Mandy Disher - "The Beacon," First Place in Plant Portraits Year 3
Every day at The New York Botanical Garden offers countless opportunities to snap the perfect shot. A red-tailed hawk making pre-flight checks, a maple seed as it whirligigs from an overhead branch–each event happens almost casually, yet the challenge of capturing nature in just the right light, at the right time, is something our visiting photographers crave.
But there’s motivation beyond the thrill of capturing the perfect picture, thanks in large part to the nearly $8,000 in grand prize funds handed out through the International Garden Photographer of the Year competition. For the last five years, the contest has provided amateurs and professionals alike with an outlet for their photographs, and in turn earned the winners not only a check, but global recognition for their work. And with an entry fee of only £10 (around $16), there’s no reason to sit this year’s competition out.
We know you’ve been anxious for the Holiday Train Show to open its doors–we’re right there with you! And truth be told, ever since preparation began in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory two weeks ago, it’s been a struggle for those of us at Plant Talk to keep our excitement in check (and why would we even want to, at that?) Watching the bridges and tracks being put in place, seeing this year’s layout take shape under the careful attentions of Paul Busse and his Applied Imagination team–it’s left us daydreaming over how spectacular everything will look under the lights this weekend.
But there’s more to the Train Show than locomotives and landmarks. This weekend also marks the start of our holiday celebrations at large, with grand opening ceremonies, music, and all sorts of entertainment outside the glassy walls of the Conservatory.
The Arthur and Janet Ross Conifer Arboretum at The New York Botanical Garden covers nearly 40 acres of rolling landscape in the heart of the garden. It became the first collection of living plants at the Garden with plantings started in 1901, and now boasts more than 250 mature conifers, some of which are more than 100 years old.
Some of the earliest conifers to arrive at the garden–planted in 1908–are the Tanyosho pines, conifers that display a beautiful, orange-red bark with branches that can often be seen spreading in an umbrella shape. Our grove of five mature specimens is a very unique example of the species in the U.S., especially when considering that each tree is more than a century old.
Did you know that globally, boreal conifer forests cover more land mass than any other type of forest on the planet? In fact, they take up more space than all of the tropical rain forests combined. This makes conifers an extremely important family of trees, not to mention record-holders for the world’s oldest, tallest, and most massive trees.
I went up to our Native Plant Garden the other day to check on the progress of the restoration, an undertaking being handled by my colleagues, John Egenes and Michael Wronski.
Our Native Plant garden has been closed for the past year and is undergoing a full-scale redesign that is spearheaded by the design firm Oehme van Sweden, whose work has been seen in the Chicago Botanic Garden and United States National Arboretum. As part of the firm’s plan here at The New York Botanical Garden, the location will be broken down into disparate native habitats that include a wetland, a sizable pond, and a meadow. It will also have a large woodland area.
My colleagues spent most of their time over the last year preparing the soil in different sections of the garden, adding truckloads of compost and leaf litter. The topography of the garden has since changed and many areas have been graded, making paths ADA accessible for wheelchairs.
They’re a curious lot, these dusky squirrels, with their furry ears and black cat sensibilities. You might almost think them bad luck, though even the most superstitious among us would be hard-pressed to toss salt over our shoulders after crossing paths with this forest rodent. And I’m not even sure that’s the right protocol for countering such a thing. Still, these little shadows are worth investigating.
I noticed the black squirrels for the first time while riding shotgun in one of the Garden’s staff golf carts (though the Mosholu course is close, I imagine we only have these because management didn’t take the suggestion of supplying us with go-karts in good humor.) The fellow in the driver’s seat pointed them out as an idle fascination, then asked me if I’d ever seen such a thing. But while a funny sight, there’s initially nothing about their behavior to differentiate them from the eastern gray squirrels you find stuffing capped acorns into their cheeks or, in my case, infiltrating the attic and chewing my home’s wiring threadbare. They breed with the grays, eat the same foods, and in urban areas of the Bronx are just as prone to hassle you for snacks, having grown too accustomed to people.
Fall’s chill may be creeping in, but the brilliant sun catching the leaves of the Forest makes for a fantastic celebration here at The New York Botanical Garden. Luckily, Garden Tour Guide Suzanne Goldstein was there in the crowd this past weekend to snap photos of the ongoing event in action, from canoe trips to forest tours.
The festivities take off again this Saturday and Sunday with live music, demonstrations, and activities for everyone to jump into. Want to glide along New York City’s only freshwater river with an expert canoe guide? The Bronx River Alliance has you covered. And once you’re back on shore, you’re welcome to join in on one of our trail tours, or sit back and enjoy the pluck and bow of The Manhattan Valley Ramblers’ talented musical arrangements.
While walking through the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory this afternoon, I found myself taken with a little plant–squat, a bit ragged, and looking almost sinister for its petite size. The nostalgia, however, was too much to gloss over.
For most kids, horticulture isn’t a hobby fallen into casually. It’s more often a topic reserved for the science classroom, where frustrated 6th grade teachers scrap and claw to gain even the most tentative hold on their students’ attention. And past the Bunsen burners, wedged somewhere in between lessons on cell walls and chlorophyll, there sits the smallest concession to fun: Dionaea muscipula–the Venus flytrap.
Back in February of this year, I related my tale of Rose, the red-tailed hawk who shares a nest on the nearby Fordham University campus with Vince, her mate. Since then, the hawks have extended their family. In May, four chicks (a record for this pair and likely any other Bronx hawks) came out to the world. I knew that it was only a matter of time before these youngsters would pay The New York Botanical Garden a visit. I hoped to be lucky enough to see these raptors close up, and I recently got my wish.
It was 9:40 a.m. on a chilly October morning and I had just passed the Garden’s reflecting pool. I wanted to do some shooting of the Conservatory grounds. That’s when I noticed a hawk darting overhead, landing on the lawn by the first tram stop on Garden Way.
The tram crew hadn’t noticed it at first. The hawk was looking down at something. After watching Jr. (one of this hawk’s siblings from 2010’s brood) for so many months this past winter, I already knew what was going to happen next, so I tip-toed ahead, ducking behind one of the two nearby trees and readying my camera. I set it to shoot eight images in one burst and began firing away. It was windy and the ray of sunlight shining through the trees directly onto my new friend kept changing, making getting clear shots interesting to say the least. But I got photos of the newest member of Rose’s dynasty regardless.
The Native Plant Garden is designed to showcase the beauty of native plants throughout the year. If this were spring, I might be talking about the planting of the woodland, where trillium, lady slippers and ferns were planted in April and May. But this is another time and another season.
Now the meadow is in focus. We haven’t had a meadow in the Native Plant Garden for a very long time–not since the old one succumbed to dodder. But once in bloom, the meadow will be an open, full sun grass garden punctuated with flowers. It has three distinct conditions available for plants, each offering a different environment to support a variety of species.
Paul Lisicky is the author of Lawnboy, Famous Builder, and The Burning House. His next book, Unbuilt Projects, is forthcoming. A New York City resident, he is a contributing member of the NYBG’s literary audio tours program, an opportunity for talented writers to add a touch of poetry to the exploration of the Garden.
The sandy soil, the boggy ponds: whenever I feel an inexplicable sense of geographic safety (say, in parts of Cape Cod, coastal North Carolina, or Florida), I understand soon enough that I’m looking at a replica of my childhood backyard–or at least the woods and marshes nearby.
And yet I once wanted to be elsewhere. Or at least I wanted my plants and trees to be elsewhere. I wanted them to grow in unexpected shapes, leaves large as shovels. I wanted them to be a little scary, a little closer to life as I knew it, which felt to me both beautiful and a little brutal. (Don’t children always know that consciousness is darker than their parents remember?) On childhood trips to Florida or California, my eye went first to the plants. The plants in warmer climates weren’t bound to restraint or to the pressures of some unnameable force, the codes always changing, impossible to decipher. Their oranges could be brighter; their trunks could be thicker, their vines could grow and twist until they made a mess of themselves, until you had no idea that the plant had once been a beautiful thing.
