Brooklyn Botanic Garden

[Edward]

Website: http://www.bbg.org/

Hours
General Grounds

April-September
Tuesday-Friday: 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Weekends and holidays: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Closed Monday ( open holiday Mondays, except for Labor Day)
October-March
Tuesday-Friday: 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Weekends and holidays: 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Closed Monday, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day ( open holiday Mondays)
Steinhardt Conservatory, Visitor Center & Garden Gift Shop

Open every day the Garden is open:

April-September
10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

October-March
10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
The Garden is closed Mondays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Day.


The Jenkins Fountain is centered in a pool 24 feet in diameter and 1-1/2 feet deep. Lily Pool Terrace.




Rock Garden opened to the public in 1917. It was the first rock garden of considerable size in an American botanic garden.

[Comelade]

A Video
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...tanical+garden


With Local Live



http://newyorkbirds.free.fr/brooklyn...rden/index.php

[LeCom]

Brooklyn Botanical Garden is amazing. May very well be the best place in the whole city. I liked it way more than Bronx Botanical Garden or the Central Park or anything else, even the Dupont Gardens in Philly. The only place that may be better is Prospect Park, but that's only cause I like rustic shit like that. If you haven't been there - go. Now.

[BrooklynRider]

I bought my membership and strolled around on Sunday. What an oasis.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Spring at the BBG



Parrot Tulip

[antinimby]

Winter Looms, but One Tree Dresses for Spring



In a warm New York December, a cherry tree at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden was in full bloom. Its breed is
known, with good reason, as the everblooming cherry.


By ANDY NEWMAN
Published: December 20, 2006

There may be no snow this holiday season, but in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, a decidedly unseasonal wonder awaits: a cherry tree in full bloom.

Four months ahead of its brothers and sisters, a tree at the northeast corner of the Japanese garden pond, crowned with thousands of delicate flowers, catches the afternoon sun and flings it back out in a cloud of silvery pink.

The blossom riot is, of course, a response to a December whose average temperature is almost five degrees above normal so far, according to the National Weather Service. Do not fear, though, that there will be no magic carpet of pink petals in the garden come April.

The tree is one of a few at the garden that flowers sporadically during warm spells throughout the late fall and winter — though almost never all at once like this, an expert at the garden said. Its breed is known, in fact, as the everblooming cherry.

“This isn’t of any concern to us,” Patrick J. Cullina, the garden’s vice president for horticulture, said yesterday. “This is serendipitous. We have hundreds of other cherry trees that will flower in the spring. It’s just a nice surprise for people who happen to be here today.”

Scot D. Medbury, the garden’s president, added, “Think of it as sort of a Christmas present.”

The gift may not last long. Mark Tebbitt, the garden’s horticultural taxonomist, said that he had been monitoring the tree and that it seemed to be at its peak yesterday. Already, some of the petals were turning brown.

The tree has been helped along by its location, a sunny spot next to the pond, which reflects sunlight up at it. In a shady patch of the garden’s parking lot stands another everblooming cherry with only a sprinkling of flowers.

The tree by the pond stands in contrast not just to the other cherry trees at the garden but to the whole rest of the place, which, warm spell or not, is pretty brown these days.

“It’s really magic,” Mr. Tebbitt said. “I think because it’s just such stark winter elsewhere.”

Yesterday afternoon, Mady Hagbi walked by the tree with her husband and four of their six children. Ms. Hagbi looked up, a huge smile spreading across her face.

“I remember when I was a child,” she said, “my grandfather used to have a tree like this in his backyard with flowers in the winter.”

Her grandfather’s yard was in Tiberias, Israel. The average temperature there in December is 60 degrees, about the same as in Daytona Beach, Fla.


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[ZippyTheChimp]

Botanic Garden looks to get greener

by Amy Zimmer / metro new york

JAN 19, 2007

PROSPECT HEIGHTS. The Brooklyn Botanic Garden was a trailblazer back in the day. In 1914, it opened the country’s first Children’s Garden and began the first bonsai collection in 1925. But the nearly 100-year-old institution recognizes it needs to reinvigorate its mission and become even “greener.”

“We’re really getting our heads together on how we can be a model of a green institution,” Scot Medbury, BBG’s president and CEO, said yesterday at a breakfast forum. The garden wants to position itself as “better interpreters” of what sustainability means and how New Yorkers can incorporate it into their lives.

With New York’s population expected to grow by 1 million people by 2030 — and half of those people expected to move to Brooklyn — Medbury wants the garden to help “strengthen the greening of the borough.”

To that end, BBG is planning to construct a new visitor’s center — expected to be completed for the garden’s centennial in 2010 — that will have a green roof that “we think will take it to the next level,” Medbury said.

The garden is also getting more involved in working with local gardeners on food issues — it’s hosting an event on Mar. 10 called “Garden-wise greening: growing healthy soil, food and community.”

Patrick Cullina, vice president of horticulture and facilities, hopes the new center will change perceptions of the benefits of green roofs and “challenge the assumptions and change the vocabulary of what we have on our roofs going forward.”

The center is still in preliminary designs by the New York-based firm Weiss/Manfredi.

[brianac]

It’s a Corsage Nightmare: An Orchid as Big as a Car

Kate Blumm/Brooklyn Botanic Garden
In a rare feat in captivity, this Grammatophyllum speciosum has blossomed to 12 feet in diameter and about 200 pounds

By TINA KELLEY
Published: September 18, 2008

A rare orchid the size of a Volkswagen Beetle is blooming for the second time ever at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, a blessed event that has spurred envy among the handful of orchid growers who will even try to grow a plant this big.

Considered the queen of orchidaceous plants, and one of the world’s largest orchids, this particular Grammatophyllum speciosum is 12 feet in diameter and weighs about 200 pounds. It last bloomed in 2003 and has four huge flower spikes, at least one of which should remain in bloom for the next week or two, said David Horak, curator of the garden’s orchid collection.

Known as the tiger or leopard orchid, the plant is native to Malaysia, Sumatra and New Guinea, where it grows in the crotches of trees more than 100 feet in the air. Plants can weigh up to two tons.

“There are all kinds of anecdotal stories about workers being killed trying to remove one from a tree,” Mr. Horak said.

If it is rare in nature, this Gulliver of the garden is even rarer in captivity, because few people or institutions can afford to grow it.

Mr. Horak bought the plant 10 years ago for $75 at an auction from the widow of Don Richardson, who was the orchid grower for Greentree, the Whitney estate on Long Island. It now hangs in a 30-inch square basket, 15 feet in the air above a pond.

As plants go, it is fairly high-maintenance, he said. It is watered every sunny day, and fed two or three times a week.

“The last time we potted it, it took five people and a rope and pulley to lower it into the current basket,” Mr. Horak said. “They resent being repotted, and for some time after we repotted it, it kind of sulked. It didn’t grow very well for a couple years.”

In an August 2007 article in Orchids, the bulletin of the American Orchid Society, Erich E. Michel, the operations manager of the Hoosier Orchid Company in Indianapolis, described trying to get a Grammatophyllum to bloom. In the essay, titled “I Need to Grow a Giant Orchid” (a need his wife as defined as “childish competitive dementia”), he described trying to coax blooms from the plant, which he variously referred to as “the beast” and “the monster.”

The plant’s spiny rootlets, which dry and harden until they are thornlike, catch plant and animal litter from above and form “a self-made composter” that helps feed the plant.

“These barbed roots were just one way the plant could hurt you,” he wrote, before describing how, after nine years of waiting, the growers decided to force the plant to bloom by starving it. “We were going to make it think it was going to die,” he wrote.

He succeeded in 2004, and again in 2007, when the plant produced eight flower spikes.

The Brooklyn orchid’s next feat will be to produce a seed capsule the size of a Nerf football, Mr. Horak said. It will have about two million dustlike seeds in it, which may be offered to some other institution or firm that wants to try growing its own. The seeds are considered an aphrodisiac by some, Mr. Michel wrote.

Unlike Audrey Junior, the voracious plant from “The Little Shop of Horrors,” the Brooklyn plant has not been named, Mr. Horak said. “On any given day, if it’s creating trouble, it gets names nobody wants to hear,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/19/ny...on&oref=slogin

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company