Tag Archives: New York Botanical Garden

The variety of orchids is stellar; one appreciates so many intricate shapes and flamboyant hues of the hybrids landscaped with ferns, bromeliads, palms, ficus, bamboo, mat dai and more. It is a festival for the eyes.

Lit up at night, the sculptures promise to be a singular, sterling experience integrating color, form, and light amidst the haunting, shadowy landscape of NYBG vistas.

The Holiday Train Show Bar Car Nights and the entire exhibition are sure to ignite your seasonal spirit and bring joy and vitality to help you usher in the New Year.

This year the Applied Imagination team added the exhibition's first roller coaster, the Coney Island Cyclone. With the Cyclone are the Coney Island Wonder Wheel (complete with LED sign) and the Elephantine Colossus, a gigantic elephant-shaped hotel from the 1890s that burnt down in a fire.

'I see it as horticultural theater. The way exhibitions are, there is tremendous complexity. It’s like when the curtain goes up the set changes.'

That was the standard practice of the explorers in the Victorian period: 'I paid you thousands of dollars to go far off into the forests of India to bring me back this plant. I want this plant.'

When the former U.S. Poet Laureate read the phrase "frying pan of yourself/into the fire..." a young child in the audience gave a magnificent whoop. It was the perfect sound effect to punctuate the hot metaphor.

I didn't think NYBG could top itself, but this year the Holiday Train Show is even more magnificent than in the past.

The curator of NYBG's famous orchid show talks about the incredible diversity of orchids and his 15 years working with them.