spring time!

It seems like Spring is finally here, and here to stay!! I've been inspired by the blossoms around town and the beautiful colors that always come out during this season and have started practicing some of my flower designs this week because of it. I think that a trip to the New York Botanical Gardens is my next stop. This article in the Times is really getting me antsy. If only I didn't have so much to get done...

For now, please enjoy their beautiful description of the gardens, and enjoy some pictures I took from a trip to a beautiful flower and gardening store out in Tenafly, NJ last week. Have a great Mother's Day!!

A Method Behind All the Wildness

Angel Franco/The New York Times

New York Botanical Garden Azaleas blaze in intensities of purple and dark pink at the Azalea Garden's entrance. 

Stand at an overlook along the mile of paths winding through the enchanting 11-acre Azalea Garden that opens on Saturday at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, and look down over the lush plantings. Broad sprays of white, pale pink and lavender seem almost haphazardly arrayed. Some flowers are just beginning to reveal themselves; others are extravagantly pronounced, sweeping across the hill in bands, punctuated by coarse foliated rock formations and tall trees that have yet to display robust signs of spring.

Angel Franco/The New York Times

Visitors at the New York Botanical Garden walk on a path above the Azalea Bank, which features a mix of hundreds of azaleas selected to flower in time for Mother's Day.

Maybe one of the charms of azaleas is that, unless ruthlessly shaped into hedges, they really do appear to be wild, their flowers opening at varied times, reaching disparate heights, leaning in multiple directions, irregularly layered in waves — accidents of nature that just happen to be gathered here in immense profusion. While roses are generally seen in highly cultivated settings, and tulips are almost prim about their presentation, azaleas, which grow profusely along river banks and on hillsides, proudly display a heritage of untamed nature.

A great illusion, of course, particularly here. It doesn’t take long to realize how far from the accidental is every aspect of this Azalea Garden, except, perhaps, that some of the older azalea plantings from the 1930s and ’40s just happened to remain here, long after they had been overwhelmed by intrusions of other plants and the casual care once given this nondescript hillside.

But no haphazard planting could have led to such a calculated distribution of new low-lying plants that will, in time, create the living, flowering understory of this garden, plants whose very names — barrenwort and foam flower, Siberian bugloss and broad-leaved sedge — mix the exotic and the commonplace. And no random chance, in the midst of rocky outcrops and wet woodlands, could have inserted flowering dogwoods, magnolias and hydrangeas alongside 200-year-old remnants of the forest that once covered the Bronx. 

...for the rest of the article, click here: botanical gardens