Plant-O-Rama at Brooklyn Botanic Garden
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- January
- 31
Tuesday was the annual Plant-O-Rama trade show at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. It’s become one of my favorite winter events.
It’s a free-wheeling day of slide lectures, catalog displays, exhibits by public gardens and wholesale nurseries and presentations about new plants coming onto the market.
The attendees are a great mix of garden and landscape professionals—from groundskeepers at public parks to high-end designers.
The main speaker in the morning was Brent Heath from Brent and Becky’s Bulbs in Virginia talking about summer bulbs (dahlias, agapanthus, cannas, caladiums, lilies, eucomis, oxalis).
In the afternoon, we heard Elizabeth Lamb, coordinator of the NYS Integrated Pest Management Program for Ornamentals, talking about herbicide alternatives (“Imagining Life After Roundup”).
Among the many great things I learned… did you know that nepeta (catmint) has allelopathic properties, meaning that it tends to suppress other plants around it? Black walnut trees do this, too.
Now I know why everything around the exuberant nepeta in my sage bed did so poorly last summer. A dwarf spruce shrub seemed to be actually shrinking by the end of the season.
But these same properties make nepeta a particularly good groundcover for weed suppression (no weeds means no Roundup). Lamb said that some of the hardy fescues have allelopathic properties, too, making them particularly good turf grasses.
During lunch, I wandered around the Steinhardt Conservatory (yes, that’s Michael Steinhardt, the one with the 55-acre estate in Bedford) looking at tropicals and taking a few photos.
A clivia hybrid:
Great color, no?
I love this lilac vine.
So robust—and another great color.
And even closer.
A calla lily.
Heliconia angusta ‘Holiday’
Cactus
Lots of orchids on display.
A little closer.
I like the orchids that seem to be floating in the air.
And another.
The bonsai house has long been one of my favorite parts of the Botanic Garden.
A mix of evergreen and deciduous trees.
All are beautifully maintained.
Last one.
This entry was posted
on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 9:04 am by Bill Cary.
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Bill Cary grew up in Louisville, Ky. His gardening was limited to growing parsley and impatiens on the windowsill of Manhattan walkups until the mid-1990s when he bought a rundown old chicken farm on 8 acres in the Hudson Valley. Now he spends his weekends chasing deer, hacking away at invasive shrubs and vines and wondering why he doesn`t have more meadow and less lawn.
