Is it really already time to think about spring and summer sessions in the Children’s Garden? Why yes, it is. And it’s not your imagination that the registration period has come early this year. We have shifted the opening date for these two popular program seasons. Registration will begin February 6th at 9 a.m., sharp.

The staff is also gearing up for the planting season—the 98th one for this hands-on kids program. Children’s Garden Coordinator Dave Daly is ordering awesome new seeds and making a few changes to the field plans for our spring gardeners. A giant compost delivery will also arrive before our first garden sessions in March and April. If you stop by in late March, you may get to see Herb Garden curator Caleb Leech on a tractor disking up a section of the field that the teen Garden Apprentices are going to replant in a new configuration this spring.

Our returning gardeners know that these preparations lay the groundwork for an amazing bounty of vegetables and flowers. Before you know it, the first baby lettuces and radishes will be ready to harvest. Then May plantings of tomato, basil, zucchini and sunflowers will grow and grow until the Children’s Garden is transformed into a lush field of plants by late July.

We are all so excited just thinking about what’s in store for our gardeners this year. The schedule is available now so you can see which time slots work best for your child. Be sure to register for one or both of these popular seasons either online or in person beginning February 6th at 9 a.m.

This time of year in the Discovery Garden, I often wonder where did everybody go? Visitors are a little scarce, and when they are here, they often drift in and out quickly, unsure of what to look for in the bare winter landscape. But take time and look closely, and you’ll discover fascinating things in the winter garden.

Winter is the time to look for the fine details in nature. With much of their greenery gone, trees and shrubs reveal their architecture. Look up to compare the tall slender shape of the hornbeam trees with the weeping mulberry’s knot of gnarled branches. This week, the wintersweet tree is covered in little perfumed blossoms, the first daffodils have opened, and tiny snowdrop flowers nod along the pathways. Winter is also a great time to touch and compare garden textures. Find the fuzzy magnolia buds, the feathery plumes of the maidenhair grasses, and the leathery Southern magnolia leaves.

As the seasonal flocks of visitors recede, winter wildlife starts to creep back into the heart of the Discovery Garden. The squeals of children exploring the water table are replaced by the sounds of sparrows bustling around the bird feeder and the tap-tap of woodpeckers foraging on the Austrian pines overhead. Look closely at the bark, where you can find the little holes they’re boring in search of insects. If you watch quietly, you might spot a robin picking red berries off the hollies in the Farm. The moisture from rain and snow supports a surge of decomposers on the woodland log pile—turn one over to find millipedes curled up in the crannies and the zigzags of slime trails left by slugs and snails.

Recently, a mother and her young kids were here exploring, and I sent them on a mission to gather the bounty of fresh cones for the pinecone bin. Trotting after her toddlers, she told me that winter is her favorite season in the Garden, because they have the place almost to themselves. Be sure to come sample the delights of the winter garden yourself, before word gets out.

How long does it take to install a 10,000-square-foot meadow on the roof of a building? According to this video, just two minutes! We captured the entirety of the early-autumn installation of 40,000 plants on the roof of BBG’s new Visitor Center—from September 26 to October 31, 2011—in this short time-lapse video. A month of soil dispersal, planting, watering, and a surprise snowfall has been condensed into two minutes of gardening history. And the transformation doesn’t end here. The living roof will change throughout the seasons, its grasses, bulbs, and perennial wildflowers attracting local pollinators and visitors alike. By May 16, when the new Visitor Center opens to the public, nearly 60,000 plants will have been installed around the building.

The Visitor Center is a key component of the most significant renewal effort since the Garden’s founding. To learn more about the extraordinary series of new projects underway visit nextcentury.bbg.org.

Are you a Brooklyn street tree fan who wants to protect your tree from dogs, trash, foot traffic, and ill-placed bikes? Maybe you’ve thought, “I’ll put in a tree guard!” Tree guards are urban heroes if designed and installed properly. But no matter how well intentioned, a poorly designed and placed tree guard can do more harm than good; remember, the health of the tree always comes first!

A good tree guard should be 18 to 22 inches tall to avoid posing a tripping hazard. For safety, the top of the guard should be flat or rounded, not pointed. Be sure it’s not a barrier to rainwater; water must be able to flow freely off the sidewalk into the tree bed. Make your guard three-sided, open to the street to allow for car doors. Remember, a tree grows, so give it room by installing your guard at the outermost edge of the tree bed. Don’t pave over any part of the bed or attach the guard to your tree. And never raise the level of the soil around the base of the tree—mounding soil or mulch over the root crown could kill it!

Try this easy DIY idea: Drill holes through the tops of four sturdy, wooden stakes or lengths of pipe. Drive the stakes or pipe into the corners of your tree bed. Loop rope or chain through the holes to create a three-sided guard. Learn more by reading Caring for City Street Trees.

Note: Installing a guard around any city tree requires a permit. For more information, visit stewardship.nycparks.org. Call 311 to report tree-related problems or hazards, or visit MillionTreesNYC.org.

Are you interested in hosting a clinic for street tree care in your neighborhood? Let us know at greenbridge@bbg.org.

Six years ago, GreenBridge began a yearlong process of reflection that produced Greening Brooklyn Together: GreenBridge Strategic Plan 2007–2011. We gathered voices from block associations, master composters, and community gardeners. Sankofa, a word from Ghana often symbolized by a bird and translated as “looking back to move forward,” aptly summarizes that community reflection and the wonderful new directions it set for GreenBridge programming.

First to fledge in 2007 was a renewed focus on Street Tree Stewardship, bolstered by a GreenBridge partnership with MillionTreesNYC. Now soaring, we’ve offered over 60 tree-care workshops and seen more than 600 street trees adopted by GreenBridge-trained stewards.

The summer of 2008 brought the GreenBridge Community Garden Alliance, launched with 50 member gardens dedicated to practicing sustainable horticulture. Since then, membership has swelled to 113 gardens, and field workshops have been offered on various topics selected by members, including drip irrigation, soil testing, rain gardening, brewing compost tea, and fruit tree care.

Perhaps most visionary was the community’s call for GreenBridge to train volunteers to help with urban greening across the borough. In 2010, the Brooklyn Urban Gardener (BUG) program offered the first “train the trainer” course for volunteers, who now assist Brooklyn’s schools, community gardens, and libraries with a host of gardening projects.

For more information about GreenBridge outreach, programs, or the strategic plan, visit us at bbg.org/greenbridge or call 718-623-7250.

When it opens in May, Brooklynites gazing up at the new BBG Visitor Center on Washington Avenue will witness a hillside transformed: soft lines of glass and steel covered by a rooftop meadow rustling in the breeze. The green roof is gorgeous, but look down—the newly installed landscape around the Visitor Center is no less innovative and inspiring.

As many GreenBridge gardeners know, last year’s Community Garden Alliance outreach featured workshops on creating rain gardens. In fact, planning is under way for a rain garden at El Puente Espiritu Tierra Garden in Williamsburg. Now BBG is launching its own living outdoor classroom to educate and motivate gardeners interested in these water-wise, low-maintenance, and beautiful plant communities. Three highly visible demonstration rain gardens are now being installed adjacent to the Visitor Center: two on the north side, just outside the ticketing area, and one on the south side of the building.

It all begins with water and where it flows when it rains. In order to divert rainwater from Brooklyn’s overtaxed storm drains and sewer system, much of the Visitor Center’s pathways will be of permeable crushed stone. Areas paved with concrete will be gently sloped and have grooves scored into the surface to help direct storm water into planted infiltration basins—otherwise known as rain gardens. Structures called rills and weirs will slow down, channel, and distribute the water. Rain gardens aren’t wet or swampy, since water flowing into them doesn’t pool. Instead, layers of permeable soil direct water downward, recharging the natural groundwater system. Plants ideally suited for these conditions withstand dry spells punctuated by periods of heavy rainfall; many of them are native species.

So when you visit the new Visitor Center—perhaps during a spring shower!—be sure to relax on a bench made from eco-friendly wood and admire the beautiful native plantings near the Washington Avenue entrance. Some herbaceous plants to look out for are blue stars (Amsonia hubrichtii and A. tabernaemontana ‘Blue Ice’) and the switchgrass cultivar ‘Ruby Ribbons’ (Panicum virgatum). Deciduous trees playing a prominent role include sweet birch (Betula lenta), several black gums (Nyssa sylvatica), and sweet bay (Magnolia virginiana).

For more on creating an urban rain garden of your own, see these gardening resources:

Rain Gardens: Using Spectacular Wetland Planting to Reduce Runoff

GreenBridge tip sheet: Creating a Rain Garden (pdf)

GreenBridge tip sheet: Native Plants for New York City Rain Gardens (pdf)

Seeing the hyacinths emerge in the springtime is exciting. Seeing them in January, as we are now due to this winter’s exceptionally mild weather, is a little bit alarming, especially now that the forecast is calling for temperatures to dip into the 20s over the next few days. There is one bright side, though. Any holiday greenery still on hand is the perfect material to protect spring bulbs from biting cold and bitter wind. That’s what BBG this week did for the hyacinths, irises, and fritillaria that have sprouted in Annual Border, says curator Cayleb Long. “Christmas tree boughs are really helpful for protecting what’s above ground right now. Even a little extra protection will go a long way,” he says.

Home gardeners can do the same for any of their own spring bulbs that may be confused about what month this is, Long says. “Hopefully, you’ll have already mulched, which will help. Then, if you’ve got Christmas tree boughs, you can place them on top. If not, you can use fallen leaves, straw, or hay—anything loose and organic like that.” Any buds that are starting to form should be pinched off, which may allow the plant to produce another flower when the time is right.

With luck, all will be well come spring, says Long. “It will vary some from species to species and cultivar to cultivar, but most bulbs should still perform just fine. A few may be a little weaker, because they each respond differently to different levels and periods of cold temperature, but others will be fine. All of my tulips, for example, are still in the ground.”

Have you ever harvested and eaten fresh vegetables...in the middle of winter? This time of year, we prepare portions of the Children’s Garden for the cold weather by covering cool-weather crops with row-cover fabric and plastic. This material insulates our plants, keeping the air and soil up to 20 degrees warmer than surrounding areas, so our plants are protected from the harsh elements of winter.

That way, we can offer kids the opportunity to do some harvesting in our Children’s Garden classes year-round. Our next session will begin on Saturday, January 21. While we won’t be spending all our time outdoors, we’ll definitely spend some of it harvesting the delicious veggies growing in our protected garden beds: carrots, turnips, beets, and greens, to name a few. In fact, due to the warmer-than-usual weather we’ve had over the past couple of months, we’ll even have the chance to explore the unprotected areas of the Children’s Garden, looking for veggies that have survived the cold without the benefit of cover.

It feels wonderful to harvest fresh produce in the middle of January, but it’s also fun to explore other parts of the Garden: BBG is one of the most magical places to spend a winter day. The quiet beauty of the Garden is only heightened if there is a white snow cover. We will also visit the Tropical Pavilion and Aquatic House to remind us of the warm times to come, and we’ll use the education greenhouses to give kids the chance to interact with plants from around the world with science experiments and potting-up activities. We’ll also create beautiful terrariums and other plant-based crafts. Visit our Children’s Classes page for more info.

And be on the lookout for our spring/summer 2012 brochure in print and online later this month. Registration begins on February 6 at 9 a.m.

If the onset of winter triggers you to sleep too much and devour comfort food, you are not alone. Many people experience Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), a change in mood during the winter months that comes as a result of seasonal light cycle variation. Others might feel sluggish or down in a way that’s not quite SAD, but is still less than ideal. There are many therapies, including light machines and vitamins, but one of the best remedies is to take some aerobic exercise outside in sunlight—and where better to do that than BBG.

So says Lynne Spevack, a psychologist for 25 years, and BBG tour guide for 20. She’s leading a series of Chase Away the Winter Blues tours at the Garden this winter. I took her December tour; there will be others the first Sunday of each month through March.

Spevack designed these tours to bring people together to experience the beauty of winter, rather than hide from it. Each one delves into a different aspect of the winter landscape. December’s tour explored the beauty of trees—from those that retain leaves and needles, to those that bare their branches and reveal silhouettes against the sky. Many of the trees Spevack identified are common NYC street trees, but in the Garden, with more space and soil to grow, some look at first very different from the ones I’ve seen lining the pavement. The twenty-three of us on the tour looked high into the canopies, ahead to the varied bark textures, and down to the ground for pinecones and fallen leaves, and we began to notice patterns and predict tree names. We all shared what we knew and noticed— one bright younger member of the tour pointed out that an unlabeled tree had five needles per fascicle, and so the tree must be a white pine.

It was one of the first really chilly days, but when we paused in the sunlight, the warmth beat down on my face and illuminated a stand of white birch trees and I could really appreciate how the crisp air and a good dose of nature in the coming months could ward off the doldrums one walk at a time.

The tours are free and start at 1pm from the visitor’s center. The next one will be January 8, and will challenge participants to use all of their senses to experience the outdoors. So bring your mittens, but be prepared to take them off!

Berries that linger well into winter are lovely to behold. Such BBG specimens as the crabapples in the Osborne Garden, the American holly in the Native Flora Garden and the winterberries outside the Steinhardt Conservatory are highlights of a winter visit. But why exactly have these plants developed this characteristic? After all, the vast majority of fruiting trees and shrubs reproduce just fine by sticking to the more familiar timeline, producing fruits that ripen in warm months and drop or get eaten soon after.

Maybe it’s helpful to arrive fashionably late sometimes. The fruits of the native hollies, like American holly (Ilex opaca) and winterberry (Ilex verticillata), ripen late and are what ecologists call poor-quality fruits. They don’t contain a lot of nutrients (they especially lack fats and oils). They also contain some compounds that can make them taste bad to the birds. Most fruits produce these bad tasting compounds; they are what keeps animals from eating fruits until they are ripe. Usually the compounds break down and are gone by the time the fruit ripens, but in the hollies it takes longer for them to fully break down. So they’re not eaten by migrating birds; they prefer fruits packed with sugars, fats, and oils that provide energy for their flights. Plus, holly berries still don’t taste very good during the fall, during migration. But the bad tasting compounds do slowly break down, and the fruits get gradually get more palatable. At the same time, winter wears on, and winter birds must take whatever food is available, even if it’s not very nutritious. At some point, the holly berries start to look pretty good and the birds willingly eat them.

No one knows for sure what purpose this alternate timeline serves the holly plants, but there are a few good ideas. Since so many other plants ripen their fruits in time for migration, the hollies avoid competition by waiting longer. It also takes energy and resources to make highly nutritious fruits. By waiting until the birds are a little less choosy, hollies get their seeds dispersed without having to put all that energy into reproduction. That energy can then be used for growth or to fight of diseases and whatever other work the plant does to survive and propagate.

Crabapples are similar in a lot of ways. Many of them also have poor-tasting, low-nutrient fruits with big seeds packed full of cyanide. Originally, some species probably evolved to ripen late for the same reasons that native hollies did. Most of the winter fruiting crabapples that you see around now are cultivated, though. They may be grown in areas where there aren’t a lot of animals to disperse them, but people have been happy to give a helping hand since they provide winter interest so nicely.

What’s the most popular Christmas tree species in North America? BBG’s Holiday Tree Key may provide a clue. The key lets users click through a series of questions about their tree’s characteristics to determine its species. By tabulating the page views during last year’s holiday season, we’ve come up with an admittedly not-quite-scientific ranking of the most common choices. And the winner is…the Douglas-fir, followed closely by the Fraser fir and grand fir. At first glance, the three species seem incredibly similar, which isn’t surprising since most people look for similar qualities in Christmas trees—good needle retention, nice fragrance, affordability. But using the key, an online version of what botanists call a dichotomous key, highlights the myriad of variations you’ll see when you look really closely at your tree. (Are the needles attached to small, woody projections or directly to the branch? Are they long or short? Do they spread upward or horizontally? Are the fine hairs on the twigs grayish or reddish?)

And that’s why it’s so much fun to use BBG's Tree Key. After all, you could simply ask the vendor what you’re buying, but doing your own investigation is a great way to really get to know that conifer occupying your living room this month. So start thinking of your Pseudotsuga menziesii as a lovely example of its species, not just a place to hang blinking lights and tinsel.

Terrariums have captivated people since the first one was accidently created in 1829 by an amateur entomologist attempting to make a habitat for a moth chrysalis inside a bottle. Terrarium, a new exhibit on view now at BBG, shows how far these “gardens in a bottle” have come since then. As part of the exhibit, which also includes artworks by Jae Hi Ahn, BBG’s Jennifer Williams, curator of interior displays and the Washington Avenue gardens, has designed 26 unique terrariums. Each one is a charming, verdant world unto itself. Taken as a group, they show the wide array of possible interpretations of this lovely art form.

To create the exhibit, Williams scoured home design and floral supply shops for an assortment of glass containers. BBG staff also pitched in with loans of several old aquariums and a Victorian glass case. Williams collected a variety of decorative elements for the interiors, including petrified wood, unusual rocks, traditional Chinese mud men figures, and whimsical animal figurines like a frog prince and tiny sheep from a model train store. Her plant choices included a variety of orchids, carnivorous plants, ferns, mosses, succulents, cacti, and tropical foliage.

When it came to arranging each terrarium, Williams let inspiration take over. Some works, like a blown-glass vessel containing a beach scene complete with shells and sea grass, are meant to evoke natural landscapes. For others, Williams made particular plants the centerpiece—like the miniature moth orchid simply placed in an elegant stemmed vase. Other pieces were all about creating a composition of different colors, textures, and shapes. “I learned to take a step back with these so I could see the complete picture rather than just look down on them from above while working on them,” says Williams. Enjoy a sneak peak of the exhibit in the slideshow below. See it in person at the Steinhardt Conservatory Gallery through February 26.

Weeks after Hurricane Irene, we were still carrying out damaged tree limbs from the Native Flora Garden. I must be about half the size of curator Uli Lorimer, who was directing our work there, and the logs were twice the size I’d have liked. I carried them up the sloped wood-chip path as my muscles ached and sweat beaded on my brow.

I’d wanted to become a BBG horticulture intern ever since I first heard about the position from my former boss, the manager of a farm where I worked. He had started his own career as a BBG intern, so I knew that interning here for eight months would be a good hands-on way to learn the basics of professional gardening.

Yeah, the job description mentioned some “physical labor,” but that was fine with me since I like to work hard. Still, I guess I pictured myself doing a lot of my learning by simply being in the Garden, observing nature. I definitely don’t remember any mention of “hauling logs.” Or mosquito attacks. I must have been bitten three times in the three minutes it took Uli to demonstrate how to tie a throwing knot, needed to safely secure and prune a tree limb.

Still, I’ve learned a lot while I’ve labored. After all, Uli didn’t just order me to start removing limbs at random. He explained how doing so would allow more sunlight into the center of the Native Flora Garden, where a patch of wildflowers was struggling to grow. He showed me proper pruning techniques so we wouldn’t compromise the tree’s health. When he took a turn with the saw, he taught me the basics of tree anatomy as he cut inch by inch into a limb of an Acer saccharum (or as I used to call it, a sugar maple—did I mention I’ve learned a lot of Latin here too?). He pointed out when we had made our way through the branch’s bark and cambium layer and into the inner heartwood.

Later, as I weeded in the Plant Family Collection, I began to recognize the emerging cotyledons of the seedlings there. Not only was I able to ID all the various trees and shrubs I was weeding under, but I also learned the scientific and common name of each of the dozen or so weeds I was pulling. My BBG botany lessons were really paying off.

As my internship nears its end, I can honestly say that all the aching, itching, and sweating has been worth it. The opportunity to work closely with anyone as knowledgeable as a BBG gardener is invaluable, and even when I’m left to do something mundane like rake leaves, I find a special peace that comes from being alone with the trees in the middle of Brooklyn. I don’t think I could stand New York City without moments like these.

Interested in working hard and pursuing a gardening career? BBG is now accepting applications for 2012 horticulture internships through December 31. Duties include such physical tasks as weeding, pruning, and raking, but the program offers the opportunity to gain a foundation in professional gardening techniques and horticulture while working directly with BBG’s internationally respected experts. More information is available on our site at bbg.org/learn/horticulture_internships/.

Last month, two great friends of BBG traveled with Native Flora Garden curator Uli Lorimer to the New Jersey Pine Barrens to explore the area’s wealth of plant life, collect seeds, and sample ripe cranberries.

BBG members Lola Lloyd Horwitz and Marni Majorelle are not only expert gardeners with decades of horticultural experience, they are also mother and daughter! Please see below for Marni’s account of this unique family outing, originally published on her blog, alivestructures.blogspot.com.

A Trip to the New Jersey Pine Barrens

By Marni Majorelle

About a three hour ride from NYC you will find some very pristine and unusual landscapes in our southern neighbor, New Jersey. The Pine Barrens consist of about 1.1 million acres of protected land, with extreme environments that range from sphagnum bogs to sandy deserts.

My mother and I went on this beautiful outing led by Brooklyn Botanical Garden's Uli Lorimer, who has a wealth of knowledge about native plants and knew the pine barrens in and out (amazing job not getting us lost!). We were accompanied by landscape architect and native plant pioneer, Darrel Morrison. He's the designer of many sites in and outside New York City and has also recently worked on the expansion of Brooklyn Botanic Garden's Native Flora Garden.

The following images illustrate the type of moonscape that exists in this sandy environment.

Broom crowberry (Corema conradii) mixed with bearberry (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi) to create a beautiful low growing mosaic. The glossy leaves of the bearberry reflected the light and crowberry was like a red hairy mat.

The dominant species is pitch pine (Pinus rigida), which surrounded the sandy paths we walked on and provided a unique sense of enclosure amid trees only slightly bigger than us. The pitch pine is accompanied by scrub oak (Quercus ilicifolia).

At the next site we visited my feet got pretty wet and muddy; thankfully it was warm and so beautiful that I didn't really care. But for people going out there, definitely bring high boots! On the way to the bog we saw pine forests with an undergrowth of blueberries turned bright red.

The bog was beautiful and tasty! I ate tart and refreshing cranberries. It was hard not to step on amazing plants.

Everywhere we looked there were carniverous pitcher plants (Sarracenia purpurea). It makes sense there would be so many of these plants here, since the soil level is low in nutrients and high in acid, forcing plants to look for their nutrients elsewhere (namely, from bugs). This set of Sarracenia was so red it looks like a crime scene!

I think the most beautiful scene we saw was watching the Eel Grass Zostera marina flow in the current of a shallow creek. The grass was so bright in the sun and so graceful. It was very peaceful and quiet at that moment.

BBG staff and volunteers dug 7,500 holes in the Garden this fall. Why? To plant spring bulbs, of course. Into each hole went either a tulip, hyacinth, iris, or allium bulb, all of which will contribute to the gorgeous spring display in the Annual Border along Lily Pool Terrace and in the beds along the west side of Magnolia Plaza. It took a team of five about two days to complete the planting, but that was just one step in the process. All told, bulb planting at BBG spans almost an entire year from conception to completion. “I start mulling ideas in midsummer and then start sketching it out and putting the plans on paper a little while later,” says curator Cayleb Long, who has masterminded the borders for the past three seasons. This year’s design will showcase pink, purple, and white species and cultivars, as well as succession planting, the practice of planning a garden with an assortment of bloom times in mind to create a continuous, ever-evolving display.

First up will be the hyacinths and species tulips, which will bloom in mid- to late April. The different tulip cultivars will follow a little later, and the alliums and irises will start to take over as the early bloomers fade. An assortment of cool-weather annuals, which will be propagated in the Garden’s nurseries this winter, will provide an ongoing accent for the duration. The two borders will also exemplify two contrasting styles in garden design. Along Lily Pool Terrace visitors will see the traditional, formal approach involving blooms lined up in rows and symmetrical patterns, arranged by height and color; the Magnolia Plaza beds will feature a naturalistic style. “For this, we literally threw the mix of bulbs we selected into a tub and mixed them around before we planted them, so you’ll see lots of different heights and more of a frenzy of color,” says Long.

When BBG’s staff was brainstorming to find a theme for our 2012 calendar, we came up with an intriguing question: What would happen if we tapped into the amazing pool of talented photographers who enthusiastically document the Garden throughout the seasons? To learn the answer, we held a photo contest. The submissions were nothing short of spectacular. We weren’t surprised. After all, who knows the Garden better than our visitors?

But while we expected some great shots, we didn't anticipate the unique perspectives we saw in the photos that were submitted. It was fantastic to admire the Garden in new ways. I often asked myself, “Where was that taken?” These fresh views inspired the title of the 2012 calendar: Your Take: BBG Through Visitors' Eyes, (available for purchase online and in BBG's Gift Shops). The winning shots are also part of an outdoor photo exhibit of the same name on view throughout the Garden from now through spring. Each photo is posted at the location where it was taken. The winning shots are also below. (Mouse over the images to see photographer credits.)

Even though the calendar contest is over, the BBG visitor Flickr group is alive and well—and currently displays more than 12,000 submissions from more than 800 contributors. Please consider sharing your favorite shots of the Garden there. Happy shooting!

BBG’s Grammatophyllum speciosum is continuing to unfurl its hundreds of blossoms, offering a rare opportunity to see this gigantic plant—considered the world’s largest orchid species—in such dramatic bloom. But don’t take our word for it—the media has fallen under its spell, too.

• Gothamist, WNYC, ABC News, and the Huffington Post were captivated by its beauty (and recent weight gain).
• The Brooklyn Paper had a cheeky take on the bloom, likening the plant’s new fertilizer to a special sauce of sorts.

It's still blooming, so come so come to the Aquatic House and see for yourself!

“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” – Albert Camus

On a beautiful Sunday morning in early November, members of BBG’s President’s Circle gathered on the Osborne Garden’s inviting Fawcett Terrace for hot cider, fresh pastries, and a stroll around the nearby grounds to take in the autumn foliage. Garden President Scot Medbury, arborist Chris Roddick, and curator of the Osborne Garden and Lilac Collection, Daniel Ryniec, took turns speaking about the changes BBG’s flora undergoes as fall gets underway, and how the Horticulture and Maintenance staff care for the gardens during this transitional time. Along our walk, they pointed out plants of particular interest during the autumn season, and answered our questions about fall gardening at home. We also learned from experience that crabapples are edible, but just barely!

Thanks to all who started this weekend morning off with a visit to BBG. Enjoy the fall!

It’s not every day that a tiger orchid blooms in Brooklyn. It’s not even every year. In fact, BBG’s Grammatophyllum speciosum had only bloomed twice in its 13-year residence here—until now. The 300-pound tropical orchid has thrived since it was repotted in June 2010 and is now producing a magnificent display of 17 flower spikes and hundreds of yellow-and-brown-spotted blossoms. Even in its native habitat of Southeast Asia, the species blooms infrequently—reportedly once every two to four years. For a specimen to blossom in cultivation and at this latitude is a special event indeed. Don’t miss it.

Bonsai may seem quiet and still, but they are constantly and vigorously expressing the dynamism of life. Each season, they change personalities like people change clothes, often taking on a dramatically different look. Fall is no exception, and viewing the bonsai in the indoor setting of BBG’s C.V. Starr Bonsai Museum accentuates the feeling of fall, highlighting their vibrant, colorful glow.

I have arranged the bonsai to create a visual flow and rhythm as visitors move through the museum. This is important because, ideally, one should experience each bonsai individually for optimal affect. In a space full of bonsai, there is the risk of their canceling each other out. (Imagine trying to have an intimate conversation in a loud, crowded room.) By balancing the arrangement of the bonsai, I try to elevate their message of compassion and inspire a profound curiosity and love of nature. Having so many different shades of color to work with this time of year really makes it exciting. When I see visitors’ eyes light up as they enter this space, I know the bonsai are showing guests another perspective of fall—something to carry in their hearts.

Hanami, the Japanese tradition of viewing the cherry blossoms, has become a well-known and much-loved tradition for the thousands of visitors who flock to the Garden each spring. Momijigari, or autumn leaf viewing, is less famous but well worth embracing too. Each fall, Japanese nature lovers venture into gardens, parks, and mountains to admire the gorgeous leaf colors (koyo) of Japanese maples (momiji) which display nearly unrivaled shades of orange, red, yellow and purple. The beauty of these deciduous trees has been expressed in poems and songs throughout Japanese history.

The Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden features two species (Acer palmatum and A. japonicum) and several cultivars of Japanese maples. Complementing this display are the fall-blooming camellias, which are putting on a show with their white, pink, and red flowers near the back gate and south shore of the pond. Several different cultivars of Camellia sasanqua (as opposed to the more common, spring-blooming C. japonica) are growing here. BBG is at the northern limit for these broad-leafed evergreen shrubs, which are slow growing but can eventually become 20-foot tall trees. Be sure to come see them all in their autumn glory.

In the 101 years that BBG has existed, the Garden has had only six leaders. Dr. Charles Stuart Gager was the first. About 20 years ago, to recognize members who join the Garden at the highest membership level, the Gager Society was created in that visionary first director’s name.

Today, in addition to the current president, Scot Medbury, we are honored to have two former BBG heads who are still very active at the Garden—Betty Scholtz and Donald Moore. This living legacy of leadership has inspired a new name for this special group: the President’s Circle. The new name celebrates the enduring relationship our staff has with you, our special group of friends.

All the wonderful benefits of membership will remain; and in fact, BBG is offering new opportunities and intimate events exclusively for President’s Circle members, including previews, behind-the-scenes tours, and special receptions. We are looking for creative new ways of keeping Dr. Gager’s legacy alive. In BBG’s programming you can look forward to continued recognition of his role in the Garden’s history.

For more information, please visit the President’s Circle.

Autumn BBG visitors looking for signs of the season can't help but notice the yellows, oranges, and reds spreading out from within the greenery. Some see more surprising glimpses of fall, too, like those same fall colors reflected in water; migrating birds, up close and personal; or leaflike patterns created by tire tracks in the freak October snow.

Here are some of our favorite visitor-contributed photos of late fall in the Garden.

Bringing the seasons to life throughout the Garden's 52 acres is no small task! BBG's dedicated horticulture staff works hard to keep the Garden beautiful year round and often receives help from our Corporate Members.

This fall, BBG highlights our partnership with Moody's, a longtime Corporate Member whose employees contributed 200 hours of service to Garden over the past year. Working alongside BBG's horticulture staff, Moody's volunteers assisted in storm clean-up after three massive trees were destroyed by a tornado last fall; they mulched an entire acre of the Garden's south-end border mound near Blue Bell Wood; and most recently, they pruned over half a mile of brush along the Garden's perimeter fence on Flatbush Avenue. Moody's employees helped the Garden tremendously this year and we look forward to welcoming another team of volunteers in the spring!

Thank you Moody's!

Know any teens who want to help save the earth? The BBG’s Garden Apprentice Program (GAP) could be the perfect way to start them off. GAP teens learn about urban farming, science, and the environment while working in one of the most exciting public gardens in the world. They grow, harvest, and cook their own crops, work with kids in the Children’s Garden, assist horticulturists and scientists behind the scenes, and explore the Garden’s plant collections in depth, all while developing teamwork and communication skills that will prepare them for future careers.

Applications are now being accepted for apprenticeships, which run from March to November 2012. The program includes spring training, summer programming, and a weekly commitment throughout the academic year.

To learn more, attend the GAP open house on Saturday, November 12 (reserve your spot by emailing gap@bbg.org). More information is also available online at bbg.org/gap.

Last Saturday's strange snowstorm unfortunately coincided with our annual Halloween celebration, Ghouls and Gourds, which director of Public Programs Anita Jacobs and her crew meticulously planned as a day of zany, engaging activities and performances with a Victorian flair. The unexpectedly heavy precipitation forced us to call off Ghouls and Gourds within its first hour, but—in true BBG style—the visitors, performers, and staff on hand didn't just head for the hills. Instead, we decamped to the Administration building, where The Richmond Indigenous Gourd Orchestra, Xylofolks and Maracatu NY performed rousing sets that had everybody jumping; Phydeaux's Flying Flea Circus did an impromptu performance in a hallway; and merry cheer was shared by all.

And the photographers on hand weren't mourning either, as the opportunity to capture the Garden in the snow—surely one of its loveliest forms—revealed itself, this time with the special chance to see fall's vibrant colors dusted with white. Luckily, our trees and other plant collections didn't suffer too badly at the hands of the storm, and so we invite you to visit before the seasonal foliage fades away. Till then, enjoy the images of this rare weather event at BBG below!

Next Saturday, October 29, children and their families will flock to Ghouls & Gourds, BBG's biggest family event, to enjoy activities ranging from ‘pretend petting zoos’ and live music to costume-making, puppetry, and parades. They’ll also have a chance to meet 14 authors and illustrators of the books they love.

Over the past few years, the Book Barn at Ghouls & Gourds has grown into a signature event, where talented story spinners charm families with readings and book signings—and get to spend time with the children that help inspire their work..Although all currently local to New York, this year’s authors hail from many different parts of the world, lending rich diversity to their stories, styles, and messages. Each will meet with fans from noon to 4 p.m., and many will oversee fun activities, like Huy Voun Lee, a regular participant since 2007. Known for her paper creations, Lee loves to engage kids in creations based on origami or paper cutouts.

Some books will stir memories for parents that have read classics like The War with Grandpa and Chocolate Fever by the engaging Robert Kimmel Smith. Others represent a newer generation of stories for children, like Bryan Collier's Obama, a biography of our president's childhood. Collier, whose distinct artwork uses a combination of watercolor and collage, possesses a long list of illustration credits. His first work as author and illustrator, Uptown, won both the Ezra Jack Keats and the Coretta Scott King awards.

Throughout the afternoon, the authors will take turns reading their works to a willingly captive audience in a book tent made of colorful fabrics and filled with inviting pillows to flop down on. So come on in to the Book Barn to visit other worlds: those emerging from words and pictures, hidden treasures between book covers.

In early October, nine of this year's Junior Botanist and Plant Investigator (JB/PI) participants and their families returned to BBG for our annual September harvest reunion. Inspired by the sunny, crisp fall day, families dove into their harvesting duties. We amassed 117 pounds of fresh veggies, including 46 pounds of ornamental ‘Gremlins’ and ‘Goblin’s Eggs’ gourds!

The harvest reunion follows five weeks of hands-on learning for our young participants. The JB/PI program is a full-scholarship experience for students that have participated in Project Green Reach (PGR) during the school year. Teachers nominate students to the JB/PI project who have shown a particular interest in, and aptitude for, the study of botany and horticulture. The JB/PIs grow vegetables in a 2,000-square-foot section of the Children’s Garden, learn the basics of nutrition and cooking, and conduct scientific investigations in BBG’s student lab.

Part of the day’s aim was to prepare the garden for another year, so families raked over the empty sections of plots and sowed clover as a cover crop. The clover will serve to fix nitrogen in the soil, enriching it for the next plants—and for the next crop of JB/PIs.

All that gardening made us hungry, so we fortified ourselves with popcorn, made from the corn we grew over the summer. We even fashioned dolls from the cornhusks we’d saved and dried. Trying to create well-proportioned figures definitely made for some good laughs!

A hard day’s work at its end, we went our separate ways, but we look forward to seeing the JB/PIs again at Ghouls & Gourds on October 29!

Rain couldn’t dampen BBG’s 2011 Chile Pepper Fiesta, which sizzled with fiery bands and spicy food galore! Free chocolate was a hit in Chile Chocolate Wonderland, where visitors of all ages enjoyed spicy samples from the region’s finest artisanal chocolatiers. Heat seekers enjoyed samples of hot sauce, spicy kimchee, fiery pickles, and other red-hot delights in Magnolia Plaza, while heavy metal fans lined up for autographs from Trans-Siberian Orchestra guitarist Chris Caffery and Mosh Potatoes cookbook author Steve Seabury.

Throughout the day the Garden was alive with music, from Mexican mariachi to Congolese rumba to urban honkytonk. The afternoon’s final performance, by the Cajun-flavored Lost Bayou Ramblers featuring Gordon Gano, had audiences up on their feet singing along to punk classics from Gano’s seminal band the Violent Femmes.

Here are some highlights of the day.

For a new twist on an old favorite, this September’s annual Gager Dinner began with cocktails in the Children’s Garden, a rare treat—normally the maximum age for admission there is 17! Guests enjoyed a look inside the Children’s Garden house, a peek at some plans for the upcoming re-imagining of the south Garden, and conversation with students and teachers in our Children’s Education programs. A spell of early-autumn rain took the crowd inside the Palm House for dinner a few minutes ahead of schedule, but nothing could dampen our celebratory spirits!

Photos by Chris Wert.

These days, chiles and chocolate mingle freely in the streets of Brooklyn without provoking a second glance. However, Anita Jacobs, director of Public Programs at BBG, remembers that when she first suggested adding a chile-chocolate sidebar to BBG's annual Chile Pepper Fiesta, some staff unfamiliar with the combo responded with "Weird!" Three years later, "chipotle" and "mole" are essential vocabulary, a chile-chocolate craze has exploded, and heads no longer spin when contemplating the fiery duo.

The marriage of chile and chocolate is not new by any means. The use of cacao pods to create a frothy, chile-spiced bitter drink dates back to the Maya and Aztecs, who imbibed it for its health benefits. Europeans are responsible for adding sugar and processing to create devilishly sweet and addictive confections. Today, people familiar with authentic Mexican cuisine will recognize the delicious depth of flavor created by the well-balanced mixture of chiles and chocolate in mole sauces.

An expanded range of chocolate vendors will participate in the Chile-Chocolate Wonderland this year—many local to Brooklyn and all delicious. Some, like Taza, serve stripped-down confections in homage to the original chocolates, using stone-ground cocoa nibs and mild doses of sugar to create deeply flavored and textured chocolate that they believe preserve health benefits. Fine and Raw's chocolatier, Daniel Sklaar, combines his love of chocolate with humor and a strong sense of environmental responsibility to create healthy, whimsical, rich-flavored confections. His organic chocolates use ingredients like blue agave syrup and sea salt to transform heirloom raw cacao into indulgences you can feel good about craving. For the more adventurous taster, Lagusta's Luscious has been dreaming up some incredible flavor combinations. Its harissa truffles feature a Moroccan-inspired sauce made from scratch with a special blend of herbs and spices and medium-hot chiles, topped off with a pinch of paprika.

If you're looking for big taste plus some good ol' competition, then make your way to the Chile-Chocolate Takedown. This culinary contest features six amateur chefs presenting their finest spicy chocolate creations to compete for the title of Chile Chocolate Champ. Audience members vote for their favorite creation on ballots after tasting each entry. Organized and hosted by Takedown creator Matt Timms, the contest this year offers entries ranging from spicy s'mores to a chile-chocolate quiche! Last year's winner was a delectable mole empanada.

For those of you who think that chiles are all fire and no fun, the Chile Pepper Fiesta has just the recipe to change your mind. Former Big Apple Circus ringmasters Robbins & Ringold emcee a day of fire-eating, chile-juggling excitement amid a spicy mix of music on the main stage. Kids can create their very own "hot" cocoa mixes to take home. Adults can make their way to the Chocolate Bar, where chocolate and chile-inspired beers await on tap. With its mix of sweet treats, incendiary sauces, spicy-scented soaps, and sizzling sounds, BBG's Chile Pepper Fiesta offers entertainment for all the senses.

Chile Pepper Fiesta
Saturday, October 1, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Learn More

Fall is a fantastic season to spend outdoors—many perennials burst into bloom as the weather cools; others make fantastical seedpods, and trees put on their colorful autumn show. There’s also the flurry of animal activity as migrating birds and butterflies pass through on their way to warmer places, and squirrels and resident birds stock up on food to make it through a New York winter. All of these seasonal changes create prime opportunities to share the life cycles of plants and animals with the children in your life—your kids, grandkids, students, and friends.

We’ll be exploring these fall phenomena at our free fall family weekend Discovery Workshops in September and October. Each week, we’ll investigate a different autumnal topic with activities for children and their grownups to participate in together, including a hands-on learning station, story reading, garden scavenger hunts, and a nature project to take home.

Join us for a workshop and wander the BBG grounds to discover the wondrous array of plant and animal life on view this fall. Then, look for seasonal changes together in your own neighborhood. A great tool to spur children’s observational skills, curiosity, and creativity is a nature journal. You can create a recycled journal using spare cardboard for the covers, scrap paper for the pages, and kitchen twine for binding.

Go for nature walks on your block and record what you find in the journal together—collect and press colorful leaves between the pages; draw and label any animals you see; write down questions, poems, and reflections; and start a collection of interesting street tree seeds. If you can revisit your neighborhood nature walks every week or two, you and your young naturalist will uncover the tiny, subtle changes that create the dramatic transition from summer to winter.

Enjoy the season, and visit often!

El Puente’s Espiritu Tierra Community Garden is proving that community gardens are great incubators for the sustainable neighborhoods movement. This year, part of GreenBridge’s Community Garden Alliance outreach focus was on rain gardening. That, paired with rain collection efforts at Espiritu Tierra, resulted in several rain gardening workshops there this past spring and summer. These hands-on workshops detailed the benefits of rain gardens and offered guidelines for creating individualized garden plans.

Rain gardens are shallow depressions designed to soak up water and support plants that tolerate both wet and dry conditions. By absorbing precipitation, they help reduce the stormwater runoff that pollutes our beaches and rivers. Often located near gutter downspouts or places where water puddles, rain gardens can be landscaped into gentle slopes or run curbside along streets. Easy to install and requiring little maintenance, rain gardens are attractive year-round and also support local wildlife.

Through these workshops, GreenBridge was delighted to participate in Williamsburg’s Green Light District, an ambitious ten-year initiative conceived by the community human rights institution El Puente and carried out in partnership with several other community organizations. The goal is to transform this environmentally challenged neighborhood into one with a healthier streetscape, a smaller carbon footprint, and a more sustainable community.

More Reading

Rain Gardens—Using Spectacular Wetland Planting to Reduce Runoff

Rain Garden Plants

Rain Gardens: A How-to Manual for Homeowners (pdf), published by The University of Wisconsin–Extension

On Wednesday, August 31, over 1,500 members enjoyed their families, friends, picnics, and a special screening of the 1990 classic film Edward Scissorhands on Cherry Esplanade at the second annual Members’ Movie Night! BBG’s amazing Horticulture and Facilities teams worked hard Monday and Tuesday removing all evidence of Hurricane Irene so that the Esplanade could be transformed into one of the most beautiful movie theaters in all of New York City. As the sun set and the movie began, even the bats swooped in to catch the show. It was a magical, Hollywood-style finale to a great summer of Members' Only events.

BBG’s BUGs are out! Brooklyn Urban Gardeners, that is.

The first class of BUG—BBG’s new program to train community greening volunteers—has put its newly honed skills to good use. Graduates of the eight-week program received their BBG certificates last January and soon dug into creative and collaborative projects all around Brooklyn.

Recognizing that community gardening is 10 percent gardening and 90 percent community, several members of BUG’s vanguard class are not just making Brooklyn greener but also bringing people together. “BUG gave me the tools, knowledge, and confidence to revitalize a community garden,” reports Erik Rosenberg, a certified BUG who currently spearheads the Crown Heights Youth Collective Garden. “Thanks to BUG, I have a framework for how to approach soil-quality issues, community assets, and other challenges. We’ve brought neighbors together for cleanup and planting days, and next we’ll be meeting to decide the garden’s long-term development.”

Coquille Houshour, also of Crown Heights, had been working for years to green NYC public schools, but BUG inspired her to speak to her neighbors about greening their own block. “During my BUG studies, I encouraged my block association to apply for a Love Your Block grant from the Citizens Committee for NYC. We got it! So last spring my neighbors and I got the tools and plants we needed to host three street ‘cleanups’ and ‘greenups.’ People got inspired to pay more attention to green space; more and more plants began appearing in containers and on fire escapes. During our last event, 25 people participated in a MillionTreesNYC street tree care workshop—12 of them were children from the block!”

Newly certified BUG Jamel Evans organized the Brooklyn Beautification Project (BBP) in his Bushwick neighborhood. BBP promotes sustainable living and self-sufficiency among youth and young families. It aims to inspire pride in place through workshops, block cleanups, and planting days. BBP has applied for a grant from In Our Back Yard (IOBY) for tools, seeds, and plants, which Jamel plans to buy at a discount he’s negotiated with local suppliers. “What I took away from BUG was, just do it. I don’t know if I’m doing everything right, but you can always do it over! Just try.”

For many BUGs, grassroots greening is a means to a greater end. As Bed-Stuy community gardener, founder of the new Tranquility Farm Community Garden, and BUG graduate Ena McPherson puts it, “Plants empower communities.”

Our next class of BUGs graduates in January 2012. Watch for BUGs in your neighborhood! Or better yet, learn more and apply to become a part of this growing group of committed community greeners.

BBG members are known as an intrepid bunch, and they upheld this reputation at the Member’s Garden Cocktail Night on Wednesday, August 3. Neither rain nor wind nor gloom of night kept these fun-loving members from enjoying refreshing botanical cocktails, lively Haitian tunes, and a walk along romantic Lily Pool Terrace.

There’s one more Cocktail Night this summer – Wednesday, September 7! For a full list of upcoming events for BBG members, please visit Member Events.

The meadow in BBG’s Discovery Garden has undergone an overhaul since 2009, when the central beds had to be excavated in order to remove a failing gingko tree. New native meadow species were selected based on their allure for kids and wildlife alike, propagated in BBG’s greenhouses, then laid out to create winding paths and intimate nooks.

Why natives? They attract and sustain scores of creatures for children’s viewing pleasure. Many native plants boast enticingly fragrant foliage and flowers, graceful forms, and a rich cultural history. They also require minimal care because they’re adapted to local conditions.

The new array of native perennials was started from seed early last year. Just 18 months later, an outlandish thicket of wildflowers and grasses is swarming with a diversity of bees, wasps, butterflies, and moths. In a garden geared toward wildlife, a mark of success was the kingbird that appeared midsummer, making steep aerial dives to score a meal of insects.

Here are a few of our favorite perennials from this summer’s display. Visit them in the Discovery Garden before summer is out, or try them in your own garden next year.

BBG will remain closed to the public on Tuesday, August 30, while staff continue to clean up after Hurricane Irene. Much was accomplished today, however, BBG's Horticulture team needs additional time to assess the integrity of collections as well as safety for visitors.

This morning, tall annuals and vines looked windblown and leaves and fruit littered the grounds. Yet under today’s blue skies, most of the Garden looked remarkably vibrant.

“Considering the amount of rain we had already had this month, and the sustained high winds over the weekend, I think we are lucky not to see more extensive damage to the collection,” says Leonard Paul, BBG foreman of grounds.

Two strikingly different gardens on a leafy street in Nutley, New Jersey, will open to the public on Saturday, September 10. Silas Mountsier and Graeme Hardie will offer tours of their private gardens, both designed by Richard Hartlage and featured on Anne Raver’s “Great Gardens” list. The occasion is the 90th birthday of BBG’s director emeritus, Betty Scholtz. Admission is $15 and proceeds will be donated to BBG.

To learn more, visit 66squarefeet.blogspot.com.

Fall is the perfect time to start a classroom compost bin! On Tuesday, August 23, the NYC Compost Project in Brooklyn is offering the workshop Worm Composting in the Classroom. Teachers will learn how to set up and maintain an indoor worm bin, and have the opportunity to purchase a pound of worms and a bin to assemble on site.

Creating a classroom compost bin is a wonderful way to teach preschoolers, elementary, or high school students about conservation, recycling, and the environment. Composting with red wiggler worms is an environmentally safe way to recycle leftover lunch foods like apple cores and banana peels. A classroom compost bin can be used all year and can be the basis of myriad lessons—from story writing and language acquisition, to discussions about decay or the food cycle, to nourishing soil for classroom plants or gardens.

Another reason for composting in schools, of course, is the amount of possibilities it provides for rich, hands-on scientific inquiry. Identifying different species of macroorganisms, discovering the chemical interplay between carbon-rich materials and nitrogen-rich materials, and even site-specific research on polluted soils and composts’ ability to buffer pH and tie up heavy metals are wonderful ways to engage older students’ curious minds.

Interested in learning more? Register for the workshop or contact compost@bbg.org.

One of the greatest results of competing as a team is the sense of community that develops. BBG’s community environmental horticulture program, GreenBridge, has been working toward that for 17 years with its Greenest Block in Brooklyn competition.

Here are some of our favorite stories chronicling this year’s contest and contestants:

• Listen to GreenBridge director Robin Simmen’s remarks on the collective action taken by the winning residential block, East 25th Street between Clarendon Road and Avenue D, from NY1.
• Check out the Daily News’s take on the vacant building that was adopted by East 25th Street residents.
• Watch a slideshow and follow along as Lindsey Taylor of Garden Design magazine describes her experience as a judge in the contest.

While restoration of the Cranford Rose Garden continues, you would do well to turn your gaze upon the Rose Arc Pool. Curator Sarah Owens has incorporated a number of perennials and annuals among the roses around the fountain. These not only make for an ongoing beautiful display of blooms but also serve to attract beneficial insects and bird pollinators, bolstering the resilience of the roses and mitigating the pitfalls of a monoculture.

Below are some photos of the current colors and shapes in bloom at the Rose Arc Pool. If you happen by, make sure to take a closer look at all the butterflies, bumble bees, wasps, and other critters that are also paying a visit to the plants.

On Wednesday, July 27, BBG members enjoyed the second annual Members’ Night for Children. The weather was lovely, the picnics were abundant, and the young and young at heart danced and sang along with musical act Rolie Polie Guacamole, which debuted its own delightful song all about BBG! The evening was rounded out with fun activities in the Discovery Garden, and a wonderful time was had by all.

For a full list of upcoming events for BBG members, visit Member Events.

See BBG’s Photos page for more great image galleries!

Share your photos of BBG with us!

On Wednesday, August 3, the winners of the 17th Annual Greenest Block in Brooklyn contest were announced. The coveted first prize in the residential category was presented to East 25th Street between Clarendon Road and Avenue D. First place in the commercial category went to Atlantic Avenue between Bond Street and Nevins Street. The Greenest Storefront category went to Habana Outpost, located at 757 Fulton Street. Winner of the Best Street Tree Beds was 8th Street between 8th Avenue and Prospect Park West. Best Window Box was awarded to Joyce Rooney of 430 8th Street as entered by the 8th Street Block Association.

For a complete list of winners with pictures, visit 2011 Winners. To read more about the press conference announcing the winners and detailing some of the achievements of the Greenest Block in Brooklyn contest, read the press release.

The Greenest Block in Brooklyn contest is an annual event of BBG’s GreenBridge, promoting streetscape gardening, tree stewardship, and community development in Brooklyn. The contest is free to enter, and winners for best residential and commercial blocks, Greenest Storefront, Best Street Tree Beds, Best Window Box, and Best Community Garden Streetscape are awarded prizes of cash or gardening tools; all participants are awarded a recognition certificate. For more information about the contest and how you can get involved next year, visit Greenest Block in Brooklyn.

It’s early morning and the dew has evaporated in the July heat. We’re leaving Brooklyn for the wilds of New Jersey, crossing the Verrazano Bridge through the sweltering intensity of the city’s low-hanging haze. We are seven people, in one van, on one mission. We’re after a rare jewel in the world of native flora: Asclepias rubra (red milkweed). We’re told that this plant hides deep in the recesses of New Jersey’s moist, acid-rich, sun- drenched savannahs. Relishing its obscurity, it hardly shows itself to passersby, yet here we are trying to find it.

We leave the cool of our air-conditioned van for the destabilizing nature of the Pine Barrens. Creeping, spiky greenbriar vines (Smilax species) wind their way through the spaces between trees. Thorns scratch skin as we contort our way out of the forest and into the bog. We walk on the hummocks of a floating sheet of sphagnum moss, brushing sweat out of our eyes, careful to avoid plunging our legs into the murky waters below. We’ve been wading for hours to no avail. The red milkweed has eluded us this time, but one of us will be back. For six of us, this is an excursion, a flight from the confines of the office, an adventure from “admin,” from the words and work that confine us within four walls. But for one of us, this is our job. This is science in action, this is conservation in process.

Uli Lorimer, curator of the Native Flora Garden, makes it look easy as he navigates the alien terrain, plucking specimens from the ground and identifying them, in Latin, as we travel throughout the day. He is a veteran bog-hopper and has visited the Pine Barrens for years in pursuit of the conservation of native flora. Including us on a seed-scouting (and blueberry-picking) expedition has enabled us to witness the legacy of BBG’s commitment to scientific integrity and conservation at work. What we encounter there is striking—carnivorous plants, red and blue dragonflies, wild water-lilies, sweet blueberries on every bush. Who would have known that a place called barrens could hold such abundance?

Soon, BBG’s visitors will be able to see the beauty of the Pine Barrens without leaving Brooklyn. Teams of skilled workers will re-create that native habitat as part of BBG's Native Flora expansion, populating it as nearly as possible with plants grown from wild-collected seeds. This expansion is not just a stunning addition to our collection but a living assertion of the value of endangered native plants. For more information on the expansion of the Native Flora Garden and continued updates about our exciting projects, take a look at the Campaign for the Next Century website.

Lauren Deutsch is BBG’s campaign coordinator.

On a recent hot and sunny Thursday morning, I climbed into BBG’s hybrid SUV armed with a ream of score sheets, a native flora handbook, and a sharp pencil. It was my first time as a staff judge in the Garden’s Greenest Block in Brooklyn contest!

My three judging teammates—a GreenBridge staff member, a Garden curator, and a BBG board member—gave me tips as we drove to our first destination: “Keep your eyes open for curbside whiskey barrel planters.” “Street tree mulch shouldn’t be piled up high against the tree trunk.” “Remember when giving points for color that green comes in many shades!” From 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., we worked our way up and down both sides of nine residential blocks between the neighborhoods of Canarsie and Flatbush, scrutinizing each property and judging on a variety of criteria, including use of mulch or compost, inclusion of native plants, and evidence of “citizen participation”—for example, on one block, neighbors had pooled their resources to collectively care for the yard of an unoccupied brownstone. Some residents even came outside to chat us up about their beautiful block!

After making essential stops for lunch and ice cream, we headed back to the Garden to tally our scores—only two of our nine blocks would go on to the final round. The decisions weren’t easy, but our deliberations were fun. Stay tuned: The winners are slated to be announced the first week of August.

April Greene is BBG’s Major Gifts and Special Events associate.

If you walk around BBG often enough, chances are you’ll come across Chris Roddick—if you keep your gaze up toward the sky, that is. Roddick spends much of his time taking the danger out of trees, pruning for the tree’s sake and for our own safety.

An ISA-certified arborist at BBG, Chris is also the coauthor of the BBG handbook The Tree Care Primer. Pruning and cleanup are only two aspects of the job; it also involves planting, predicting growth, and sometimes even taking a few aerial photographs for earth-bound staff.

BBG's senior arborist was featured in New York Works on WNYC describing the precarious but rewarding nature of his work. The piece, "A Brooklyn Arborist", by Sarah Kate Kramer, is also available for download from the WNYC website.

On July 6, members gathered around the Lily Pool Terrace to soak up the beautiful summer evening with cold cocktails, live music, and colorful scenery. Fun was had by all, and we look forward to the next Garden Cocktail Nights on August 3 and September 7!

For a full list of upcoming events for BBG members, visit Member Events .

Feel like you're missing out on the fun? Become a member at BBG today.

All photos by Sarah Tew Photography.

I'm so excited to unveil my latest time-lapse video of Lily Pool Terrace! Over three years ago, I had the idea of doing time-lapses of the different gardens and collections at BBG to show them in a new light. Of course, I started with the cherry trees. Today, that video has been viewed more than 150,000 times and has been seen all over the world. That same year, I was also able to capture the Cranford Rose Garden. But in hindsight, I had no idea how lucky I was to achieve such success.

In the years since, I've attempted numerous time-lapse videos, but either human error, forces of nature, lackluster timing, or just plain bad luck has gotten in the way. Fortunately, the fates were with us for this new video.

Lily Pool Terrace turned out to be an excellent subject. The water-lilies open and close daily. The sacred lotus unfurl their gigantic flowers and then drop their petals. The sky and nearby buildings are reflected in the still waters of the pool. Photographers practically dive in, setting their high-powered, expensive lenses within inches of their subjects. At dusk, the space is often transformed into a gathering place for wedding receptions or summer evening cocktails.

As with the previous videos, I'm especially thankful to Brooklyn-based musician Jon Solo for providing a beautiful and emotional original song to accompany the images. This video features an instrumental version of his song “Broken in Two,” available on his website at jonsolomusic.com.

Interesting Still Images

With a grand total of 36 residential semifinalists, whittled down from 188 original entrants, the first round of judging is now over for the 2011 Greenest Block in Brooklyn competition! GreenBridge program manager Nina Browne assures us that "the competition is fierce" this year. To view the semifinalists, visit Greenest Block Contest.

Claudette Brady, a contributor to Bed-Stuy Patch and resident of Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn whose own block has been participating in the competition for two years, recently took to the streets to see what her neighborhood has to offer. In her article, Bed-Stuy Goes Big for Greenest Block she speaks with recent winners and tours the area, finding a “sense of ownership and responsibility for the entire block” to be the best indication of potential top contenders. Bed-Stuy has claimed 10 of the 36 semifinalist spots this year, the biggest proportion of any neighborhood.

The winners will be announced August 3, with a $300 check for each first-place residential and commercial block winner, and cash prizes from $100–200 for other block finalists. Check out Greenest Block Contest for a map of the current entrants, the residential semifinalists list, and more information on the competition.

Missed the registration deadline? The application window may be closed for this year's competition, but it’s never too early to band together with neighbors to figure out how to spruce up your window boxes for next year!

On Wednesday, June 29th, Goldman Sachs Community TeamWorks volunteers came back to BBG to work in the Children’s Garden. In the morning, Senior Garden Apprentices from BBG’s Garden Apprentice Program led the group in a weed identification game and briefed the volunteers on their tasks for the day. The volunteers worked side by side with the Garden Apprentices for the remainder of the day, weeding the entire Children’s Garden and sowing seeds. At the end of the day, volunteers enjoyed harvesting vegetables to take home.

Thanks to all the Goldman Sachs volunteers for their hard work. We look forward to seeing you again next year!

Each year since 1996, members of BBG's Gager Society take a trip to explore gorgeous private gardens in the tri-state area. This past June, the Gager Society and a handful of Garden staff took a tour of two unique gardens in Pennsylvania’s Bucks County. The members of the Gager Society make up the inner circle of friends of Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Through their annual support of $1,500 or more, Gager Society members help further the Garden’s acclaimed and wide-reaching programs in education, research, and community greening, while helping to maintain one of the world’s most beautiful horticultural collections.

Our first stop on this year's excursion was Mill Fleurs, the 10-acre home of Barbara and Robert Tiffany. The Tiffanys bought the property, located beside picturesque Tohickon Creek, in 1993 and promptly renovated the neglected garden. Their collections, including over 1,000 hostas, 325 different rhododendrons, and 135 epimediums, as well as many other specimens, have been carefully planted on the land’s rolling hills and shady valleys to produce a truly artful display. Barbara and Robert graciously led a two-and-a-half-hour-long tour of garden highlights and treated our group to muffins and coffee on the roof of the property’s antique icehouse.

After a last look at Mill Fleurs, we moved on to Cedaridge Farm, the charming home and gardens of Derek and Carolyn Fell. A 20-acre historic property, Cedaridge features waterfalls and koi pond, a cutting garden, vegetable garden, and an extensive collection of lilies. Derek, a writer and photographer whose work often draws on the garden, led a tour for us and was happy to answer our questions. The Fells hosted our lunch on one of Cedaridge’s spacious lawns, and we enjoyed the afternoon respite in their renovated barn, in the gazebo, and beneath stands of tall leafy trees.

A brief afternoon rain shower encouraged us back onto the bus, where we swapped impressions and photos of all the beautiful flora we’d just seen. Many thanks again to our wonderful hosts and guests. We can’t wait for next year!

To learn more about the Gager Society and how you can become a member, visit Gager Society.

For a hardcore locavore chef, working at BBG’s Terrace Cafe is something close to a dream. “I got mustard greens, dragon carrots, rhubard, purslane, spring onions, and sorrel this week,” says Ariel Nadelberg, the Cafe’s new chef. Each of the ingredients she gets from the Herb Garden—in agreement with Herb Garden curator Caleb Leech—gets incorporated into one of six or seven daily specials featured in the menu, like pastas, soups, grains, and the cheese plate. This week, for example, mustard greens showed up in the special quiche and pasta salad; rhubarb made it into the kale salad, and the herbs made it into...just about everything.

Overall, the new menu emphasizes vegetables and whole grains, while showcasing meat in smaller quantities, akin to Mark Bittman’s “flexitarian” guidelines. (The hotdog and hamburger are still, of course, firmly on the menu!). When she’s not sourcing food from the Herb Garden, Ariel buys all greens from local farms, like Satur Farms on the Northfork of Long Island. And in keeping with the Garden’s summer theme Native New Yorkers, the Cafe’s drink program showcases Gorilla Coffee, Kombucha Brooklyn, as well as sweets by Ladybird in Park Slope.

Here are some shots of Ariel harvesting in the Herb Garden, and then some of her results.

This week, BBG's Native Flora Garden curator Uli Lorimer weighed in on gothamist.com's new green thumb series giving his advice on native plants to grow in sun and shade in backyards around NYC. Some of the plants he suggests for shady backyards include ferns, snakeroot, and goldenrod. To see the full list of Uli's recommendations, visit Guide To Urban Gardening: Your Outdoor Space.

To learn more about native plants of the Northeast, how to grow them at home, and how the animals around you depend on them, take a walk on BBG's garden-wide trail, Native New Yorkers.

BBG's Spring Gala and After Party welcomed more than 800 guests to an evening filled with drinks, dinner, and dancing set within the beautiful spring scenery of the Garden. The event honored Shelby White and the Leon Levy Foundation with a Visionary Award for the philanthropic commitment they have made to BBG. Martha A. Rubin and Majora Carter were also presented with Better Earth Awards for their work in promoting environmental consciousness in New York City. The evening raised over $650,000 for BBG programs and collections. It was truly an incredible evening, and we thank all those who attended. We hope you had as much fun as we did and look forward to welcoming you back to the Garden soon!

Decked out in their finest hats, BBG members flocked to the Cranford Rose Garden to celebrate the blooming of the roses earlier this June. The warm evening was filled with live music, picnics on the lawn, and of course, guests stopping to smell the roses.

For a full list of member's events at BBG, visit Member Events.

This year BBG’s special membership group attended more events than ever before! Here’s a quick look at a few great times we enjoyed:

Insider’s Look at Graceful Perseverance | March 30

Bonsai curator Julian Velasco led tours of BBG’s enchanting collection after guests enjoyed an early-spring reception in the Steinhardt Conservatory.

Sakura Matsuri Preview Party | April 27

Guests gathered on Cherry Esplanade for sake and Japanese snacks before curator Brian Funk gave tours of the Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden in full bloom.

Cocktails in the Wilderness | May 17

The Native Flora Garden turned 100 years young this year! We took our wine to the woods in celebration and heard about this magnificent garden’s past, present, and future from curator Uli Lorimer and BBG president Scot Medbury.

Annual Garden Trip | June 16

This year we traveled to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, to visit two exquisite private gardens: Barbara and Robert Tiffany’s home Mill Fleurs, and Cedaridge Farm, the home of Derek and Carolyn Fell.

And we’re not done yet! Please stay tuned for updates on the great events just ahead.

In 2005, a mysterious syndrome called rose rosette disease (RRD) was first detected in the Cranford Rose Garden. Often referred to as the witch’s-broom of roses, the disease, which is caused by an unknown pathogen, causes irregular, distorted growth, drastic decline, and eventual death of infected roses. Beyond its devastating impact, not much is known about this disease. As it began to spread through the Cranford collection, staff decided to undertake a preemptive renovation to preserve the health of uninfected roses and replace those species that had already been lost.

In an effort to arrest the spread of RRD, plants with symptoms were removed, and areas with a concentration of infection were planted with species other than roses. As visitors to the Garden last year may have noticed, a bright mix of annuals and perennials grew in these fallow areas, which encouraged beneficial insect populations. The beds’ soil was also extensively amended with organic compost and manure.

Restoration planting of the once-infected beds began this spring. With a focus on preserving and rehabilitating BBG’s historic collection, as well as increasing the number of modern roses on display, five sections of roses were planted in an area previously riddled with disease. These new beds feature plants collected from all over the world, organized by breeder or type, including a section of found roses and roses bred by Rudolph Geschwind, W. Kordes’ Söhne, David Austin, and early American breeders. These new roses will take three to five years to mature to their full beauty.

As the renovation of the Cranford Rose Garden continues during 2011, a mixture of annuals and perennials will again be incorporated into the rose beds to provide habitat for the beneficial insects that reduce the need for chemical treatments in the garden. These companion plants also provide pleasing color combinations with the roses and cover bare spots in the beds where labor-intensive weeding would otherwise be needed.

Thanks to the contributions of staff and volunteers who have worked on this renovation, the Garden has significantly improved the vigor of the collection of roses on display at BBG. To learn more about the collection, visit Cranford Rose Garden.

Preparations are underway to present three performances of Wilderness: Paradis, a new piece by acclaimed choreographer Yanira Castro | a canary torsi, on site at BBG next Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. The piece is actually part of Dance Theater Workshop’s 2011 spring season, but has been sculpted especially for BBG, and unfolds at twilight in two locations within the Garden: the Desert Pavilion, in the Steinhardt Conservatory, and Cherry Esplanade. A very limited audience (only 50 per night!) will have the chance to intimately experience this evening performance, which is inspired by the final section of Jean-Luc Godard’s 2004 film, Notre Musique. Paradis opens with a stark and fragile solo in the Desert House, followed by eight dancers in the Esplanade whose simple, quiet movement heightens the solitary landscape of the night Garden. The audience informs the work as their movement is tracked to generate elements of the performance as it unfolds around them.

Dance and other arts programming have been part of BBG’s festival offerings for decades, but we’re delighted to move into special site-specific work created by artists who are inspired by BBG’s unique landscape and history. Castro has built an impressive reputation on the strength of her work and the unusual environments in which she has developed them (including an award-winning piece presented in the men’s lobby bathroom at the Gershwin Hotel), and the ethereal, mesmerizing environment she has created with Paradis is sure to make the audience experience BBG in a whole new way.

For tickets, please visit dancetheaterworkshop.org/castro_brooklynbotanic.

BBG communications manager Kate Blumm has a new column in Brooklyn Bread, a monthly magazine dedicated to Brooklyn foodie culture. In the most recent issue she wrote about BBG's Children's Garden and got Children's Garden curator Dave Daly to list some of his favorite edibles to grow in the ground or in containers with kids. You can read the article below, or check it out in the online version of the magazine here.

Flour/Flower: Plants, Food, and Beyond

by Kate Blumm

There is one area at Brooklyn Botanic Garden that you, reader, will find strictly off-limits: a spot where you will be hurried away lest you attempt to place a pinky toe within its white wood gates: the Children’s Garden, which since 1914 has been a haven for the exclusive use of Brooklyn’s young ones as they scratch the ground, get their hands (and everything else) dirty, and learn about the natural world through year-round cultivation of plants and flowers.

Jealous? You should be, if only because ever since the Children’s Garden founding almost a century ago scrumptious edible plants have been a key part of the kids’ work. Just three years after our fledging botanic garden opened its gates, the 1914 Brooklyn Botanic Garden Record, which detailed annually the affairs of the institution, noted: “On May second was started the outdoor work for children at the Garden. One hundred and eighty applied for gardens and 150 received them, leaving a waiting list of 30 names.... The individual garden beds, 5 x 7 feet in size, are planted to vegetables, including beans, kohlrabi, onion seed, onion sets, carrots, beets, radishes, and lettuce. Flower beds were planted by the children about the boundaries of these sections. Then there are some larger sections planted to grains, peanuts, melons, corn, and other things unsuited to planting in small areas.”

When the Children's Garden program was created in 1914, our nation was in the throes of a profound transition from a rural to an industrial society. Its founder perceived the program as “a living opportunity for a child to learn lessons of nurture and observe how nature looks out for herself.” This idea—once revolutionary—is now, particularly in New York and other urban areas, being recognized as a near-essential component to a healthy childhood. Participants ages 2¬–17 still tend their own plots, planting crops and flowers, harvesting them, preparing them on site in salads, salsas, veggie breads, and more, and proudly toting them home under the guidance of garden instructors (the only adults allowed in the space).

Each season, children nurture and harvest some of what they plant as well as something planted the season before. Tomatoes and peppers, planted in spring, produce for the summer gardeners. Summer's seeding of cool-season greens is harvested in autumn. The garlic that fall gardeners plant is harvested by a new crop of youngsters in the spring. Below, Children’s Garden manager David Daly shares some of his favorite edibles in the 2011 Children’s Garden spring to summer plant roster, selections that would work well planted this month in a container or in your backyard, too!

-For a colorful edible green, choose the Swiss chard ‘Bright Lights’ cultivar (Beta vulgaris var. cicla 'Bright Lights'); it can be grown from seed in a container or started there and then transplanted outside and harvested continuously throughout the growing season.

-Lacinato (or dinosaur) kale (Brassica oleracea var. sabellica), in green and purple varieties, has beautifully veined leaves with an ancient look to them. It can grow in both warm and cool months, looks great, and tastes even better. Perfect for kale chips (a favorite of the kids in the Children’s Garden)!

-Gold Nugget cherry tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum 'Gold Nugget’) are bright yellow, deliciously sweet, and full of flavor. This cultivar produces prolific harvests once the plants reach maturity in late July or early August.

-Genovese basil (Ocinum basilicum ‘Genovese’) is popular for a good reason: It’s perfect for summer pesto and grows maniacally when properly cared for. At this point in the season, starting with a young seedling from the farmer’s market or BBG’s Garden Shop is a good idea here—it’ll do better than starting from seed.

All the rain in Brooklyn this past week has made the blooms in Bluebell Wood incredibly vivid and lush. Designed by Robert Hyland, BBG's former VP of Horticulture, in 1994, this planting of 45,000 Spanish bluebells (Hyacinthoides hispanica 'Excelsior') has become a much-loved spring feature of the Garden. Prior to the redesign, this area of BBG was a lawn that was increasingly being shaded out by the beech, birch, oak, and elm tree collection that is also planted there. As any home gardener knows, a shady area can be a tough place to grow and maintain a lawn, so the solution of a shade-loving underplanting for these tress was born and the bluebells were planted. Today the area is lovingly cared for by Anne O'Neil and is a top destination for BBG visitors and photographers looking to be immersed in waves of sweet-smelling blue blooms. In fact, one photographer, Ben Miflin, was awarded third place in the "Spirit of the American Garden" category of the 2011 International Garden Photographer of the Year contest for a photo he took in Bluebell Wood.

This photo by Ben Miflin was taken in BBG's Bluebell Wood and was the third place winner in the 2011 International Garden Photographer of the Year contest. All rights reserved.

The bluebell blossoms last for about two weeks and are at their peak now, so if you have a chance to make it to the Garden this weekend be sure to take a stroll through the wood!

Drop in for free family workshops to soak up spring in the Discovery Garden! Children will become naturalists as they explore plant and animal life cycles, watch the garden come magically to life, and experience the springtime world through fun, hands-on activities.

Saturdays: May 21, June 4
Drop in 11 a.m.–1 p.m. No registration required.

Sundays: May 22, June 5
Drop in 1 p.m.–3 p.m. No registration required.

No workshops Memorial Day weekend; workshops cancelled in inclement weather.

After a successful training program last fall, the very first class of certified Brooklyn Urban Gardeners (BUGs) is making a difference to community greening efforts throughout Brooklyn. “BUG gave me the tools, knowledge, and confidence to revitalize a community garden,” reports Erik Rosenberg, a certified BUG who spearheads the Crown Heights Youth Collective Garden. “It’s difficult work, but thanks to the BUG classes and my team community service project, I have a framework for how to approach soil, community assets…and other challenges as well.” Quite a few media outlets have been talking to recent BUG graduates about their experiences and work, including bed-stuy.patch.com, City Critic, and brooklyntodaycom.

The BUG program, which launched at BBG last year, is an intensive ten-session “train-the-trainer” course. A series of interconnected workshops and hands-on site visits cover the basics of sustainable horticultural practices and how to advocate for the creation and protection of community green space. “The goal of this innovative, free program is that upon graduation, BUG students are ready to become part of a growing network of BBG community volunteers who extend the educational resources of BBG and mentor community greening efforts throughout Brooklyn,” says Robin Simmen, director of GreenBridge.

To achieve certification, each of the 15 BUG students completes the weekly required reading, approximately 35 hours of in-class coursework, team-project presentations, and 30 hours of project-based community service. In-class time is designed to meet the needs of working people and is scheduled for eight Thursday evenings (6–9 p.m.) and two Saturdays. Project team members, along with a staff mentor, devise a workable community service schedule.

BUG enrolls an intergenerational, multicultural mix of adults stemming from diverse economic and educational backgrounds who represent neighborhoods across Brooklyn. They bring with them varying levels of gardening expertise. Along with being taught by experts with professional experience, participants learn from and network with each other. Through their work together on team projects, many BUGs have formed what promise to be lifelong friendships. As Mirem Villamil, a certified BUG and now garden manager at Edible Schoolyard Brooklyn, put it, “When I came to my first BUG class, I thought, ‘This is my tribe!’”

The 2011 BUG course will run from September to mid-November. Among the topics to be covered are city soils, basic composting, growing food, water-wise gardening, asset-based community building, conflict resolution, gardening with native plants, and streetscape gardening. To apply to participate in this free course, visit bbg.org/greenbridge/bug.

The deadline for applications is June 1. For more information, email bug@bbg.org, or call 718-623-7250.

What could be more lovely than a clear sunny spring day, the fresh green shoots of plants juxtaposed against a powder-blue sky? The flowers of Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica) are as if tiny pieces of that sky came floating down to earth, giving us a fleeting glimpse of the heavens. Emerging from the earth with precocious energy, the foliage is at first tinged with deep purple margins, eventually giving way to soft arching flower stems that bear those ethereal bells of rapture. The flower buds fade quickly from pink when closed to azure blue when open. This species is robust and easy to cultivate in moist, rich woodland soils. It prefers the cooler temperatures of spring and goes yellow and dormant rapidly once the heat of summer arrives.

Azaleas, wisteria, and rhododendrons are in bloom in the Osborne Garden offering a stunning kaleidoscope of color.

The Osborne Garden was originally designed in 1935 by landscape architect Harold Caparn and dedicated to Dean Clay Osborne in 1939 by his wife Sade Elizabeth Osborne. It was designed as a showcase for ornamental plants and built in part by laborers in the Civil Works Administration and the Works Progress Administration. 1947, landscape architect Alice Recknagel Ireys designed plantings of large masses of white, red, and pink azaleas, rhododendrons, wisterias, and evergreens to frame the central lawn. Today, this three-acre, Italian-style formal garden is maintained by curator Dan Ryniec who has been with BBG for over 30 years.

When you come to admire the azaleas and other blooms within the Osborne, be sure to take time to rest on the semicircle of limestone benches near the fountain. Sit at one end and you can whisper clearly to someone sitting at the opposite side. These “whispering benches” are a much beloved feature of the Osborne Garden and great place to sit back and take in the beauty of thousands of spring blossoms.

Looking to green your lawn the natural way? Join instructor Luke Halligan for an informative workshop on sustainable lawn-care techniques on Tuesday, May 17, from 6 to 8 p.m.

This workshop will cover everything you need to know to make your lawn into a thriving ecosystem. We will discuss methods to establish and care for a low maintenance lawn, including mulch mowing, incorporating compost, and aeration. Sustainable alternatives to turf grass will also be shared.

$5 workshop fee; registration is required. Visit Sustainable Lawn-Care Techniques to register.

Few flowers epitomize the grace of spring ephemerals like Claytonia virginica, commonly called spring beauty, fairy spud, good-morning-spring, musquash, wild-potato, or miskodeed. Spreading like a carpet over the forest floor, the candy-striped flowers are among the earliest to open after the snow has melted and spring warmth has arrived. The flowers and rangy foliage emerge from a small marble-size corm. They can be easily transplanted and moved after flowering has finished. Be sure to remember where they are—once they go dormant, the small corms are nearly impossible to find. The corms are edible and “when boiled in salt water, are palatable and nutritious, having the flavor of chestnuts,” reported the Harvard botanist Merrit Fernald in 1943. The Native American name miskodeed is used in The Song of Hiawatha, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. From chapter XXI, The White Man’s Foot:

And Segwun, the youthful stranger,
More distinctly in the daylight
Saw the icy face before him;
It was Peboan, the Winter!
From his eyes the tears were flowing;
As from melting lakes the streamlets
And his body shrunk and dwindled
As the shouting sun ascended,
Till into the air it faded,
Till into the ground it vanished,
And the young man saw before him,
On the hearth stone of the wigwam,
Where the fire had smoked and smouldered,
Saw the earliest flower of the Spring-time,
Saw the Beauty of the Spring-time,
Saw the Miskodeed in blossom.

NYC Wildflower Week celebrates the more than 53,000 acres of open space and 778 native plants found in the five boroughs. This Tuesday, May 10, curator Uli Lorimer will lead a special tour of the Native Flora Garden highlighting spring ephemerals, native lady's slipper orchids, indigenous azaleas, ferns, and aquatic plants such as golden club (Orontium aquaticum) and blue flag iris (Iris versicolor).

To see the full listing of events across the city celebrating our native plants and to learn more about the 4th Annual NYC Wildflower Week, visit nycwildflowerweek.org.

Need somewhere special to take mom for Mother's Day this Sunday? Bring her on a tour of BBG to smell the lilacs and enjoy the bright blooms of tulips, wisteria, azaleas, crabapples, Japanese tree peonies, and more!

The Lilac Collection underwent a renovation this past winter and has just recently begun to bloom. There are approximately 150 specimens in the collection that flower in colors including white, violet, blue, lilac, pink, magenta, and purple as well as bi-color sensations. Each shrub has a different scent and it's an incredible experience to walk around on a sunny spring day exploring and enjoying the different fragrances.

Guided tours are offered at 1 p.m. on weekends and are free with Garden admission. Meet at the Visitor Center; no reservations are needed. To learn more about the collection, visit Lilac Collection.

The tulips planted on Lily Pool Terrace are in bloom! Planted last fall by curator Cayleb Long and BBG interns, this display of over 6,000 plants is one of the most vibrant signs of spring in the Garden. Each year the pattern of the display changes along with the varieties featured so it is always a welcome surprise when the bulbs begin to bloom and show their colors. This year Cayleb planted a riotous rainbow with highlights including 'West Point,' 'El Niño,' and 'Angelique.' If you want to see the display in person be sure to come soon, as once the blooms begin to fade the plants are replaced with the Annual Border display.

If you came out to Sakura Matsuri this past weekend (and we hope you did!), you might have seen a few hints of change at BBG, like the steel framework of the new Visitor Center subtly visible behind the Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden. Renewal is afoot in the Garden with, the Campaign for the Next Century in full swing. To learn more, visit nextcentury.bbg.org , a fresh new website devoted exclusively to the Campaign, BBG’s most significant garden renewal effort since its founding 100 years ago. With projects that affect virtually every part of the Garden—and some that even extend beyond its borders—these dramatic and ambitious enhancements will help us meet the rapidly changing needs of BBG’s audience and the world.

Here’s just a sampling of some of the Campaign projects:

• Expansions of the Native Flora Garden, Discovery Garden, and Herb Garden, and a brand-new Woodland Garden and Water Garden
• A new, greener Visitor Center with more amenities for visitors
• The installation of an innovative water recirculation system that will capture up to 30 million gallons of rainwater annually and greatly lessen the Garden’s dependence on the greater New York water supply
• Enriched community programs to help make hands-on horticulture a Brooklyn standard

On display now in the current Visitor Center, located in the Administration Building, is a 3-D architectural model of the new Visitor Center, along with ten large backlit wall panels showing each project in detail. Next time you're at the Garden, be sure to stop by to learn more about the changes at BBG!

In contrast to its cousin Dicentra cuccularia, Dicentra eximia, commonly known as wild bleeding heart, is one of our longest flowering and most widely adaptable spring flowers. The blossoms emerge by mid- to late April and will cling to the plant through August and September. Equally at home in full sun or shade and growing in sandy or dark rich soil, this is one tough customer! It forms neat clumps that grow larger with age, and it also seeds itself readily. Not to worry, the itinerant seedlings are easily removed from unwanted places. Its specific epithet in Latin, eximia, means extraordinary, and to my mind is an accurate description of this species.

On Wednesday, May 4 at 6:30 p.m. join the Torrey Botanical Society and Dr. Stephen Buchmann for a free illustrated talk showcasing North American native bee diversity and the threats facing bees and other pollinators. Explore the amazing ways bees make a living and learn more about Colony Collapse Disorder and steps the Pollinator Partnership is taking to alleviate it. Dr. Buchmann will also share simple things to do in backyards, gardens, and schools to help native bees and other pollinating animals. A book signing will follow the talk.

Guests should check in at 1000 Washington Avenue. Refreshments at 6 p.m.; lecture begins after reception and Torrey Botanical Society announcements.

No charge, and preregistration is not required.

This past weekend the 30th annual Sakura Matsuri cherry blossom festival brought in close to 70,000 visitors to BBG. With fantastic weather, the cherry trees in peak bloom, and 60-plus events and performances to enjoy, it was and incredible kickoff to spring. We put together a photo selection of some of the weekend highlights, but we hope you'll share your cherry blossom and Sakura photos with us on the BBG Hanami Group on Flickr!

As many of you who have attended BBG’s Sakura Matsuri in years past have noticed, something very unique is drawing in a different crowd: a multicultural swath of people young and old coming to the annual celebration of Japanese cherry blossoms in strange, sometimes exotic, garments. This phenomenon is known as cosplay, a sort of culture within a subculture.

Etymology and Brief History

“But what exactly IS cosplay?,” you ask. Cosplay as a term is a Japanese portmanteau of “costumed play.” The component of play is what differentiates cosplay from simply wearing a costume like you would at Halloween. In cosplay, instead of simply donning the costume of a character, you are becoming the character, and in many cases, interacting with others as such. The emphasis is on costumed interactivity.

Despite its reputation as a Japanese subculture, cosplay is, in fact, born of an inherently American tradition. The term cosplay finds its roots in the American Science Fiction convention (it was coined by a member of a Japanese studio at a Los Angeles-based convention in 1984) where fans of a certain program or genre dress in strange, sometimes exotic, garments. While Japanese otaku (“fans”) no doubt were dressing up in costumes independent of the happenings in the West, it wasn’t until the globalization of American sci-fi in the 1970’s and 80’s that things really started to take off and international cosplay networks began to develop.

In the late 1990’s/early 2000’s a cosplay boom began in the United States. This was thanks in large part to television programs like Pokemon and the mainstream U.S. releases of numerous premier titles from Japan (Dragonball Z, Sailor Moon, and the Mobile Suit Gundam side-series Gundam Wing) which inspired the geek community. What followed was an exponential increase in the popularity of anime and the propagation of fan gatherings at conventions. The rapid evolution of the web at the time fostered many forums and websites dedicated to information about costuming, cosplay, and its role in Japanese popular culture. Some of these sites (such as American Cosplay Paradise and Cosplay.com) offered galleries to display one’s work and forums for people to plan meetups at conventions, exchange costuming ideas, or just talk about new shows from the East.

Cosplay Culture in America

Today, sites allow fans and costumers to increase their construction abilities thru video tutorials or use social networking tools to link up with others. The community is constantly evolving. With conventions running almost every week of the year all across the country, people from different geographical regions are finding opportunities for cosplay interactions.

These days, cosplayers more often than not learn about events through social networking with friends or in online forums. Carrie Wink-Troy, a veteran cosplayer since 2002 who started a manufacturing business with fellow cosplayer Carolann Voltarel, explains how she started: “When I was in school for graphic arts I met a friend who was into Sailor Moon, and she was a cosplayer. So I thought, ‘hey, this should be fun!’ ” Despite having (at the time) rudimentary sewing skills, Wink-Troy ordered her first costume off eBay, and her success at her first convention, the Virginia-based Katsucon, brought her back for more. “I met other people who were really into anime, into the whole dressing up thing...everyone was really chill and really accepting, so I was hooked.”

These days it is popular (and sometimes necessary) to commission costumes or purchase them from websites dedicated to ready made components. The quality of these items has increased drastically in the last few years. Even many of my friends now order from Asian
sites that specialize in character-specific wigs (through options like the Chinese shopping service Taobao), which offer products almost simultaneously with new program releases. As starter costumes or last-minute options, ready-made costumes can make both novices and veterans feel more comfortable enjoying what they love about cosplay with minimal fuss.

Once a cosplayer has arrived at a convention, they seek to increase their exposure through photo shoots, hall cosplay contests (costume judging for workmanship), and the masquerade (a costume competition with a theatrical slant). Photo shoots are one of the most appealing and universal aspects of cosplay, allowing participants to capture the hard work put into their costumes or satisfy their inner desire to be fashion models. The majority of “professional” images you’re likely to encounter were shot during these sessions. Culturally, the photo shoot is universal, while cosplay performance, which is my own personal specialty, is more often than not secondary to the photography and craftsmanship elements.

Cosplay at BBG’s Sakura Matsuri

With its lush landscapes and broad spaces, Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Sakura Matsuri has become a magnet for local cosplayers. At this time of year, players can mimic the look of shooting in Japan without having to travel there. From a cosplay photographer’s perspective, the exotic costumes and beautiful landscape form a winning combination.

The festive outdoor atmosphere also allows people who normally feel confined within the walls of a convention center to enjoy reveling (or “playing”) with friends in a space that, like the costumes they wear, transcends the daily norm. With new events like the Cosplay Fashion Show (Sunday at 6:15 p.m.), there are now even more opportunities for cosplayers to display their work without the intensity of competition. In short, Sakura Matsuri serves as a perfect venue for people to maybe dare to go a little bit beyond the contemporary.

In the end, it’s really the experience that allows one to truly understand cosplay—though you don’t have to go as far as putting on a costume and acting like a Japanese schoolgirl (or boy) in order to catch the enthusiasm that makes cosplay so popular. Take this post as an invitation to give cosplay a look with more knowledgeable eyes at this year’s Sakura Matsuri; to see this world with some knowledge of what it is these kids (and grown-ups) see in it themselves.

If you've been waiting to come and see Cherry Esplanade and Cherry Walk in bloom, now is the time to take a trip to BBG! The two allées of Prunus 'Kanzan' on Cherry Esplanade began to open on Monday and should be in peak bloom by Thursday afternoon and continue through this weekend's Sakura Matsuri cherry blossom festival.

Cherry Walk, the gently meandering path behind the Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden, has also burst into bloom. The first cherry trees were planted here by the BBG Auxiliary in 1921 and two trees from the original planting are still there today.

The blooming of the 'Kanzan' trees often signals the beginning of the end for the cherry blossom season at BBG. Within a week these abundant blossoms will begin to fall creating petal strewn pathways. Hanami, the month-long celebration of cherry blossom watching, officially ends on May 1, though there may still be some blossoms during BBG's Plant Sale next week if the weather is mild.

To keep track of the bloom status of the trees, check the daily updates on the Cherry Watch Map.

This past Monday Goldman Sachs Community TeamWorks volunteers came to BBG ready to help with some spring clean-up along Cherry Esplanade. In the morning, BBG arborists Chris Roddick and Travis Wolf led the group in mulching and weeding the liberty maples that line the esplanade and in the afternoon the volunteers had the rare opportunity to plant two new Prunus ‘Kanzan’ cherry trees.

Thanks to all the Goldman Sachs volunteers for their hard work. We'll see you at the next volunteer day in June!

Dicentra cuccullaria often called Dutchman’s breeches, bachelor’s breeches, boys-and-girls, kitten breeches, little-boy’s breeches, or staggerweed is in bloom in the Native Flora Garden.

Soft pale green pinnate foliage, feathery texture, and dainty flowers hanging like charms on a bracelet makes this spring ephemeral instantly recognizable and widely loved. The flowers consist of two outer petals, each shaped like a trouser or pant leg, together forming a tiny pair of breeches or pantaloons. There are two beaked, inner petals that surround the stamens and pistil, excluding all but the largest long-tongued bees access to the nectar and pollen. Easily cultivated and care free, this species thrives in moist, rich woodland soils. This plant is toxic to grazing animals—if it’s ingested, it causes them to stagger about, disoriented and unsteady. It also holds a special place in Native American lore. The ethnobotanist Huron Smith wrote in 1923, “This is one of the most important love charms of the Menomini. The young swain tries to throw it at his intended and hit her with it. Another way is for him to chew the root, breathing out so that the scent will carry to her. He then circles around the girl, and when she catches the scent, she will follow him wherever he goes.”

Spring ephemeral Sanguinaria canadensis (commonly known as bloodroot, puccoon, red puccoon, Indian paint, snakebite, tetterwort, sweet slumber) is in bloom in the Native Flora Garden this week.

I reserve a special sort of admiration for the first rugged plants to slip free of winter’s lingering grasp, and bloodroot is one that deserves to be lauded. The leaf and flower bud emerge simultaneously, with the leaf lovingly encasing and protecting the delicate flower bud until it can burst open on warm sunny April days. The flower resembles an airplane propeller in shape, with pure crystalline petals radiating from a center of golden-yellow stamens and pistil. Sadly, the flowers don’t last more than a few days before the petals collapse into a pile below. The foliage continues to expand and will persist well into the summer and early autumn. The plant’s most common name, bloodroot, alludes to its potent orange-red sap, said to stain anything it touches, which exudes from the stem and rhizome when damaged. Its Latin species name, sanguinaria, translates as “bleeding.” This sap was highly prized by Native Americans for a multitude of uses. It was employed as a dye for baskets and clothing, and when mixed with animal fat it became a fearsome body paint characteristic of the Algonquin and Lenape people of this region. Tetterwort refers to its use for treating skin ailments, and as it was once believed to induce sleep, bloodroot also became known as sweet slumber. In modern times, the sap was found to contain the alkaloid sanguinarine, a compound with antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory properties. It can be found as an ingredient in some herbal toothpastes and mouthwashes as well as in topical ointments for treating warts and moles. Like trilliums, the seeds of bloodroot are ant dispersed, which means this plant is slow to colonize areas. There are also two attractive double flower forms, S. canadensis f. multiplex and S. canadensis ‘Flore Pleno’—expensive but commercially available.

Most of the flowering cherry trees in the Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden are in peak bloom! This weekend should be an excellent time to come out and celebrate hanami, the Japanese cultural tradition of enjoying and celebrating the transitory beauty of the cherry blossom season. The blooms only last a few days once they peak, so try to make it out this weekend to see the Japanese Garden at its cherry blossom best. The trees along Cherry Walk and on Cherry Esplanade are still in pre-bloom, so it you can't make it to BBG this weekend, you'll still have time to come in the next two weeks to admire the blossoms elsewhere in the Garden. To keep up to date with the bloom status of all the trees, visit the CherryWatch Bloom Status Map.

Ever spotted your favorite garden on Gossip Girl, in Vogue, on Saturday Night Live, or in a Kohl’s ad? If so, you’ve seen some of our greatest recent hits of commercial photography—that is, the production crews who come to the Garden to use its dramatic backdrops for their own commercial projects.

Our most recent commercial shoot, last Wednesday, was for a 60-second Earth Day promo for NBC’s Late Night with Jimmy Fallon show. The Roots, Jimmy Fallon’s house band, wrote a song in honor of the holiday, and we loaded in at the crack of dawn in the Steinhardt Conservatory to begin shooting the super-fun promo—a music video, really—which the production team is kindly letting us share with you on the blog.

If you’ve never had the opportunity to work on (or be a fly on the wall of) a big network shoot, you may not believe how much time, manpower and energy it takes to produce something as lovely and effortless-looking as the clip above. You can see BBG’s Desert Pavilion, Entry House, and Daffodil Hill in the promo—which accounts for less than half of the 60 seconds. (The Honda hybrid is also driving past the Herb Garden towards the end of the promo.) For those four locations, we spent about nine hours setting up, shooting, and breaking down, with a crew of about 60 working in tandem with BBG staff.

We get dozens of requests each week this time of year to shoot commercial projects at the Garden—from fashion magazines, TV shows and commercials, feature films, and more. We need to be incredibly careful about which projects we select, since the safety of our plant collections and comfort of our regular visitors are top priorities. When a request comes in, I work with horticulture, security and facilities to determine if it’s a good match for us, and on the day of the shoot, personnel from all those departments work with me to make sure that every element is carefully managed, from visitor traffic rerouting to ensuring that not even one leg of one stand of one light touches a planted bed here. I think one of my greatest compliments of my whole life came a couple of years ago when a producer, in a somewhat frightened voice, once told me I was a captain of the plant police.

This shoot, despite being in grey and wet weather, was a great success. Catch this promo both here and tonight during primetime on NBC, and let us know what you think in the comments!

The Leon Levy Foundation, led by philanthropist Shelby White, has pledged its support of Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Campaign for the Next Century with a gift of $7.5 million, the largest contribution by a living donor in the institution’s 100-year history. The gift will help support a suite of projects and initiatives that affects virtually every part of the Garden and will extend well beyond its borders, collectively comprising the most ambitious set of enhancements since the Garden’s founding. View the full press release here.

To learn more about the campaign and the projects this generous donation will fund, visit Campaign for the Next Century.

Writer, photographer, and friend of BBG Keight Beaven sent us some great hanami photos from Japan. In her note she said:

"This year while teaching English in Nagoya-shi, Aichi I was lucky enough to experience the beauty of Japanese flowering cherry trees first hand. Lasting for just two weeks, hanami is one of the most anticipated activities in Japan. As the weather began to warm into spring this year, the brown barren branches of cherry trees exploded with pink and white blossoms that lured people out of their offices and homes and into the parks to admire the delicate and transitory beauty of the trees in bloom. It's a rare site to see so many Japanese people socializing with each other in public. Groups of friends and families congregated on large city-provided blue tarps that blanketed the ground under the blooming trees and a host of colorful food stalls and carnival games lined the blossom areas to compliment the experience. With many sips of beer and sake woven between upbeat chatter and laughter between friends and strangers, it was a true Japanese picnic. One very important word of advice for those thinking of visiting next year: don't go home when the sun sets. Some of the best cherry blossom viewing is done at night when the city illuminates the trees from below or within the petal-filled branches."

Few plants herald the coming of spring like trilliums. Easily recognizable by their distinct form, mature trilliums feature three leaves in a whorl on top of which sits the blossom, whose floral parts also appear in multiples of three. The blooms of pedicellate trilliums sit on a short stalk or pedicel where as the flowers of the sessile group sit directly atop the whorl of foliage.

Pedicellate Trilliums

Trillium grandiflorum (white wake Robin, white trillium, great white trillium)

This species is the showiest, best known, and most loved of all trilliums. It is the provincial flower of Ontario, Canada and a highly prized shade garden perennial throughout the world. Its natural range extends from Maine and southern Quebec west to Michigan and Minnesota and south along the spine of the Appalachian Mountains. It grows in well-drained, rich forest soils with a preference for sugar maple and beech forests.

All species of trillium seeds are naturally dispersed by ants, who are attracted to a fleshy, fat globule attached to the seed coat called a elaiosome. The ants will take the seed a distance from the mother plant, eat the globule, and discard the seed or they will take the seed back to their nest and discard of the seed underground once the globule has been consumed.

With ants to disperse the seed and suitable soil conditions Trillium grandiflorum can form large drifts over the years. Native Americans used the grated root as a poultice for eye swelling and as a tea to relieve cramping during menstruation. The common name wake Robin alludes to the danger of rousing the goblin Robin Goodfellow if the flower is picked. It may also refer to the plant's use as an aphrodisiac. Geoffrey Grigson reports in his book The Englishman’s Flora of the “use of Robin as a pet name for the penis.” Author John Lyly wrote in 1602 that “They have eaten so much wake Robin, that they cannot sleep for love.”

Trillium erectum (red trillium, stinking benjamin, stinking willie, purple trillium, birthwort)

While not as showy as the white wake Robin, Trillium erectum is nonetheless quite attractive. A great deal of natural variation occurs, with the flower colors ranging from deep burgundy to cherry red and even to white. It is one of the earliest trilliums to bloom and sometimes suffers late frost damage. The fragrance of this flower has been liken to that of a fetid wet dog, hence some the common names. The flowers attract flies and gnats as pollinators. T. erectum can be found in northeastern of the U.S., southern Quebec, and Appalachian Mountain states. It prefers to grow in humus-rich cool soils, often in association with hemlocks (Tsuga sp.) rhododendrons, and laurels (Kalmia sp.) Further south in its range it becomes more of a high-elevation plant. It is also considered one of the most promiscuous of trilliums, readily hybridizing with at least three other species where their ranges overlap.

Trillium flexipes (bent trillium)

A robust and tall plant, this trillium has flowers usually smaller than those of T. grandiflorum but with a creamier white color and a more textured petal. Its erect flowers last for a long time and do not turn pink with age like T. grandiflorum. Another distinguishing feature is that the blossom is often carried at a right angle to the pedicel. Its range is predominantly the eastern central U.S. and the southern Great Lake states but it does occur sporadically in eastern Pennsylvannia and extreme northwestern New Jersey. Flowering in May, this statuesque plant is most at home on rich wooded slopes in limestone derived soils and along stream valleys and upper flood plains.

Trillium undulatum (painted trillium, striped wake Robin, painted lady)

Perhaps the most elusive of trilliums, the painted trillium rewards its discoverers with pure white petals, a wavy fringed margin, and flushes of magenta pink in the throat of the flower. It occurs in rich, acidic soils and only in locations where the soil stays cool and moist. Only at its northern extreme does one find it growing exposed. Its distribution runs north from the highest elevations in Georgia along the spine of the Appalachians into New England and eastern Canada. Adding to its mystery, this trillium emerges, expands, and flowers at an alarming rate. Quite literally it could missed today and in flower tomorrow. Painted trillium are considered amongst the most challenging to cultivate.

Trillium vaseyi (sweet Beth, sweet trillium, Vasey’s trillium)

Named in honor of English-born American botanist George Vasey (1822–1893), this is one of the least known trilliums. If not for its nodding or declined flower, T. vaseyi would be the largest flowered and showiest of all the pedicillate trilliums. It prefers sheltered sites in wooded ravines and stream banks in deep, rich soils. It is rarely found as large clumps, instead occurring sporadically wherever habitat is suitable.

Sessile Trilliums

Trillium cuneatum (whippoor-will flower, large toadshade, toadshade, bloody butchers, sweet betsy)

The largest of all eastern sessile trilliums, this species occupies a vast geographical range, resulting in many variations in form and much confusion amongst botanists and enthusiasts. A burgundy red flower sits directly atop green and silver mottled foliage. The flower's fragrance has been compared to raw beef or a butcher shop, hence its colorful common name, bloody butchers. Tolerant of some competition, it has been found in open grassy fields as well as shaded woods, preferring to grow on sloped land rather than flat floodplain areas.

Trillium luteum (yellow trillium, yellow toadshade)

Another charming spring bloomer with ghostly mottled leaves, this is perhaps the most recognizable of sessile trilliums. Growing in great abundance in the southern Appalachians, it is the only trillium with a yellow flower. It also sports the most pleasant fragrance among trilliums, a sweet lemony scent. Because of its ease of culture and popularity amongst horticulturalists and gardeners, it is widely available at local garden centers and nurseries. It grows in rich mature forest soils and thin open deciduous woodlands.

Trillium stamineum (twisted trillium)

While not as showy as its sessile cousins, this trillium is remarkable due to the spreading, twisted oxblood petals and prominent upright stamens. The leaves bear mild mottling and the flower emits an unpleasant fetid odor at close range, likely pollinated by carrion flies and gnats. Its distribution is restricted to a narrow band between Alabama, Mississippi, and western Tennessee, growing along floodplains and streams in sandy or heavy clay soils. Twisted trillium grows sporadically and widely scattered, though in rich soil conditions it may produce thick clumps.

Of the 26 flowering cherry trees on display in the Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden, 15 began to bloom this week and are holding their blossoms despite the rain. The majority of these trees are Prunus subhirtella 'Pendula', often called weeping cherries. In BBG's collection there are both white and pink varieties. Weeping cherries have been cultivated in Japan for centuries and are often referred to as ito-zakura ("thread cherry") in poems and literature. The thin branches weep because of their fast growing habit and do indeed look like threads blowing in the breeze before the blossoms emerge. The species was first introduced into Europe in 1862 by German physician and botanical collector Philipp Franz von Siebold. In addition to P. subhirtella 'Pendula' visitors to the Garden can also see Prunus sargentii 'Fudan-zakura' in peak bloom.

To see the stages of bloom of all the flowering cherry trees at BBG visit the CherryWatch map and follow us on Twitter for the latest bloom updates.

Magnolia Plaza was slow to start this year thanks to the cool weather, but the wait was worth it. Today the trees burst into bloom filling the area near the Visitor Center with sweet scents and a gorgeous array of colorful blossoms. There are 72 trees highlighting 17 different varieties of magnolias on display. To learn more about the collection, visit Magnolia Plaza.

Registration is open for spring and summer classes and workshops at BBG!

Check out summer classes and programs for adults, community gardeners, composters, and children from April through August.

This year, we are happy to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Native Flora Garden with special classes and events for adults. Learn what natives make the best alternatives to common garden exotics or take a watercolor class inspired by plant life found within 100 miles of New york City.

And as Time Out New York Kids recently said, what better way to celebrate spring than to register your child for a gardening class at BBG? Two- and three-year-olds explore nature accompanied by their caregivers, while Seeds (pre-K and K students) work communally to plant seeds and maintain crops. City Farmers (1st through 8th graders, broken into three age groups) take things further, working in small groups on their own plots to nurture plants from seed to table. Structured play and storytime for the younger set and science and cooking classes for older kids add to the outdoorsy fun.

All classes and educational programs at BBG require preregistration (except for Discovery Workshops). Members receive a discount on class fees. Register today!

Amborella trichopoda (Amborellaceae) is the earliest known living lineage of flowering plants. Any student who has taken a class with me over the last 10 years has learned about this amazing plant. In its endemic country of New Caledonia, on Mt. Aoupinie, I finally got to see this amazing and very strange flowering tree.

The two earliest known lineages of flowering plants—that is, the earliest known branches in their evolutionary tree—are Amborella trichopoda and the order containing water lilies (Nymphaeales). What makes this finding so odd is that these two lineages are extremely different in their external and internal structure. Amborella is a small woody tree with very structurally reduced flowers and separate male and female individuals (i.e. it’s dioecious); whereas, water lilies are aquatic herbaceous plants with very complex flower structure and individuals have flowers containing both female and male reproductive parts (i.e., they are hermaphrodite).

In addition, unlike the vast majority of flowering plants, including water lilies, Amborella has no vessel elements through which to transport water. Seeing this plant sterile would have been an amazing experience, but we got to see it in flower (both female and male trees) and fruit (only female trees make fruit because fruits develop from the ovary, part of the female reproductive organ)!!

Parc de la Rivière Bleue (Blue River Park) is perhaps most well-known national park in New Caledonia. It is in the heart of the southern end of the south province and is famous for its most showy vertebrate residents, the kagus (Rhynochetos jubatus). We were fortunate to visit the park with Daniel and Irène Letocart from the Endemia website and Daniel’s brother, Yves Letocart, one of the most well known ornithologist in the country. Yves studies the kagu and easily called these beautiful birds from the forest for us to see and photograph.

These flightless, endemic New Caledonian birds only show their full beauty when alarmed or trying to attract a mate. In the photo below, one bird greets another with a show of aggression as it emerges from the forest edge.

While the birders in our group walked ahead with Yves, I stayed in the back of the group walking slowly with Daniel and Irène soaking up their vast knowledge of the flora of Rivière Bleue. The pictures below show just a few of the hundreds of species we saw that day.

We have seen this first plant, Gardenia aubryi (Rubiaceae), several places and in each place have heard the same story. You can break off the apical bud/developing young leaves and chew them like chewing gums.

I finally tried this at Rivière Bleue and was amazed at the chewing gum texture that develops after only two or three foamy saliva producing chews! It really does feel and taste like gum, albeit with rather weak flavor. Daniel told us that New Caledonians use the chewed buds to plug small holes in boats. After hand washing my field pants I discovered two buds I had placed in my pocket and now I believe this boat repair story!

I mentioned in a previous blog post that there is an enormous diversity of gymnosperms in the New Caledonian flora. Various lineages of these coning plants have diversified in odd ways on the islands of New Caledonia and chief among them are the Araucariaceae and the Podocarpaceae. The two pictures below show just how strange these two families can be in this flora.

New Caledonia is one of the world’s largest producers of nickel ore and evidence of this metal is everywhere, even in the plants. Sebertia acuminata (Sapotaceae) is a large, rather nondescript plant that accumulates large amounts of nickel from the soil in which it grows. This accumulation is very obvious when you cut into the bark of these trees or snap off a leaf or twig: they have blue sap!

In the more open areas of Parc de la Rivière Bleue, along the river and large artificially created lake, some of the more gorgeous residents of the park were in bloom. The first of these that I will share with you is Xanthostemon aurantiacus (Myrtaceae), which was nearly growing in the water on the edge of the lake.

Amyema scandens (Loranthaceae) is a beautiful parasitic plant that, although it does parasitize its woody host, has leaves of its own that photosynthesize.

At the visitors’ center on the way out of the park, we saw the first of several Oxera species we saw in the area. This beautiful almost orchid-like flower is actually a member of the mint family! The leaves look very much like honey suckle leaves and the flowers certainly don’t look like typical mint flowers!

Today The New York Times and the Daily News both ran stories about new blight-resistant chestnuts coming to BBG. Bart Chezar, a long-time BBG member and Prospect Park volunteer received the hybrid seeds from the American Chestnut Foundation with the hope that once planted in the Garden and Park they might inoculate the purebred trees already standing.

To read more visit The New York Times City Room or NYDailyNews.com.

We collected at the end of a harrowing road today – I’m not sure that our car rental agency knew what they were getting into with us! The habitat on the road to the Montagne des Sources Preserve was a mix of high maquis and rain forest on ultramafic soils. I still have not quite gotten used to seeing so many different gymnosperms in a tropical forest. Their presence and that of the gymnosperm-looking flowering plant family, Casuarinaceae, is evident in the canopy shot above. We saw quite a few plant species that were new to us today. One of the most interesting was the parasitic plant, Daenikera corallina (Santalaceae).

This is a truly parasitic plant meaning that it does not make its own food by converting the energy of the sun via photosynthesis. Instead, it steals the products of photosynthesis (primarily sugar) from other plants. Thus, Daenikera corallina does not have chlorophyll and is therefore not green. The only part of D. corallina that occurs outside of the plant it is parasitizing is its flowers and the stalk and branches on which they are borne (i.e. the inflorescence, which after fertilization develops into fruits in an infructescence).

Another interesting genus of which we have now seen several species is Scaevola in the Goodeniaceae. I first saw this genus on the island of Molokai in Hawaii and it has stayed with me because of its beautiful, strongly asymmetrical flowers.

The family Epacridaceae is now recognized within the blueberry family, Ericaceae. This formerly recognized family sometimes resembles what you would think of as a typical blueberry family member, but more often stretches the morphological limits of the Ericaceae. One such example is the Dracophyllum sp. that we saw today.

If you are a fan of tropical fruits, the fruit below might seem familiar to you. It is a Montrouziera sp. (Clusiaceae), a genus related to mangosteen (Garcinia mangostana, also in the Clusiaceae). This family is often characterized by having yellow sap, which you can see exuding from the bark slash in the picture below.

On our lunch break, Danielle sat down right next to two carnivorous plants and thus was the first person on our trip to see the pitcher plant, Nepenthes vieillardii (Nepenthaceae). The other animal-eating plant was Drosera neocaledonia (Droseraceae), a sundew. We have both pitcher plants and sundews in the flora of eastern North America – in the eastern US the pitcher plants are members of the genus Sarracenia (Sarraceniaceae), but sundews are in the same genus all around the world: Drosera.

Speaking of Danielle… she was the unlucky person who “got” to carry the Semecarpus atra samples down the mountain to me in Yahoué the other day. She had hiked ahead with one of our guides and the guide recognized Semecarpus and collected it for me. The only problem was that the guide did not know that Semecarpus causes a nasty rash much like poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans). A few days later we found out that Danielle is just as allergic to Semecarpus as she is to poison ivy!

We had an excellent field day in Parc des Grandes Fougères with a team of botanists from IRD. The park was established in 2008 adjacent to (and accessed via) Réserve Spéciale de Faune du Col d’Amieu and its name means park of large ferns. We worked mostly in previously surveyed plots established within the park’s forests by IRD. Within the plots, all of the woody plants with trunks above a certain diameter are tagged and recorded.

Young fern leaves are called fiddleheads and several brown fiddleheads are shown in this picture among the stalks (botanically = stipes) of mature fern fronds.”

Our US team and Austrian graduate student, Barbara Turner, helped IRD locate specific trees within their plots in order to verify questionable identifications that had been recorded earlier. We also located Anacardiaceae trees so that Jérôme Munzinger could collect samples of them for our project. It was a very successful day in which we collected another three Anacards (and Barbara collected several samples for her project).

The most exciting collection of the day was our first fertile New Caledonian Anacard: Euroschinus elegans. This is the first fertile Euroschinus we have ever collected or even seen alive, and the fruits were beautiful (okay, maybe only to the eyes of Anacardiaceae enthusiasts)!

I do quite a lot of tropical fieldwork and often travel to exotic places of interest to tourists. With this type of travel comes many, many offers for free field assistants from New Yorkers interested in escaping the long northeastern winter. This next photo should be a warning to those of you who make this offer thinking that you are signing up for a tropical vacation…

In addition to gear, her backpack carries lunch for four and a day’s supply of water for two. The orange bag in the front is my field press made by the Herbarium Supply Company – I have been using this type of soft field press for four years now and wouldn’t go into the field without one ever again. The long silver bag with the rainbow strap on Keren’s shoulder is the very fancy carrying bag that our friends Dave and Ely made for my homemade clipper poles. These poles are cut into three-foot sections and are also a must for my field expeditions because they fit into my luggage and can be extended up to ca. 30 feet. The binoculars are for spotting high fruits and flowers in trees and the occasional bird.

For our first day of fieldwork we joined Barbara Turner, a Ph.D. student from the University of Vienna studying the ebony and persimmon genus, Diospyros (Ebenaceae), and Céline Chambrey, a botanist from IRD, on an already planed excursion. We made two stops, Gadji and Yahoué, both of which are within 15 minutes of Nouméa.

Gadji is a site right on the coast and at this location we had the pleasure of meeting the couple responsible for the fabulous Endemia website, Daniel and Irène Letocart. They are experts on all things New Caledonian, but Irène seems to specialize on the flora. She identified every plant we saw to genus and most of them to species! This is an impressive skill in a country that has ca. 3300 species of plants. With Daniel’s, Irène’s and Céline’s help in locating them, I was fortunate to make three Anacardiaceae collections on my first day out. We found Euroschinus obtusifolia var. obtusifolia at Godji, and Semecarpus atra and what we have preliminarily identified as Euroschinus verrucosa at Yahoué. Unfortunately all of these collections were sterile, which makes them much harder to identify than if they had been in flower or fruit. Godji was a very flat site that was easy to navigate; Yahoué was extremely steep at times with slick packed mud and lots of edge-of-mountain traversing. The trail just past the waterfall was about a 60º incline.

In addition to the Anacards, some other notable plants from today were a simple, unlobed leaf passion flower vine (Passiflora sp., Passifloraceae),

the mangroves Sonneratia alba (Sonneratiaceae)

and Bruguiera gymnorrhiza (Rhizophoraceae),

After exploring the local market, we decided to visit the zoological and botanical garden in Noumea. We were very pleasantly surprised to find an excellent zoo with large, well-kept and rather open enclosures for the animals. The zoo has an affiliation with the World Wildlife Fund and has excellent interpretation throughout. I was, of course, very excited to see a few endemic plants including Araucaria columnaris

and Acacia spirorbis

and a native Dysoxylum species.

The birders on the trip were slightly more excited to see the endemic and much celebrated Kagu (Rhynochetos jubatus).

Not being a birder, my favorite bird of the day was the horned parakeet (Eunymphicus cornutus).

]]> ResearchersBlogFieldwork 2011-03-17T19:59:10+00:00 http://www.bbg.org/news/first_days http://www.bbg.org/news/first_days?utm_source=RSS-Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=first_days&utm_campaign=RSS

After 13 hours over water, we finally saw the islands of New Caledonia as we approached the airport. We spent the first few days getting our bearings, doing a little in-town botanizing and birding, sorting out a rental car issue (the four wheel drive SUV we got at the airport was the size of a large toaster and had less luggage space than my bicycle), meeting with our collaborator, Jérôme Munzinger, at Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), and planning the order in which we will visit our targeted sites in the south province.

Since we are all still waking up at 5:00, we had no problem getting to the daily market in time for the best selection of produce and fresh fish. As you can see from the picture, we were able to get a wide selection of locally grown tropical fruits. These fruits mostly originated in south Asia and the Pacific, with the exception of sweetsop, which originated in tropical America, most likely the Caribbean. Despite the fact that these fruits were locally grown, like everything else in New Caledonia, they were very expensive. Bananas are about $6 per kilogram, or about $2.70 per pound, and they are by far the cheapest fruit! A single papaya costs at least $10.

For those of you unfamiliar with my research and my global botanical escapades, I offer this brief introduction. My name is Susan Pell and I am the director of Science at Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The primary foci of research conducted in our department are the evolutionary relationships of plants, their nomenclatural classification, and where they occur (both naturally and introduced). These three different branches of botany have a common application: they inform decisions about conservation. My research is a bit unusual in the department because the majority of my fieldwork is conducted outside of the US. I have been very fortunate in my career to obtain funding from a wide variety of agencies, organizations, and foundations in order to collect plants all over the world. My latest trip is to New Caledonia, a series of islands in the Pacific Ocean. I will be blogging on a regular basis as I travel around the islands, collecting plants and stories along the way.

New Caledonia is a group of islands in the southwest Pacific Ocean, east-northeast of Australia. It has one of the most unique floras on earth with more than 75% of the 3,250 plant species endemic. The biological distinctiveness of New Caledonia is due in great part to its geological history. It is the third largest island in the Pacific (behind New Zealand and New Guinea) and is rather exceptional among Pacific Islands because it is continental rather than volcanic in origin. The largest island in New Caledonia, Grande Terre, was once part of Gondwanaland, but separated from all other landmasses approximately 65 to 80 million years ago. New Caledonia consists of one large island (Grande Terre, ca. 400km by 50km) and several smaller islands. It was named by Captain Cook in recognition of the similarity between its shore and the rocky coastal cliffs of Scotland (a.k.a Caledonia).

This expedition is funded by a grant I received from the US National Science Foundation (DEB-0919485). The focus of the trip is to collect members of the cashew family (Anacardiaceae) and the frankincense and myrrh family (Burseraceae) on Grande Terre and Île des Pins. The diversity of these two families is not overwhelming here, but the species that are present are extremely unique. One Anacardiaceae genus in particular, Euroschinus, has diversified in New Caledonia to a greater degree than it has done throughout the rest of its range in the Pacific. We are interested in understanding why there is such a relatively high number of Euroschinus species in New Caledonia, when there are only two species in the much larger land masses of New Guinea and Australia. One explanation may be the diversity of ancient soil types found in New Caledonia and the other may simply be the 65+ million years its flora has been isolated from other major landmasses. The collections we make on this expedition will be contributed to several herbaria around the world and the DNA I extract from them will help us unravel their evolutionary and biogeographic histories.