted below now that the true fall scenery is beginning to make itself known. Learn a bit more about leaves this week!
Todd Forrest is the NYBG’s Arthur Ross Vice President for Horticulture and Living Collections. He leads all horticulture programs and activities across the Garden’s 250-acre National Historic Landmark landscape, including 50 gardens and plant collections outside and under glass, the old-growth Thain Family Forest, and living exhibitions in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory.
Approximately thirty thousand trees add shade and scale to the Garden, including thousands of mature oaks, maples, sweet-gums, beeches, birches, tulip-trees, black-gums, and other deciduous beauties in the Native Plant Garden, Azalea Garden, and dotted across the hills and dales of our historic landscape. All of these wonderful shade trees make fall at the Garden a heart-breakingly beautiful mosaic of yellow, orange, burgundy, scarlet, and brown, particularly when late October and early November days are bright and nights are crisp but not freezing.
All of these wonderful shade trees also make the annual ritual of fall leaf pick-up a Herculean task for Garden horticulturists, who take up rakes, blowers, mowers, vacuums, and any other tool they can think of and spend the better part of three months each year in an elaborately choreographed leaf gathering and transporting dance across the Garden’s 250 acres. If all goes as planned, leaf pick-up begins in early October and is mostly finished before winter’s first substantial snowfall.
New Yorkers tend to look down a lot, and for good reason. It’s a busy town. So it’s important to be reminded sometimes that looking up can lead to remarkable sights!
For everyone who’s been cooped up in an office cubicle for far too long to frolic in the changing fall palette, I thought I’d throw together some of the best and brightest shots from around the Garden this week. The autumnal leaves are really picking up the pace! We’re actually heading into the coming weekend at about the halfway mark on our Fall Foliage Tracker, with reds, oranges, and yellows popping all over our 250 acres. Some of the gradients—trees starting green at their lower branches and graduating to red at the tip-top—are downright majestic.
Whether or not you decide to come and join us for Fall Forest Weekends over the next two Saturdays and Sundays (you really should!), here’s to enjoying every last minute of this colorful middle ground before winter’s snows set in.
In some parts of New York State, autumn has already come and gone. But here in the Bronx? The best is yet to come! How will you know when it’s time to pay us a visit to see the Garden’s 250-acres dressed up in the prettiest oranges, reds, and yellows of fall? With our new Fall Foliage Tracker of course!
The Garden has a multitude of places for you to enjoy the beauty of fall, but if I had to pick just one place you must visit for fall foliage enjoyment, it would be the Thain Family Forest. This 50-acre old growth forest is the largest remaining tract of the woodlands that once covered all five boroughs of New York City. The Bronx River, New York City’s only freshwater river, cuts through it in a dramatic gorge complete with a waterfall. Stand above the river on the Hester Bridge for one of the Garden’s great fall foliage vistas.
