Inside The New York Botanical Garden

Todd Forrest

Beautiful Beard-tongues

Posted in Horticulture on June 20 2014, by Todd Forrest

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.


The flowers of Penstemon cobaea var. purpurea are much larger than those of the other beard-tongues in the Native Plant Garden
The flowers of Penstemon cobaea var. purpurea are much larger than those of the other beard-tongues in the Native Plant Garden.

I am batty for beard-tongues. No, I don’t mean the furry-mouthed feeling that people with actual social lives get after long nights of too many cocktails, I mean the more than 250 species of Penstemon, a genus of perennials and biennials native to North America from the Maine woods to the alpine meadows of Idaho and the deserts of California. With tall clusters of flowers as beautiful as their common name is ugly (the moniker beard-tongue refers to tufts of hair that emerge from the sterile fifth stamen of certain species), beard-tongues carry late spring in the Native Plant Garden.

The most common beard-tongue in cultivation is Penstemon digitalis ‘Husker Red’, selected in 1983 by Dr. Dale Lindgren of the University of Nebraska for its maroon leaves, long-lasting inflorescences of white flowers, and extreme hardiness (it thrives in Nebraska!). We planted ‘Husker Red’ in the Native Border, where its flowers bridge the gap between the peaks of mid-spring and mid-summer bloom, and its foliage adds a dash of welcome color throughout the growing season.

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Waiting for Hydrangeas

Posted in Horticulture on May 30 2014, by Todd Forrest

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.


Cutting back hydrangeas
Frost-killed hydrangea stems should be pruned back to live wood.

On April 16 at 6 a.m., the Garden’s weather station reported a low temperature of 30.2°F. The freezing temperatures were accompanied by about a half inch of icy slush that coated the greening turf and accumulated in the chalices formed by the opening flowers of saucer magnolias, which had just emerged after a string of warm April days that, I hoped, signaled the end of our seemingly interminable winter. Needless to say, the Garden’s venerable saucer magnolias did not have their best spring.

For many, memories of that hard April frost will be erased by this week’s temperatures—approaching 90°F as I write—and the reappearance of seersucker suits in midtown. Those of us who love plants will be reminded of April 16 every time we see an old-fashioned Hydrangea macrophylla over the next few months. With the exception of remontant (re-blooming) varieties such as Endless Summer® (more on these later), Hydrangea macrophylla flower from buds formed during the previous growing season. Dormant through the long winter, these buds began to swell as temperatures finally rose in early April, only to be zapped by the hard mid-April frost.

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An Unsung Harbinger of Spring

Posted in Horticulture on March 28 2014, by Todd Forrest

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.


Acer rubrumFor most people who anxiously await the end of winter, spring begins when the first brassy bulbs emerge from just-thawed soil. Not for me. While I am as enthusiastic about the appearance of snowdrops, crocuses, reticulate irises, and glories-of-the-snow as your average winter-weary garden watcher, what really warms my heart are early spring flowers that don’t make the evening news—those of our native red maples (Acer rubrum).

As March transmogrifies from lion into lamb, I look skyward hoping to catch a glimpse of the flowers of red maple as they peek out of disintegrating winter buds. At a distance, a red maple tree in full bloom is a tangle of gray limbs enveloped in a carmine haze. The individual flowers are quite small, but a mature tree can produce hundreds of thousands of five-flowered clusters, which together create the most ethereal of all spring spectacles.

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October’s Woodland Weekend

Posted in Programs and Events on September 17 2012, by Matt Newman

Countless acres of lush flora, over 230 bird species, a virtual menagerie of fish, insects, reptiles, and mammals–and that’s just Central Park. New York City may have a reputation for being the urban jungle, but tucked in and around the buildings are the greenscapes–including the NYBG–that land us in the upper echelons of woodland sustainability. Places where flora and fauna have thrived in spite of the metropolis built up around them. But it’s not as if it was an easy task to get to where we are now, as The Cultural Landscape Foundation‘s (TCLF) president, Charles Birnbaum, recently explained; it was a long and trying process, with green spaces across the city sometimes suffering under a lack of proper management. And that’s a part of the reason that we’re adding our voice to TCLF’s fall conference, Bridging the Nature-Culture Divide II: Stewardship of Central Park’s Woodlands.

On Friday, October 5, the NYBG joins with the Central Park Conservancy and institutions from across the country to examine today’s woodland sustainability, along with natural diversity, the role of people in the care of these landscapes, and public education. Speakers such as the Garden’s Arthur Ross Vice President for Horticulture and Living Collections, Todd Forrest, will offer their expertise on the lessons learned by our park stewards over the years, while accomplished landscape architects and other national experts detail the challenges now faced in caring for these cultural icons.

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Special Trees to See at the Garden

Posted in Gardens and Collections on April 29 2010, by Plant Talk

For Arbor Day, Staff Name Some Favorites; Tell Us Yours

Carol Capobianco is Editorial Content Manager at The New York Botanical Garden.

In honor of Arbor Day tomorrow, I asked some of the Horticulture staff to divulge their favorite tree at the Garden. With over 30,000 trees to select from, this could be daunting. For some, it was a cinch and they rattled off a tale about a special specimen. For others, it was like picking a favorite child, so they gave several choices.

Todd Forrest, Vice President for Horticulture and Living Collections, judiciously noted: “My favorite tree is always the one we just planted, because it helps ensure that our historic landscape will have trees for people to enjoy for decades to come.” (But he later did offer up a name, see below.)

Here, then, are some exceptional trees at the Garden and the reasons why they made the grade. Let us know which of the thousands of trees at the Garden—and we keep planting additional ones—is your favorite. We’d love to hear from you.

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Garden Loses 50 Trees in Storm; Cleanup Continues

Posted in Gardens and Collections on March 24 2010, by Plant Talk

Some 100-Year-Old Specimens Destroyed; 150 Others Damaged

Todd Forrest is Vice President for Horticulture and Living Collections.

While gardeners are accustomed to coping with the slings and arrows of outrageous weather, this winter has tested the patience of even the most experienced horticulturists among the Garden’s staff. Two wet, heavy snowstorms in February caused significant damage to the Garden’s historic trees, but nothing prepared us for the damage of the nor’easter that hit New York the weekend of March 13 and 14.

The deep snow that fell only two weeks before had not even completely melted when the torrential rains started late in the week of March 8. The combination of snowmelt and rain completely saturated the ground, creating the perfect conditions for what foresters call “wind throw”—trees, roots and all, torn out of the ground by fierce winds. With winds holding steady at between 30 and 40 mph and gusting to over 70 mph, many of the Garden’s historic trees had no chance.

By Sunday, March 14, 50 of our trees, including many historic conifers planted in the early 1900s and oaks older than the Garden itself, were lying across the ground. More than 150 other trees lost limbs or were otherwise damaged. Nearly every small tree planted in fall 2009 was uprooted. While our arborists will be assessing the full extent of the devastation for weeks to come, we are already mourning the loss of some of our favorite trees, including a Ponderosa pine planted in the Ross Conifer Arboretum in 1904 and a blue Atlas cedar planted in the Benenson Ornamental Conifers in 1966.

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