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Forbes
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Brooklyn Botanic Garden's Bonsai Collection Turns 100
The Brooklyn Botanic Garden is celebrating the 100th anniversary of their bonsai collection with a ... More special exhibit and events. Shown are bonsai within the garden's Magnolia Plaza. The Brooklyn Botanic Garden often gets attention for when their esplanade of cherry blossom trees are in bloom. However, the park is recognizing another tree species on its grounds this year - the bonsai. 2025 is marking the centenary of the BBG's bonsai collection. Bonsai is the Japanese art of growing and shaping miniature trees in containers, and the BBG is said to have one of the oldest and largest collections on public display. From June 14 through October 19, the BBG will celebrate the collection with an expanded display of specimens, including never-before-displayed 'tiny trees' and an outdoor display of bonsai. The festivities will also extend to special tours, exhibits, workshops and other events. 'Brooklyn Botanic Garden has been the proud caretaker of this remarkable bonsai collection for 100 years, fostering a practice that is equal parts horticulture, art, design, and patience,' said Adrian Benepe, the garden's president. 'We are excited to see even more of these miniature trees—true works of art—displayed this year, including outdoors amid full-sized trees for a stunning comparison.' The Brooklyn Botanic Garden's C.V. Starr Bonsai Museum is the location for the garden's longtime ... More bonsai collection. FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder The garden's bonsai collection was started in 1925 through a generous gift of trees and shrubs imported from Japan in 1911. It was donated by Ernest F. Coe, a Connecticut landscape designer and nurseryman. Three bonsai from this original donation remain. They are a Japanese maple (Acer palmatum), a Daimyo oak (Quercus dentata) and a Japanese red pine (Pinus densiflora). Today, the Rocky Mountain Juniper is the oldest living bonsai in the BBG's collection. This Juniperus scopulorum is about 500 years old and features a full cascade style, meant to depict a tree hanging from the side of a cliff by the seashore or a stream. Overtime, the collection grew and diversified under the care of the BBG's first exclusive bonsai curator, Frank Masao Okamura. His 34-year tenure at the garden ran from 1947 to 1981. During his career, Okamura developed bonsai from unusual plants, including many tropicals and semitropicals. In the 1950s, the BBG launched the first of its renowned bonsai handbooks and began offering some of the first bonsai classes in the U.S. For 34 years, Frank Masao Okamura was the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's first exclusive bonsai curator, Today, the garden's bonsai collection is on view in the C.V. Starr Bonsai Museum. As many as 30 specimens are on exhibit at any given time from the BBG's collection of almost 400 temperate and tropical bonsai. Some of the trees are well over a century old, with many still cultivated in their original containers. For the BBG's bonsai collection's 100th anniversary, this museum will have new interpretations highlighting it as well as bonsai techniques and tools. A selection of bonsai outdoors in a seasonal display will be shown on Magnolia Plaza. 'I change the display often and bring in flowering and fragrant trees as much as possible so that the visitor's experience is always fresh and exciting,' explained BBG's C.V. Starr Bonsai Museum gardener David Castro. 'We have so many bonsai and this is such a rare collection, it's easy to display something different.' Visitors at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden marvel at the garden's bonsai collection inside the C.V. ... More Starr Bonsai Museum. In the BBG's Conservatory Gallery, visitors can see The Mountain, the Tree, and the Man by graphic novelist Misako Rocks!. In this playful exhibit, a bonsai in the BBG's collection shares memories of its life in manga-style panels. Along the way, visitors will learn about Okamura and can watch a restored short film from 1971 featuring Okamura. From June through October, the garden will offer tours for visitors to learn about the collection and see bonsai gardening demonstrations. Tours will run every Saturday and Sunday in June starting June 14 and happening monthly from July through October. Continuing Education bonsai workshops will be offered this fall. Visitors will find Japanese-inspired dishes and drinks in the BBG's Yellow Magnolia Café and Canteen; a series of ticketed Sake Dinners will happen in September. Terrain at Brooklyn Botanic Garden is offering not only bonsai trees, planters and tools, but also new boxed sets of cards and tote bags featuring illustrations of bonsai by Okamura. On Saturday, June 14, visitors are invited to mark the 100th anniversary of this collection, join a tour and enjoy live music. For more information or to purchase tickets, visit the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's website.
New York Times
02-05-2025
- New York Times
Overwhelmed? Go See Some Cherry Blossoms.
On the first warm night of spring, at the end of a particularly draining day of work and news, a friend texted to see if I wanted to come over for a drink on her deck. There was an urgency in the message — When? Now! She was gathering whomever might be around, which on a Thursday night at about 7:30 turned out to be three other people. Occasioning all this was her cherry tree, a monumental Kanzan that canopies roughly two-thirds of her Brooklyn backyard and part of the one next door. It was in peak bloom and it might not be this magnificent in four days or even tomorrow. Last Saturday, 22,000 people, a number greater than the seating capacity of the Barclays Center, visited the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, paying as much as $22 each to take in the long double rows of blossoming cherry trees that arched toward one another in a spectacular arboreal cathedral. There are 26 cherry tree varieties in the garden, including the Kanzans that line the cherry walk; most of them cultivars, rather than natives, and the first among them was planted in 1921. The Kanzan is especially exquisite, because its pink double blossoms can contain as many as 28 petals each. The flowering period is short — usually only a week, perhaps two — and rain or any significant shift in temperature will curtail it. There are few more powerful metaphors in the botanical world for the transient nature of beauty and the need to seize whatever chance might come along to experience it. A few days after my neighbor's dusk viewing, I joined Adrian Benepe, the president of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, for a walk through the cherry esplanade. It was a bright Tuesday afternoon and it seemed as if the entire city had posted an out-of-office emoji on Slack. In Japan, there is a term — hanami — for the practice, centuries old, of gathering to look at cherry blossoms, a ritualization of appreciating ephemeral pleasures. A Japanese office worker does not have to lie to her boss about where she is should she choose to take off in the middle of the workday to participate in it. In the mornings, some managers might even dispatch an underling to scout a location for picnicking later on and proceed to give that person part of the day off. Our own cherry blossom heritage owes much to Japan. In 1912, as a gesture of good will and friendship, the country's government sent more than 3,000 cherry trees to the United States. An initial shipment three years earlier had been lost at sea. The trees that arrived in New York were planted in Morningside Heights, near Riverside Church, on land that would later be named Sakura Park in their honor. In 2012, various celebrations were planned to commemorate the centennial of the gift. In 2025, that geopolitical connection has become strained, with the policy chief of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party calling on the Trump administration to reconsider the 24 percent tariffs on Japanese goods that it has announced. Mr. Benepe, who served as the city's parks commissioner for a decade beginning in 2002, has noticed more and more people coming to the garden — to escape, he speculated, the broader 'turmoil.' And donations remained very strong over the past year, even as other cultural institutions in the city have struggled. The garden set a record for money raised in a year without a large capital campaign. In a largely secular urban world, parks and gardens are easily likened to churches. There is a decorum required, a sense of the devotional, a congregation eager for the awe of the divine. Flanking the cherry corridor are the Liberty Oaks, planted in memoriam of those who died on Sept. 11. As it happened, Mr. Benepe had buried his mother on Sept. 10, 2001. The next afternoon he went to Central Park and was taken aback by the crowds in the Sheep Meadow. It seemed so discordant — all those people gathering under the late summer sun amid the shock and tragedy. But only a space as open, verdant and enormous, he came to understand, could really absorb the scale of so much grief. This year's cherry season has coincided with Mr. Benepe's own mourning. His father, Barry Benepe, died last month at the age of 96. The elder Mr. Benepe founded New York's Greenmarkets in the mid-1970s, beginning a national movement during a period of urban collapse and a need for rebirth. From his initiative the city's network of farmers' markets grew into the largest in the country. But New York has always delivered more than it has needed to in terms of its horticultural and green life. Elgin Botanic Garden, one of America's first public gardens, was established in the early 19th century on the site of what is now Rockefeller Center. The garden had an educational orientation. Under the stewardship of David Hosack, one of the most famous doctors of his generation, many plants were grown for medicinal purposes. In the coming days, tens of thousands more New Yorkers will continue to seek out cherry blossoms — many of which might be in post-bloom, a phase that has its own appeal. Even in their afterlife, fallen and blanketing the ground, they are medicine of a kind.
