LaGuardia Corner Garden - Community Gardening in NY at its best. Open to the public.

April flowers

2022-04-03Karin Kiontke

It is finally April, and the days are definitely much longer already. The birds are in love. The song of our resident cardinal is audible over the din of the city, and the robins are so busy, they hardly pay attention to us humans. Gardeners have cut back the dry stalks of last year’s flowers, pruned the fruit trees and roses and prepared the soil for the new season. Among the plants, daffodils rule in shades of yellow and orange.

However, there are also other colors, like the purplish blue of hyacinths, the bluish pink of the “Glory of the Snow” (Chionodoxa) and the orange-red of quince blossoms. It is worth looking very close to the ground as well. Here the tiny flowers of a creeping Veronica show off in sky blue.

Beginning with next weekend, the garden will be open every Saturday and Sunday afternoon from 2PM to 6PM. During the week the gate may be open when the weather is fair and one of us is around. Please come for a visit. There will be something new to see every day.

More on the hellebore

2022-03-13Karin Kiontke

It is March now, and we had a small taste of spring last week when the temperatures reached unbelievable 74ºF. Since then, there was more wind and rain and even snow. The plants are taking it slow. At this time of the year, the stars of our garden are the lentenrose hellebores.

Buds open to show nodding flowers in pink, dark red, purple, greenish white, and cream with beautiful speckles. Those colorful flower parts are actually sepals, not petals. The petals are modified into nectaries, small cup-shape structures arranged in a ring around the base of the flower. Here, a reward for pollinators is produced and stored. The sepals don’t fall off when the flower is pollinated but will stay on the plant, sometimes for months until the seedpods are ripe.

As pretty as a hellebore is, the whole plant is poisonous. Fortunately, it tastes so bad that even hungry animals can’t be tempted. If someone were to consume a lot of it despite that taste, hellebores would cause vomiting and nervous symptoms like tinnitus, stupor and perhaps even depression and death.

As is often the case with poisonous plants, hellebores were used in medicine. In ancient Greece and during medieval times, they were prescribed as a cure for madness. The plants had their role in witchcraft, too, specifically in curses that were meant to cause insanity. Good, that a course of hellebore could have been taken as an antidote.

Antidote or not, who is bewitched by the beauty of the Helleborus flower will be fine. I am sure of it.

A little sign of spring

2022-02-24Karin Kiontke

We have some good news to report: This year, we will be open to the public again almost like before this terrible pandemic. Beginning in April (and a little depending on the weather), we will resume our regular open hours on weekend afternoons. During this time, a gardener will be there to talk with and answer questions. At other times, the gate may be open and visitors are very welcome to walk around or sit down for a little while. We missed our guests from the neighborhood, the rest of New York and all over the world so much!

Also, even though there is again snow in the forecast for tonight, the warm days during the last weeks have coaxed some early spring flowers out of hibernation. Above are the bright yellow winter aconites. And of course, there are snow drops.

The first of the lenten roses are also opening now. These hellebores are hybrids of the species Helleborus orientalis and come in a variety of beautiful colors from cream-white to dark red. There is also a pure white hellebore, the Christmas rose (Helleborus niger), but this kind blooms in the dead of winter and is already past its prime in February. The lenten roses that bloom now were welcomed by neighborhood honey bees last week, when it was warm enough for some worker bees to leave their hive and forage for fresh nectar and pollen.
Soon, there will be more flowers to be enjoyed by both insect and human visitors of our garden.

Open Garden Day

2021-06-06Karin Kiontke

Yesterday was GreenThumb’s “Open Garden Day”. This was the first official event since the beginning of the Pandemic. What a wonderful change! We organized a meditation session in the morning followed by our seventh annual Rose Walk.

Finally, visitors can walk along the paths again instead of seeing the garden from outside the fence.

It was a perfect sunny summer day and many visitors were happy to see the gates open. Of the roses, only the last varieties were still blooming; but these are some of our prettiest roses, like the profusely blooming “Ballerina”.

The upcoming stars are Clematis. One grows next to Ballerina. Many more are found throughout the garden.

For the evening, we had another surprise for our gardeners and neighbors: The “Nevermind Orchestra” came over to play two sets with their signature Nirvana songs. Live Music, loud, cheerful and fun, how much did we miss it!

When the “Nevermind Orchestra” plays, it can be heard far and wide.

This was a great day and a perfect start of a new chapter: from now on, we will open our gates every weekend afternoon until late fall.

We are excited that the “Nevermind Orchestra” will return for “Make Music New York” on June 21.

We are Back

2021-05-25Karin Kiontke

After a very long pause, and a very strange year, we are finally back!

There is so much to tell. in Fall 2019, we got our wonderful new fence. Then, the pandemic began and forced us to close our gates to the public for more than a year. Fortunately, the new fence is low and neighbors and passerbys could catch a good view of the flowers from the periphery of the garden.

Several gardeners moved out of the city temporarily. For the rest of us, the garden was a welcome haven where we could relax and forget the worries of the world for a little while. Working in the ground, pruning, planting and harvesting gave us the feeling that things will be all right.

We are grateful that all of our members are well. Most of us are vaccinated, and like the city, we are going to open up more and more. We will begin to host events again, too (stay tuned).

Therefore: Welcome back friends!

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It is a lovely time in the garden: Irises, roses and peonies are blooming with profusion. Here are a few of our beauties: