citygardenguide

Herewith are a few trends Cityardenguide spotted at Chelsea:

1.Naturalistic planting is very big. Modified meadow planting is everywhere, no more traditional English borders. There are lots of wand like flowers waving in the wind and lots of spikes and balls floating above a green base. Aquilegia, astrantia, and iris, are used frequently as dots of color above the green. Grass is used very sparingly and rarely mowed. (Bad for the mower salesmen)

2. Recycled materials are used extensively, especially for paving materials. All the gardens stress ecological awareness.

3. Color- Dark burgundy is in. The darkest red aquilegia, Barlow Black and the darkest red astrantia are particular favorites.

4. Iris are back. (You might not have known they had gone)

5.Every garden has a pool- most often a rectangular one.

6. Sadly this seemed to be a universal trend - bad garden art. Every garden seemed to have to have an "art" object, and most would have been much better without it

Posted by gardenguidenyc at 07:06 PM | Comments (0)

Greenmarket

Where would we be without the Greenmarket? Right now, it seems like a garden unto itself--along with the usual selection of wonderful fresh vegetables, fruits, cheese, meats, fish, honey, maple syrup and bread, the Greenmarket celebrates spring with a great selection of plants as well. And we're not just talking about fluffy hanging baskets, but herb plants, vegetable starts, well-grown annuals and perennials--the Greenmarket has them all. The biggest selection can be found at the Union Square market, which is held on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.

Posted by gardenguidenyc at 05:15 PM | Comments (0)

May 20, 2005

Rites of Spring: Procession to Save our Gardens

6BC Garden

On Saturday, May 21st, the fifteenth annual all-day parade and theatrical pageant celebrating the community gardens on the Lower East Side will be held throughout the neighborhood. The Lower East Side has the greatest concentration of community gardens in the city and you can visit thirty gardens during the course of the day. There will be a closing ceremony at 6pm on Eighth Street between Avenues C and D featuring the release of 50 butterflies. More information can be found on the Earth Celebrations website.

Posted by gardenguidenyc at 02:10 PM | Comments (0)

How-To Books

People who have never had a garden are often at a loss to know how to start one and surprisingly anxious about the process. Fear of failure--"But I might kill a plant"--seems to be a big part of the problem. True gardeners know that plants die all the time, and one of the peculiar joys of the pastime is taking advantage of your failures to try out something new. The biggest fear when you take up gardening is not that you might have a black thumb, but that you might develop a dangerous and often expensive addiction to new plants.

For all those would-be gardeners who don't know quite where to start there are two new books, both by well-known New York gardeners, aimed squarely at beginners. Garden Your City by Barbara Hobens Felt is an appealing and sensible how-to book for aspiring urban gardeners. It covers everything from where--a window box, a fire escape, a roof, the neighboring building's tree pit--to how--hard work and determination. Ms. Felt is a community gardener and is particularly good on the nuts and bolts of urban gardening. She starts at the beginning; make sure you have permission to garden from the legal owner of the land, check for a water source, observe the sun and shade pattern of your site. There is a demystifying section on starting plants from seed and a good list of easy plants for beginners. She goes on to more complicated projects like creating a compost pile and building a pond. The directions are simple and the tone is confidence-building. YOU can do this. This is the ideal book for neophyte urban gardeners, whether confronting a postage-stamp backyard or a derelict lot in need of beautification. The design is also friendly and approachable with clear but gently humorous line drawings that are much more effective than the photographs.

Although it will be useful to city gardeners everywhere, this is really a New York book. The problems she describes while universal, have particular resonance here. Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe wrote the introduction, and the author, a garden activist, started her gardening career in Hell's Kitchen at the Clinton Community Garden, one of the city's oldest and most beautiful community gardens.

A more general work is How to Get Started in Northeast Gardening, by Darryl Trout with Rob Proctor. Trout is a well-known garden writer and lecturer from Queens. This is part of a "First Garden" series and is geared more to the suburbs. It, too, starts with the premise that the reader knows less than nothing about the subject and leads them through the first steps of establishing a garden. There is a useful section called "Plants for Success," which describes a number of plants that are particularly suited to our area and includes good photographs and cultural requirements. The list, while not encyclopedic, will definitely get a new gardener started.

Posted by gardenguidenyc at 09:06 AM | Comments (0)

May 18, 2005

What's Blooming 5/18

One of the most romantic and poetic moments in the City's garden calendar is here. The Bluebell Wood at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden is at its peak. At this moment, 45000 bluebells are creating a sapphire carpet in the wood just south of the Cherry Esplanade.

Another bluebell display, though not nearly as dramatic, occurs at the Heather Garden in Fort Tryon Park. There the bluebells have naturalized in the perennial beds. This is a mixed blessing for the park's gardeners whose job is to keep the beds under control, and visitors often see them yanking up the bulbs. But they are definitely an enchanting sight in May.

The English bluebell of legend is Hyacynthoides non-scripta. What we generally find in our gardens is the Hyacynthoides hispanica, which is more vigorous. So vigorous in fact, that it is classed as an invasive in the United Kingdom as it is threatening the native blue bell.

Links:Brooklyn Botanic Garden, NYC Parks

Posted by gardenguidenyc at 06:31 PM | Comments (0)

May 16, 2005

Plantarium

Line up a couple of these on a windowsill and enjoy your own indoor garden. The beauty of them is that you can plant just one seed and then watch it grow under perfect conditions. The secret is all in the gel that feeds the plant until you are ready to put it in your garden--or give to a friend. The planter comes with your choice of seeds: basil, tomato, eggplant, melon, lavender, poppy or sweet pea. Look for them up at the brand-new, beautifully re-designed gift shop at Wave Hill in the Bronx. (Beware: the manufacturer claims the gel is non-toxic but at the same time recommends that you not get it on your hands, so use care in handling...)

Posted by gardenguidenyc at 01:45 PM | Comments (0)

May 12, 2005

What's Blooming 5/12

This time of year a number of quiet, un-flamboyant shrubs light up the understories of our park woodlands. Later in the season, once their flowers are spent, they can be hard to distinguish as they recede into the green monochrome. But right now a walk through any large park reveals a host of delicious-smelling, unusually shaped blooms.

If you are in a park and catch a whiff of strong spicy fragrance, it could easily be coming from one of the many viburnums in bloom at the moment. Viburnums come in so many shapes and sizes that our policy here at Citygardenguide is when in doubt, guess viburnum! Viburnum carlesii, burkwoodii and juddii all have a very strong fragrance and waxy, snowball-shaped flowers. The Doublefile Viburnums which are just now coming into bloom have little scent but are the most spectacular of the bunch, with pure white, flat cymes held above the leaves and a horizontal, tiered branching habit. Michael Dirr, whose Manual of Woody Landscape Plants is the bible of ornamental shrubs and trees, says, "a choice specimen of Doublefile Viburnum is without equal", and he's right.

Fothergilla is another shrub that is planted throughout the parks. A mid-sized native, it has oval leaves and bright fall color. Like most plants, it does better in the sun, but it performs adequately in quite a lot of shade, and is much used in the understory in Central Park. It has perky bottlebrush-shaped, creamy white flowers that smell strongly of honey.

The Cherry laurel (Prunus laurocerasus) also has upright bottlebrush-shaped white flowers and also smells sweetly of honey. It can survive the deepest shade and keeps its leaves (although they are rarely unblemished) all winter. It is an invaluable, if slightly boring, shrub. But it keeps a nice, mounded form and we here at Cityardenguide think the smell is divine - Dirr calls it "sickeningly fragrant" (he's wrong). There are lots of huge, billowy specimens in Central Park, but around town they are usually compact and between two to three feet high and wide. A walk across the plaza in front of the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center, where the trees are underplanted with cherry laurel, is an olfactory treat this week.

May 09, 2005

Rockefeller Center

Where is the prettiest spring display in the city this week? Believe it or not, it's at the Rockefeller Center Promenade (sometimes known as the Channel Gardens). It consists of two rows of ten-foot-tall European hornbeams planted in the beds on either side of the central water tanks. Lush grass, sprinkled with blue, white and purple pansies, carpets the area under the trees. It is all fresh, simple and really inviting. The Promenade displays only last a couple of weeks--they are changed about ten times a year--so this delightful incarnation won't be around for very long. We can only hope that those 28 elegant hornbeams are going to a good home when their gig is up.

Posted by gardenguidenyc at 05:40 PM | Comments (0)

May 05, 2005

Home Depot

Citygardenguide is not particularly keen on box stores--one of the good things about living in New York is their relative scarcity--but we are ALWAYS looking for a good deal on plants and garden products. So when the new Manhattan Home Depot stores took out big ads touting their Indoor Garden Centers we thought we should take a look.

Sad to report, the Indoor Garden Center is more dismal than you can imagine. For starters, the lighting, which is probably flattering to plumbing fixtures, makes everything look plastic. We had to finger the spathiophyllum and a number of other plants to make sure they were real. The choice of seasonal plants is pathetic. There were about a dozen potted roses in terrible condition, some potted tulips in pink foil paper which looked as if they had missed Easter, several diseased mandevilla vines.... you get the message. A group of standard hibiscus in neon colors were still looking presentable, but the pickings were very slim. Traditional indoor foliage plants appeared to be a better bet and were decently priced, but grouped together in that light they resembled a display in a less than elegant office lobby. A large collection of orchids looked healthy, but the selection of hanging plants left much to be desired. There were lots of ornamental pots but relatively few with simple clean designs.

Feeling that we had to find a redeeming feature, we moved on to the garden products; potting soils, fertilizers, and gizmos. We found an intriguing watering device which can keep a plant watered for three weeks. There were many sizes of potting soil (Home Depot seems to have an exclusive deal with Miracle Grow and Scotts). When we asked if there were any organic products, the salesperson looked at us as if we had said a bad word, and said no. We moved on...

Posted by gardenguidenyc at 07:08 PM | Comments (0)

The High Line Exhibition

For all of us who are following the story of the transformation of the High Line from an abandoned elevated highway to a ribbon of park, this little exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art perfectly captures our excitement and also ambivalence about the project. The installation in the third floor Architecture and Design galleries includes a model, axonometric drawings, and planting plans. We think it's by far the most poetic, site sensitive and inspiring urban project we have seen in some time. The plans and models are admirably readable for the lay person, so visitors can appreciate the linear quality of the park, which is about progression through but above the city. The implication of movement is reinforced by the planting, which transforms itself along the way from wetland to woodland to grassland, retaining the wild dimension of the present High Line. Plant nuts (we are guilty) will love the planting plans; they are only preliminary but help furnish the site in the imagination. The access points to the park are cleverly managed; not too intrusive but effectively changing the mood from the street to the park.

The ambivalence comes with the other parts of the exhibition, which focus on the present, Joel Sternfeld's four marvelous, melancholic photos and a video of the High Line. These are so poignant, and so evocative of the ephemeral and decayed beauty of the site, one has to ask, should we loose this? The answer is sadly- yes. It's going to be a beautiful park. In any case, as the signs all over the exhibition emphasize...we're talking private property here, and those of us who make up the general public are not permitted up.

The question occurs, will this actually get built? As always in New York, only if enough money can be raised, but The Friends of the High Line seem to be gathering steam and the City of New York has already committed funds.

Exhibition: April 20 to July 18, 2005
Links: Friends of the High Line and MoMA

Posted by gardenguidenyc at 03:46 PM | Comments (0)

May 03, 2005

Veggie Love

We found this tableware set on the web blog/magazine Land+Living. Called Veggie Love, the utensils were designed a couple of years ago by the firm Lift, whose web site is long on hip, cool and humorous, but short on actual information, so it is hard to figure out if you can buy a set for your next dinner party. But this is clearly the kind of cutlery that every gardener should have!

Lift has also designed an ecologically sensitive sandal for your summer wardrobe. The Johnny Appleseed Sandal has phytoremediating seeds embedded in the sole (phytoremediating plants clean toxins in the air and water), and as the sandals wear out, the seeds are liberated. Each step has a positive impact on the environment. Such a beautiful idea! Unfortunately, the sandals are only in design phase...maybe next summer!

Posted by gardenguidenyc at 09:19 PM | Comments (0)

May 02, 2005

Plant Sale

As if Brooklyn Botanic Garden wasn't enticing enough right now with its spectacular spring displays of cherry trees, lilacs and tulips, the garden is holding its famed plant sale on May 4 and 5. Even if you only have a windowbox, or a tree pit, it is worth a trip out to Brooklyn this week to check out the sale tables. Not only will you find unusual plants, but lots of your old favorites as well--this is the largest benefit plant sale in the Northeast--and you can be sure that all the plants are well-grown, because, for the first time, all the material is being provided by Monrovia Growers. Experts will be on hand to answer questions. The event takes place rain or shine.

Posted by gardenguidenyc at 03:08 PM | Comments (0)