Plants & Gardens Blog

Across the borough, gardeners enthusiastically embraced a restructuring of the contest and managed to turn a social distancing strategy into a way to connect with neighbors. Read › Brooklyn’s Beloved Window Boxes

Plants have evolved in a complex world and are very sensitive to particular and subtle cues. Decisions about where we put buildings and how we build them have a much larger impact than we often realize. Read › Plants, Sunlight, and Buildings

Starting heirloom fruits and vegetables from seed saves money, promotes biodiversity, and safeguards our cultural legacies. Join Owen Taylor, seed farmer and founder of Truelove Seeds, to learn tricks of the trade for starting your own. Read › Seed Starting: Preserving Our Cultures (Video)

Christopher Bolden-Newsome, farmer and codirector of the Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia, presents the Wilbur A. Levin Keynote Address at Making Brooklyn Bloom 2021. Read › She Hid Seeds in Her Hair: The Power of Ancestral African Foods (Video)

Kimberly Curtis leads us on a journey across continents, linking garden to kitchen while focusing on the properties and stories of three important healing plants indigenous to Africa: moringa, castor, and hibiscus. Read › Plant Journeys through the African Diaspora (Video)

The pandemic shifted our perspective regarding our homes and forced us to take a look at what we personally need to thrive. Many people turned to plants. Read › Plants and the Pandemic

Christopher Bolden-Newsome talks about the enduring legacy of traditional African food, crops, and agricultural technique in his keynote address during this year’s Making Brooklyn Bloom. Read › Preserving African Heritage through Plants and Agriculture

With the anniversary of the COVID shutdown this month, some communities want to memorialize beloved neighbors with plantings. Here are some things to consider. Read › Day of Remembrance: Is This a Good Time to Plant a Memorial Garden?

The Garden was founded in 1910, and just a short while later, the influenza pandemic emerged. School group attendance dropped to near zero and the conservatories closed, though for a different reason than they have now. Read › Brooklyn Botanic Garden in 1918: A Time of Pandemic, War, and Poverty