Flowers in the Nolan Greenhouses, New York Botanical Garden / taken from the New York Botanical Garden website, http://www.nybg.org/.

Last weekend I saw the new 'Monet's Garden' exhibit at the New York Botanical Garden and it is a terrific show!  Just wonderful.  I forgot my camera (again), but the photos above feature some of the flowers that are in the garden beds inside the Conservatory.   I won't spoil it by telling you everything about the show but I will say that if you have visited Giverny, Monet's home outside of Paris in Normandy, you will really be impressed by what the NYBG staff has done.  If you've not yet been to Giverny, you'll really want to go!

Monet's house museum in Giverny, 75 kilometers west of Paris, welcomes approximately 500,000 visitors a year -- during the seven months it's open -- and is the second most visited site in Normandy.  "My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece" Monet famously said, and he wasn't just superficially interested in what was growing on his property.  "My garden is a slow work," he noted, "pursued with love and I do not deny that I am proud of it.  Forty years ago, when I established myself here, there was nothing but a farmhouse and a poor orchard...I bought the house and little by little I enlarged and organized it...I dug, planted, weeded, myself; in the evenings the children watered."

The NYBG's show includes an exhibit of two rarely seen Monet paintings and his palette in the Rondina Gallery; the Monet to Mallarme Poetry Walk in the Perennial Garden; photographs of Giverny by professional gardener and acclaimed photographer Elizabeth Murray, who helped to restore the Giverny gardens in the 1980s and who is the author of the 20th anniversary edition of Monet's Passion: Ideas, Inspiration and Insights from the Painter's Gardens, Pomegranate, 2010) in Ross Hall; and lots of special events (films, concerts, poetry readings, and hands-on art for kids).

The exhibit is curated by Dr. Paul Hayes Tucker, considered one of America's foremost authorities on Monet and Impressionism, and his Claude Monet: Life and Art (Yale University Press, 1998) has been a favorite book of mine.  Additionally, I highly recommend Monet or the Triumph of Impressionism by Daniel Wildenstein (Taschen, 2010); and Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet by Stephanie  Cowell (Broadway, 2011) for companion reading.

'Monet's Garden' runs through the 21st of October -- don't miss it!

If you live in the New York Metropolitan Area and you are a Francophile, I hope you had a chance to see the Orchid Show at the New York Botanical Garden -- the exhibit closed yesterday and I (finally) saw it on Saturday.  Frenchman Patrick Blanc was the guest of honor at the Orchid Show this year, and if you don't already know he is internationally renowned for the invention of something called the vertical garden, which is one of the most amazing creations I've ever seen. 

Blanc devised a way to grow particular plants horizontally, without soil, indoors or outdoors, on surfaces of varying sizes.  The concept is hard to visualize unless you're looking at it (the photo above, from a revised and updated edition of Blanc's book, really doesn't do the creation justice), and I apologize that I'm not including any photographs of the exhibit's vertical walls in this post but I (stupidly) didn't bring my camera to the NYBG on Saturday and the photos on Blanc's website -- http://www.verticalgardenpatrickblanc.com/ -- are protected (there are lots of other photos on the Web but I feel it's right to use them unless I can credit the photographer).  But check out Blanc's site and be prepared to be amazed!  See also a fascinating article about Blanc and his work in the Spring 2012 issue of France Magazine.  As writer Amy Serafin notes in her article, "A single wall can boast hundreds of species in infinite shades of green, with different shapes and patterns.  Each plant is selected to suit that particular environment."

In Paris alone there are more than 25 vertical gardens, including at the Musee du Quai Branley, BHV Homme, the Cartier Foundation, Six Senses Spa, and the Club Med offices.  I would say that going to see one is most definitely vaut le detour!  But if you can't get to Paris for a while, the new book mentioned above might suffice until you can: The Vertical Garden: From Nature to the City (Patrick Blanc, Norton, April 2012).  Or, check out the Patrick Blanc projects in Miami, Charlotte, Racine, Tacoma, New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.  Fabulous!

If you've read my Istanbul book you know that Claudia Roden, one of my most favorite food writers and cookbook authors, shared the name of one of her favorite restaurants in the city, Borsa in the Istinye Park mall (there are other Borsas in Istanbul, but this is the one she was taken to by her friends Nevin Halici -- who was the first to travel around Turkey collecting regional recipes -- and her brother Feyzi Halici -- a poet and longtime senator who promoted regional cuisine by organizing cooking competitions and gastronomic congresses).

I regularly use several of Roden's cookbooks at home, including Arabesque (Knopf, 2006), Mediterranean Cookery (Knopf, 1992), The Book of Jewish Food (Knopf, 1996), and both of her books on Middle Eastern Food (the original edition was published in 1974 and the new one appeared in 2000). But a few weeks ago, I bought Roden's new cookbook -- The Food of Spain (Ecco)-- and I think it might be her best book yet. It's just fabulous. I've been dipping into it at random and can't stop reading it.

If you have my book on Northern Spain: from the Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela (Three Rivers Press, 2003) you know that I have a soft spot in my heart for Spain -- I went there with my high school Spanish class, and it was my first trip outside of the U.S. So with Spain in mind, I went last weekend to see 'Spanish Paradise: Gardens of the Alhambra' at The New York Botanical Garden. What a wonderful garden they've created in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, and there is a companion exhibit, 'Historical Views: Tourists at the Alhambra,' in the Mertz Library. This is presented in collaboration with The Hispanic Society of America, which addresses every aspect of culture in Spain, Portugal, Latin America, and the Philippines and whose collections are unparalled in scope and quality. In the gardens surrounding the Conservatory there is Poetry Walk, featuring sixteen poetry boards with the poems of Federico Garcia Lorca , and there are tapas and sangria in one of the cafes as well as flamenco in the Ross Performance Hall. The whole thing was so impressive I became a member!

'Spanish Paradise' closes in just 4 days, so if you are living in or visiting the New York metropolitan area make haste and get there quick. And if you love Spain as much as I do, you'll agree that The Food of Spain is a must-have volume.