Patricia Gonzalez is an NYBG Visitor Services Attendant and avid wildlife photographer.
The Great-horned Owl nest of 2009
I have had the pleasure of taking thousands of photos of wildlife at The New York Botanical Garden since my first treks here in 2008. Among the birds of prey that I enjoy photographing are the Great-horned Owls. My first encounter with these winged hunters was back in March of 2009.
It was a little after 4:00 p.m. as I was walking down Azalea Way that I heard hooting coming from the Forest. I looked through the trees only to be surprised by the outline of an owl. Back then, I was shooting with a small point-and-shoot that had nowhere near the zoom range of my current camera. But it didn’t matter. What was important was that I got to see an amazing member of the animal kingdom for the first time, and I got a photo!
Later that month I spotted the female owl and one of her two hatchlings in the nest, which was located in a snag overlooking a trail near the edge of the Forest. I’ll never forget the day when a fluffy little head popped up and looked right into my camera. It’s still one of my all-time favorite photographs.
This year’s cherry blossoms announced the arrival of spring at the Garden in great bursts of white and pink. When a light breeze picks up the petals in a candy-colored flurry, you are reminded of the winter blizzards that are thankfully behind us.
Several beautiful varieties are scattered throughout the Ross Conifer Arboretum, with elegant weeping cherries framing the Haupt Conservatory. The best cherry blossom walk on grounds, though, is definitely Cherry Valley, just past the Thain Family Forest on the path to the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden. There the billowing trees surround you in a celebration of spring’s arrival. Click through and brighten up your day with a peek at the Garden’s cherry trees at the height of their flowering season!
Walking through the Ross Gallery on my way to the office each morning, I like to pause a moment and admire the greenery clothing the walls. There’s no vertical garden on display, per se. Rather, the photography of Allan Pollok-Morris is so verdant as to come close to imitating one. His compositions of Scottish countrysides, estate gardens, and landscape sculpture depict a depth of color and foliage that we seldom see on the left side of the Atlantic, and there’s a grandeur to each image that belies the “humble ruggedness” many default to when discussing Scotland.
To give you a refresher of what you’ve been missing out on if you haven’t yet made a stop to see this photo exhibition, I put together a slideshow of some of Allan’s iconic works hanging now in the Ross Gallery. Each photograph depicts the landscapes, sculptures, or gardens of a designer living or working in Scotland—natives and expats alike.
While we are well into The Orchid Show, I know our photography aficionados have not forgotten about this year’s Tropical Paradise Photo Contest. After lengthy deliberations over our six weekly winners in the Macro and Sense of Place categories, we are ready to announce the Grand Prize Winners in each category, recipients of a seat in the NYBG Adult Education photography class of their choice.
Most of all, I hope enjoying the outstanding weekly submissions on Plant Talk has inspired you all to enjoy the Garden through your own lens. If you want to challenge your skills and enhance your enjoyment of the Garden, then NYBG Adult Education offers a variety of classes to help you see the grounds in new ways. For those shutterbugs out there, the next class will be Photographing Birds, Bees, & Butterflies on April 26, but there are many more slated for spring as the Garden comes into full bloom. Whether with an iPhone or a full DSLR rig, there are classes for all subjects and levels of expertise.
Now for the moment that has been weeks in the making. We are very pleased to announce the Grand Prize Winners of the 2014 Tropical Paradise Photo Contest! Click through to find out.
Here we are, at the end of our Tropical Paradise Photo Contest’s last round of finals. As we welcomed the colorful debut of The Orchid Show: Key West Contemporary this past weekend, we also had to say goodbye to Tropical Paradise for another year. Today we announce the last finalists who managed to capture the magic of that exhibition through their lenses.
While the Oscars may be over, we still have our own prize to give out for “Best Picture”—a seat in the NYBG Adult Education Photography class of the winner’s choice. We will now deliberate over the past six rounds of weekly winners, and announce the Grand Prize Winners next Tuesday. So without further ado, we announce the winners of Best Photo in the Macro Category, and Best Photo in the Sense-of-Place Category. The envelope please…
It is time once again to announce another round of winners in our Tropical Paradise Photo Contest. We certainly hope you all enjoyed the long Presidents’ Day weekend in spite of the soggy weather. Appropriately enough, some of our best photographic entries this week captured the beauty of water. Of course, there is a world of difference between the warm mists of the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, and the ice covering the grounds.
If you’re looking to try your hand at photographing our permanent Conservatory collections, we’re now into week five of a total six judging windows to submit your work, so don’t wait long! Simply upload your photos of the Tropical Paradiseexhibition currently in the Conservatory to our Flickr group (don’t forget the #tropicalparadise hashtag) before 6 p.m. on Friday, February 21, to be entered into this week’s judging. Until then, please enjoy the three winning photos in the Macro and Sense-of-Place categories, and stay dry out there!
It is hard to believe that the time has come to announce the third round of winners in our Tropical Paradise Photo Contest. We are halfway through this six-week competition, with the fourth week beginning this past Saturday. But there’s still time to win! Simply upload your photos of the Tropical Paradise exhibition in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory to our Flickr group before the 6 p.m. deadline this Friday, February 14—Valentine’s Day—to be entered into this week’s judging. After all, we don’t want this contest cutting into any romantic plans you may have. Though if you don’t have any plans yet, may we recommend one of our Valentine’s Day Dates at Tropical Paradise?
The submissions have been very impressive thus far, and it took careful deliberation to choose the top three photos in the Macro and Sense-of-Place categories. We sympathized with the judges at Sochi in carefully weighing the qualities of each contender. So in honor of the Winter Olympics, here are our Gold, Silver, and Bronze Medalists for this week!
The tallies are in for week two of the Tropical Paradise Photo Contest! With so many great photographs in the submission queue this time around, it was like pulling teeth trying to find a consensus on the winners, but we rallied and came to some good conclusions.
We’re now into week three of the contest as far as submission windows go, and the number of people contributing is still climbing—which we love. Frankly, the more the merrier. The judges and I thrive on a good challenge. But while we’re on the topic, I must remind all newcomers to our contest that the only way to ensure we see your entries is to tag each photo with “#tropicalparadise” when you upload it to our Flickr group. No variations on that, please! Even if we do happen to see a photo with “Tropical Paradise” in the title, we can’t be sure that you intended to submit it officially, and you know what they say about assumptions.
Otherwise, everything has been going swimmingly (aside from our weekly winner announcements, which are a day late as per usual). Keep the photos coming! And without further ado, here are your winners for week two of TPPC 2014.
Cue week three of our Tropical Paradise exhibition, and the third round in our ongoing, six-week photography contest! Already we’ve seen dozens of entries from local and visiting photographers hoping to take home the brass ring—a certificate good for one Adult Education photography course of the winner’s choosing. And because we have two categories in which to enter, Macro and Sense-of-Place, that’s two opportunities to win a certificate. Easy! Just check out our photo contest rules page to get a handle on submission guidelines and schedules.
We’ll have the winners of the second round up on Plant Talk as of Monday or Tuesday, but in the meantime you can check out the competition via the announced champions of the first week.
There are still four whole weeks of competition left as of this Saturday, February 1, but if you’re not much of a camera fiend there’s still plenty of interest to be found in our daily events and activities in the Conservatory. You’ll find our permanent collection of tropical rarities and stunning blooms augmented by Tropical Interactive Encounters, hands-on demos that open up the rejuvenating properties of plants like nutmeg and annatto with samples to boot. And for kids, Tropical Wintertime Wonders in the Everett Children’s Adventure Garden offer a chance to chase away the winter gloom in the cozy Discovery Center. There they’ll pot up their own specimen plants to take home and use a field notebook to discover the beginnings of new plantlife waiting for spring’s arrival.
If the weather’s got you down, don’t suffer it! Just hop up to our Conservatory and make the instant transition to the tropics, only a step inside our classic glasshouse.
It is time once again to announce another round of winners in our 
It is hard to believe that the time has come to announce the third round of winners in our 
The tallies are in for week two of the 