NYBG-hosts-orchids

The Orchid Show returns to The New York Botanical Garden on Saturday 23rd February and runs until 6th April. This annual popular exhibition and sale of fine orchids is expected to lift winter-weary spirits and herald the perennial promise of spring.

The exhibition will be the only place in the north-eastern United States this winter to see thousands of orchids in a curated and designed museum-quality exhibition.

The central site for the exhibition will be The Enid A Haupt Conservatory – America’s largest Victorian-style glasshouse – offering a prime opportunity for visitors to gain insights into orchid biology. A ‘rainbow’ of floating flowering orchids will be found in the Palms of the Americas Gallery and in the Lowland Tropical Rain Forest Gallery, exotic trees arch overhead to invite discovery of orchids as they would grow in nature.

In this, the sixth year of the exhibition, a new designer will cast a spotlight on Sinagpore in the Seasonal Exhibition Galleries. From the ruins of an ancient Mayan temple to a hastily abandoned orchid collector’s hut, each year an astounding new design element has wowed visitors. For 2008, get set to be transported to Singapore. Visitors will be delighted by a southeast Asian-style pavilion, bursting with a multitude of spectacular tropical orchids such as Vanda and Dendrobium, which are grown in great quantities in Singapore.

Designer Thomas Noel will create a façade of a two-story pavilion as well as a series of planting arches reminiscent of many formal gardens in Singapore.

Thousands of top quality orchids from exotic, hard-to-find specimens for connoisseurs to elegant yet easy-to-grow varieties for beginners will be available for purchase in the Shop in the Garden in the Leon Levy Visitor Center.

There will also be home gardening demonstrations, audio tours and expert question-and-answer sessions, in fact everything the aspiring or accomplished orchid enthusiast can and should know about these wonderful plants. For the first time this year, you don’t need to be on site to take advantage of some of the Garden’s orchid experts’ advice. Sonia Uyterhoeven, Gardener for Public Education, has compiled nearly 50 orchid tips to share with the curious. Each day, during The Orchid Show’s six week run, the Botanical Garden website will highlight a different one of these tips on how to care and nurture your plants.

For further details about the show, information on times, programme events etc., and for orchid tips log onto: www.nybg.org