The New York Botanical Garden, historically green by nature, is helping New Yorkers cultivate ever greener ways. This summer it is featuring “edible evenings,” a celebration of home-grown food with tips from chefs and help for getting kids involved in gardening.

The eco-outreach will continue during the Garden’s Fall Open House on Sept. 12, which will feature a day (from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.)  of lectures, demonstrations and classes in botanical art, botany, floral design, landscaping and horticulture and horticultural therapy

Green classes will continue throughout the year with these offerings:

• Growing Green with Roses, 3 Thursdays starting September 24

• Organic Greenhouse Methods, 3 Saturdays held in November

• Organic Gardening and Ecological Landscaping: The Natural Approach, 6 Wednesdays starting January 6, 2010

• Does “Organic” Really Work?, January 19, 2010

• Environmentally Safe Lawn Care, March 10, 2010

• Native Plants Saturday, March 27, 2010

The Open House also will feature career talks for those who are interested in learning more about landscape design, horticultural therapy, or horticulture. To find out more how the Garden’s Continuing Education program can help people find careers in these industries, see the website or call 800.322.6924.

This June may have given New Yorkers an unseasonably rainy stretch crummy enough to keep them inside whenever possible, but it has also delivered a novel way to exploit the rare sunny day: A new park built upon industrial ruins, sustained by both citizens and government, and (to judge from its opening week) enjoyed by all.

Known as The High Line, the park sits upon a long stretch of elevated train track running down the west side of the city’s lower end. The nearly 80 year-old tracks once carried freight through industrial areas, running straight through some warehouses to allow for easy loading and unloading of goods.

The rails were last used for freight in 1980 and soon targeted for demolition, but a variety of residents in affected neighborhoods lobbied against that. In 1999, two enthusiasts founded Friends of the High Line to push for the structure’s re-use as a park. Remarkably, they succeeded. The first phase of the project, about nine blocks long, opened June 8; a second section should be complete in a little over a year; a third and final segment still awaits approval.

Opening weekend was, predictably, mobbed by visitors, a fact quickly documented by those inclined to criticize the project (however flimsy their complaints). But just a few days after opening, when I visited, access was easy. Though the park above was certainly well attended — with visitors ranging from couples and families with small children to the elderly and clusters of college-age friends — there were no lines to get in and no need to jostle for pleasant places to sit or stroll. (Organizers say they have had a line on three weekend days so far, with waits to ascend never longer than 30 minutes.)

Up top, the park is both stylishly designed and ecologically thoughtful. Many of the original construction materials were reused in the final design, after being treated to remove contaminants like lead paint and creosote, and the plants contained in the new gravel beds were chosen with the ultimate natural model in mind. As Katie Lorah, spokesperson for the Friends organization, explained, “the planting concept is modeled on the landscape that occurred naturally when the trains stopped running. Different conditions on the Line — widening and narrowing, varying soil depths, sun and shade, different wind patterns and degrees of shelter from nearby buildings — contributed to an extremely varied range of growing conditions on the Line, what the design team calls ‘micro-climates.’ Many of these conditions remain now that the High Line is a park, so many of the same species are used.”

A high percentage of the grasses, trees, and blooming plants here are native species, which are attended to by some very happy-looking gardeners. Gardeners and other maintenance personnel (who currently are spending as much time answering curious visitors’ questions as pruning limbs) are employed by the non-profit Friends organization, which has an arrangement with the city’s parks department wherein it provides over 70 percent of the annual operating budget. (It also raised a large fraction of construction costs.

Those planted areas, which are feathered into and around concrete paths throughout the park, perform a valuable role when it comes to rain. The High Line “functions essentially like the City’s largest green roof,” Lorah says.

As summer sets in, many of us are looking to shade those windows any way we can, and one of the greenest solutions is to add greenery. Outside the window, that is.

A shade tree can mitigate the heat gain on a west or south-facing window and truly cut down on electricity costs. The trouble is — it takes a few years to maximize its effect. Even if you plant a big tree, it will be a while before it’s settled in and leafing out.

Which brings us to a project at Purdue University. Scientists there have been studying a new hybrid species of the American chestnut, a tree that can grow much faster and larger than other hardwood varieties. They think it could be a good bet to shade your windows, built new forests that could be sustainably harvested and in the process sequester a whole lot of carbon more efficiently than many other trees could.

They’ve compared the American chestnut to quaking aspen, red pine and white pine and found that the chestnut grew faster and had three times more biomass than the other species. It also sequestered more carbon than the other trees, except when compared with a black walnut in one study location.

“Each tree has about the same percentage of its biomass made up of carbon, but the fact that the American chestnut grows faster and larger means it stores more carbon in a shorter amount of time,” said Douglas Jacobs, an associate professor of forestry and natural resources at Purdue.

As a bonus, much of that carbon could be retained when the chestnuts are converted into wood products, he noted.

Many years ago, the original (non-hybrid) American chestnut was used for fine furniture because it is a dense hardwood. However, beginning in the early 1900s, it experienced a blight caused by a fungus that spread across it’s natural U.S. territory from New England, across New York and south to Alabama. Fifty years later, the tree was nearly gone, according to a report on the Purdue project in Science Daily.

But arborists are creating a hybrid American chestnut through interbreeding with the blight-resistant Chinese chesnut that results in a tree that’s “94 percent American chestnut,” according to the report.

The catch: That hybrid tree will be available sometime in the next decade.

“We’re really quite close to having a blight-resistant hybrid that can be reintroduced into eastern forests,” Jacobs said. “But because American chestnut has been absent from our forests for so long now, we really don’t know much about the species at all.”

Actually, there is a group of chestnut enthusiasts who know as much as there is to know and are collaborating to bring the native American tree back to its Appalachian roots. Intrigued? Visit the American Chesnut Foundation. They’re still promising a blight-resistant American chestnut that will be forest-ready before the end of the decade.

Are they jus-nuts? It doesn’t appear so. Not only are they pushing the research on the blight-resistant variety, they provide people with traditional American chestnut seeds and seedlings (if you live east of the Mississippi — they don’t want to spread any potential blight westward). Order on the site to get your personal forest underway.

The Purdue research is being funded by The Stry Foundation, Electric Power Research Institute and Hardwood Tree Improvement and Regeneration Center.

(Photo credits: Chesnut, The American Chesnut Foundation; Researcher with seedling, Purdue University/Nicole Jacobs.)

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Lance Armstrong may have to take his own advice and “dare to change” his life after being outed as the city’s biggest water guzzler, using a whopping 222,900 gallons of water in June, according to an AP report that appeared in the Austin American-Statesman late last week.

In July, consumption jumped to 330,000 gallons, putting him way out in front of the competition at about 38 times what the average household uses, according to the New York Times, which jumped onto the story.

The seven-time Tour de France winner was unaware of the ghastly volumes of water his lushly landscaped Austin compound was consuming, despite water bills that would cause most mortals to swoon. We’re talking $1,630 for the month of June and $2,460 for July, according to the AP and the NYT. He didn’t know because a management company handles his accounts.

Apparently Lance and company haven’t heard of native plantings, a common way that other Hill Country residents tamp down on irrigation needs for home landscaping. Native plants are big with environmentalists, not to mention more frugal homeowners, because they can thrive on the typical waterfall for their area, be it in Pennsylvania, California or often-parched Central Texas. (Did Lance and onetime singer girlfriend Sheryl Crow, whose enviro credentials run as deep, never discuss such things?)

Ironically one of the “Dares” you can take on Armstrong’s healthy living LiveStrong website is to drink more water: “Drink more water to flush out toxins from the body, make your skin healthier and keep hunger pangs at bay. Your body needs water to replenish muscles and maintain balance, so aim for at least eight to 12 cups daily.”

Sounds like good advice. If there’s some left.

OK, chuckles aside, the champion cyclist conceded that he could do better in the conservation category. “I need to fix this,” Armstrong told the AP. “To use that much more water (than most residents) is unacceptable. I have no interest in being the top water user in Austin, Texas.”

Perhaps he could install a gray water system to recycle household water by using it on the landscape.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media