New York, New York: Part Two

How the NYBG turned a bleak winter’s day into a wonderland and gave us a few unexpected, lifelong memories to take home with us.

We really didn’t expect much when we ventured out to the New York Botanical Gardens and this has nothing to do with the NYBG and more to do with the fact I was run off my feet when I was booking our visit, amidst a myriad of other sightseeing. I just hadn’t given it a lot of thought, though as a gardener and plant nerd, I probably should have but travelling overseas with little people in a large family group takes up a lot of mental real estate. Beyond a particular display I’d heard of and the fact it was winter which can be a stark time in a garden, I had not really spent a lot of time researching the sprawling garden itself which was established in 1891 and has since been registered as a National Historic Landmark.

Somewhere over the course of the 14 years since Hugo and I last visited New York City and I became a horticulturist and we became parents, I had been told about an incredible exhibit the NYBG do every year, whereby New York City and all its major landmarks are reconstructed in miniature form, entirely out of plant matter, a cellulose version of one of the world’s most famous cities! The whole mini-metropolis is topped off with a scaled down working railway system that weaves its way through the boroughs not unlike the train we’d just caught from Midtown, Manhattan from the beguilingly beautiful, Grand Central Terminal, direct to the Bronx, and the gardens’ very own station.