50+ Lifestyles- Grand Times With Your Grandkids

Deep-six your passport, euthanize your euros, dispense with airline baggage surcharges and thumb your nose at gasoline receipts. Do as my wife and I, and companions Sal and Edith Lipiner did on a recent Friday. Take a fascinating tour of the replication of Evolutionist Charles Darwin’s gardens in Kent, England, where he spent the last 40 years of his life observing and experimenting with plants in the outdoors and greenhouses in the surrounding countryside. Artfully, we also viewed the gardens from the perspective of his study in Down House. To those among us who heretofore regarded his Origin of the Species as dealing primarily with two-legged or four-legged creatures, we became keenly aware of his attraction to plants, including how flowers have evolved their intense beauty, and how plants are in fact sensitive beings, responsive to the most miniscule beam of light and the pull of gravity. Our guides were Botatanical Garden’s Director of Exhibitions Karen Daubmann and Director of Science Public Relations, George Shakespear. Darwin was not merely intoxicated by the intrinsic beauty of flowers, but as subjects for experiment and observation which he carried out his in his home laboratory on workbenches ingeniously recreated in the exhibition. While there is still time, do make a point of bringing your grandkids, and while there, be beguiled by the Henry Moore statuary and the Peggy Guggenheim Rose Garden. Words to the wise: the NYBG tramway system will take you from point to point to point with moderate waits of 20 minutes tops. Moreover, the dining outlets are spotless, well-staffed, and stocked with wholesome, sandwiches and salads.

1) Darwin’s Garden: An Evolutionary Adventure

Enid A. Haupt Conservatory

The NY Botanical Gardens’s Re-Creation of Darwin’s Gardens in Kent, England. Photos: Hal Drucker.

Replicating his house and study. Karen Daubmann was our authoritative guide.

Walking through the meadows near his home. Darwin observed that common primroses have two different flower forms: one with prominent male parts (anthers), the other with prominent female parts (pistils). When he crossed one flower type with the other, it produced more seed and stronger seedlings. He called these “legitimate marriages.” His studies on primroses were his first experimental proof that nature favors cross-pollination.

Darwin grew more than 100 different climbing plants, taking measurements, timing their movements and recording how they climbed. Climbing, he concluded, enables plants to reach sunlight by using something else for support, without the necessity of growing their own thick stems or trunks, a distinct advantage in a dense forest or woodland.

Carnivorous plants grow in nutrient-poor environment where insects provide important nutritional needs. Darwin wondered: How did they trap and digest insects? He experimented with sundews – tiny plants with glistening hairs on their round leaves, which curved around the meal (most notably, nitrogen-rich meat, egg white, wood and cinder) digestive enzymes dissolved it and the leaves absorbed it.

Phototropism, the process in which plants grow toward light, fascinated Darwin. He thought that the tip of a plant might have a light-sensitive area, which sent a chemical message down to the stem, causing cells to grow so that the plant bent toward the light. To test this concept, he placed caps on the tips with caps covered with feather quills and darkened them with ink. The plants did not bend, until he removed the caps.

In the Metz Library is a facsimile of Darwin’s 1837 rough sketch of a tree of life, which is his explanation for where he believes plants fit in to the natural scheme of things. “I think” is written above it.

2) Moore in America

For the next several months, New Yorkers will determine that Less is Not Necessarily Moore as The New York Botanical Garden hosts the largest outdoor exhibition of Henry Moore’s sculptures ever presented in a single venue in America – 20 major pieces strategically positioned throughout the Garden’s 250 acres and among its 50 gardens, lawns and plant collections. I can promise you that The Botanical Gardens will offer you and your grandkids a perfect haven for the alchemy of man-made artistry being at one with unfettered nature.

Left: Large Reclining Figure (1984). At entrance to Benenson Ornamental Conifers. Right: Hill Arches (1973). On main lawn before Metz Library near Tulip Tree Allée.

Left: Reclining Figure Arch Leg (1969-70). At Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden. Right: Reclining Mother & Child (1975-76). At Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden.

3) The Lore of the Roses

Peggy Guggenheim’s Rose Garden

There’s nothing in these parts that is more enticing to the soul than an interlude at Peggy G.’s Rose Garden. This year, two of Henry Moore’s magnificent reclining figures punctuate the vivid panoply of palette-driven perfection.