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November 04, 2005
No Organic Gardening at the New NYBG Home Gardening Center
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This fall NYBG unveiled its revamped Home Gardening Center- its purpose is to inspire home gardeners with new ideas and techniques, and we recently went up to the Bronx to check it out. We weren't that keen on the old family gardening center, which was a little dusty and featured gardens that compared unfavorably with our own, and we can think of no worse insult. So we were looking forward to the new exhibit.
We were put off--very put off--to find that the entire new garden is sponsored by Scott's and MiracleGro. Now Citygardenguide has nothing against keeping houseplants on life support with chemicals, but we have been brought up to beleive that a real gardener would never stoop to pouring MiracleGro into the ground in an outdoor garden (outdoor pots are a gray area). Not only did we think that run-off from fertilizers was bad for groundwater systems, but that with good gardening practices and plenty of compost you shouldn't need to goose your garden with non-organic fertilizers...and if you felt you really needed a little boost--say you're trying to grow championship dahlias or something--you could find an organic product to do the trick. We were also under the impression that the use of chemicals on lawns is verbotten in the green world. We were stunned that so important a scientific institution as NYBG would accept sponsorship money from Scott's and MiracleGro, and plaster their logos all over the gardens and the handouts. We do understand how hard it is for nonprofit institutions to find funding for this kind of effort, but we wonder if there was any debate at the Garden about accepting this sponsorship.
With that rant out of the way, we have to admit that we really loved one of the new exhibits, the trial garden. Trial gardens allow you to "compare and evaluate" the performance of different plants. This is how professionals judge and compare new introductions, and it's great that home gardeners now have a place to judge for themselves the relative merits of the latest in plant fashions. Each of the 16 beds in the garden is dedicated to a different species. This year's group includes, among others, geraniums, sages, buddleias, hydrangeas and roses.
Citygardenguide was particularly interested in the geranium bed. They trialled a number of blues (always a good color in the garden) including "Brookside" the standard blue, and Rozanne, the new blue introduction which has caused quite a stir in the geranium world. For the record, Rozanne did seem to live up to its billing as a non-stop flowerer. If you find it on sale at a nursery or in a catalog, go for it.
We found ourselves drawn to the rose display, and we were busily writing down names of some of the better-looking cultivars when an awful thought occurred to us. Are these blemish-free roses the result of lavish applications of pesticides and fertilizers? The vibrant, perfectly-formed roses began to take on a sinister air.
Another display we really liked was the bamboo and grass garden set around the Ken Roman Gazebo. There are 50 varieties of grass and bamboo in the exhibit, and it's an excellent way to learn about the
ever more popular world of monocots.
NYBG, like the Conservatory Garden (see below) always features a display of single petal chrysanthemums at this time of year. Usually they are in a long border, but this year the display is part of the Home Gardening Center. It's not as big as it usually is, which is a shame, but these chrysanthemums are so gorgeous it's a pleasure to admire them anywhere.
Posted by gardenguidenyc at November 4, 2005 04:18 PM