Gardens & Collections Blog
The Quiet Earth: A Forest in Winter
When you step into the Native Flora Garden, no matter what season, you feel a sense of wonderment and mystery. It looks and feels like a forest. During summer months, the garden pulses with activity—flying insects buzz, lush growth sways in the warm breeze, the smells are intoxicating. It’s as if you’re standing on
New Native Flora Garden Grows Local
When it comes to living and eating more sustainably, we’ve all heard, “Go local.” Brooklyn Botanic Garden will embody this edict when the Native Flora Garden expansion opens later this spring. The one-acre expansion features more than 150 plant species that evoke rapidly disappearing wild ecosystems in New Jersey,
What Gives Leaves Their Fall Color?
As the days get shorter and the nights get cooler, the leaves of our broad-leaf trees are losing their green, and entire forests are turning shades of gold and yellow, orange, red, and purple. This process is one of nature’s most beautiful spectacles, but the changes that create it occur within each tiny leaf cell, where
Food for Thought
What’s red and green, eats bugs, and lives at BBG? The carnivorous plant display that curator Cayleb Long has recently placed on Lily Pool Terrace. Four large pots at the corners of the pools and one at the top of the steps all hold a variety of these fascinating plants, not only the well-known Venus flytrap (Dionaea
WNYC Investigates Amaranth
Amaranth may be the most important and delicious plant you've never heard of. It’s been cultivated for thousands of years across the world and could be a major player in the future of food security, but, despite its many virtues, few Americans are familiar with it. Caleb Leech, BBG's Herb Garden curator, and Ariel
Lovely Lotuses
Those beautiful blossoms in the Lily Pools must mean its water lily time, right? Not quite. The large flowers in full bloom right now are not lilies but sacred lotuses, explains Cayleb Long, Lily Pool Terrace curator. They do look similar at first glance, and lotuses (Nelumbo nucifera) were once thought to be a type of
