A Visit to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden

Surrounded by beauty in the rose garden. Photo by TD. (click on photos for larger, clearer versions)

The weekend before last, TD and I took the subway to the wonderful Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which we had not been to in a while. I remembered that June is a great time to visit when the Cranford Rose Garden is in high bloom.  I've done several posts about botanical gardens recently, which offer such bounteous natural beauty inside city limits. A theme that runs through my book is my predilection for a simple, natural country style while living in the city - combining my upstate youth with my Manhattan adulthood. Certainly city parks and botanical gardens, with their rolling green lawns and fragrant flowers, offer the epitome of this appealing combination.

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which is a museum of living plants, was founded in 1910 on a 39-acre section of Prospect Park. The Olmstead Brothers, who designed Central Park and the New York Botanical Garden, laid out the original site plan. Now it features more than 12,000 different kinds of plants from around the world and is comprised of all kinds of gardens including a Japanese garden and pond filled with orange koi fish, a lily collection, a daffodil hill, and a lot more.
After exiting the subway at the Eastern Parkway stop, we payed at the Garden entrance and walked through the property with our destination in mind - the blooming roses. In the Shakespeare Garden, an artist sketched some plants in the shade -

The Conservatory, built in 1917, houses many kinds of indoor gardens like a desert and a tropical garden -

In the Cherry Esplanade, visitors lounged under the trees. It looked like an Impressionist painting - 

Before we got to the rose garden, we passed this rose-covered arch which gave a taste of the pleasures to come. I love the sweeping movement of the roses clamoring over the arches. "The eye has to travel," Diana Vreeland famously said.

At last we reached the Cranford Rose Garden, which was built in 1928 and paid for by subway engineer Walter Cranford who ponied up $15,000 to create it. It features a plethora of all kinds of roses planted in beds in rows so it feels very intimate as the visitor can get up close to the blooms. You just wander up and down the rows and enjoy the beauty and the fragrance. When we visited at the end of June, some of the roses were past their peak and on their way out but the garden was still spectacular.

These lovely pink roses edged in red are called Delany Sisters - 

These huge yellow roses, called Edina, posed at the corner of a bed.

At one end of the garden, pink roses and a bank of lavender offered a dreamy combination.

I just love to wander around in this garden, up and down, back and forth. You really don't want to leave.

At last we extricated ourselves and walked down a grassy lawn. TD checked the Phillies baseball score on his phone under some shade trees. 

We exited out of a different entrance than where we came in, and noticed that the wonderful Brooklyn Museum was right next door rising above the trees.

Flowers and art in Brooklyn – a lovely corner of the world.

Roses and Refuse

Along the Hudson River Park where I run and ride my bike are blooming right now the most wonderful rugosa roses. It's really a shrub with dark green leaves which explodes with joyous flowers at this time of year. The roses also smell heavenly – fragrant and slightly fruity.

Rugosa roses are native to eastern Asia where they grow on the coast, often on sand dunes. Because the plant is tolerant of seaside salt and wind, it is also known as the beach rose. Tough, low maintenance and salt tolerant, it is often used next to roads which are salted during the winter for ice. Like the West Side Highway.

Mounds of roses have been planted throughout the Hudson River Park – white at the entrance

pink at the water fountain

and along the bike path, with the river beyond

Waves of pink and red at the tennis courts.

I love this flower which is white and pale pink in one bloom.

The best part though is around the big sanitation center.

As you come up on it there are seemingly fields of flowers.

The roses diminish the sanitation truck idling in the background.

The beauty and the fragrance overwhelm.

If you have to have a giant sanitation center, it's nice to have it surrounded by roses, no?

Happy Valentine's Day!

This is the twenty-fourth Valentine's Day Ted and I are celebrating together, and I'm very grateful for it, this you-and-me, I'll tell you that. We have a lot of fun together.
I made cupcakes!

Not bad right? I got a little decorating kit at Bed, Bath and Beyond. Martha Stewart, eat your heart out.
For Valentine's Day, we have a lot of roses around the house, because you know I love roses.

But I say, if you don't have someone buying you roses

go buy some for yourself

and I say, here's to love, in all its forms.

The Pleasure of the Rose

I love white roses and it's so easy to go to the deli at the corner and get a bunch and separate them into small vases. The one above went into a little handpainted vase I bought at Anthropologie on sale for $7.99.
A rose can hang on the wall

or stand on a table

or go on a desk. During the week they open up

and are different every day. Also they look different in the day in natural light

and at nighttime.

Light goes through the pale petals, like thin paper, which can take on a creamy blush. The unfolding buds are a joy to look at all week long.

And that's the pleasure of the rose.