The New Yorkerator

The sign said “burpless cucumbers.” I had not noticed that my previous encounters with cucumbers were particularly burp-inducing, so I asked how this variety was different.  read more »

Besides hostas’ no-fuss disposition—they thrive on neglect—gardeners love the fact that they can curate a collection.  read more »

“Bloody hell, that was a good decision. Damn!” English director Danny Boyle was boasting about casting the magnetic Irishman Cillian Murphy as his leading man.  read more »

Avocado squash were new to me, though, so I thought I’d see how they work on an open flame.  read more »

Katharine White gardened in tweed suits and Ferragamo pumps. Pat Buckley preferred a bikini when deadheading her Connecticut rose garden. But what to wear to garden in a public space, Riverside Park, where I was not only visible but a kind of minor attraction?

As I tried to put together the perfect outfit, I had a few things to consider. First, since I travel crosstown to the garden and often make plans for afterward, I needed to come up with the equivalent of a “day to night” ensemble, but more casual. Also, since I’d become a neighborhood fixture for the playgrounders, joggers and other park regulars, I wanted to add some style to what is, after all, a “quality of life” project. But I also needed my clothes to protect me—working this garden is fraught with peril, from broken glass and slippery rocks to prickly thorns.

Jeans were the obvious choice—not Sevens, but classic Lee brand, bought in rural Vermont, with a kind of hick provenance and generous back pockets that easily accommodate my Felco pruners. Minimalist black sneakers (think Audrey Hepburn in Two for the Road), great for scaling rocks or sidewalks, worked perfectly. I paired a simple gray T-shirt, worn a bit tight—gardening is nothing if not sensual—with a white, long-sleeved agnès b button-down that I hung on a tree to stay crisp while I worked. A huge, wide-brimmed straw hat—a baseball cap would have been too prosaic—perfected my farmer chic.

I’d like to think my outfit reflected what E.B. White wrote about Katharine in his intro to Onward and Upward in the Garden: “She simply refused to dress DOWN to a garden … she walked among her flowers as she walked among her friends.”

Wheelie Cool: Mary Testa, Tony Roberts and Jackie Hoffman camp out in Xanadu on Broadway.  read more »

It was a perfect day for transplanting. With the soil moist from a few days of rain—thank you mulch for maintaining that ideal condition—I could “fix” some previous planting mistakes without having to drag out the hoses. Any instructions for transplanting include the imperative “water, water, water,” but because of my faucet-challenged conditions in Riverside Park, my plants would have to make do with damp, if not drenched, earth. Plus, the temperature was cool—guaranteeing that no plant would suffer in a wilting heat.

There were two offenders: a few mint (mentha) plants that I hastily threw in the ground last year and some sunflower mammoths (helianthus), an annual whose seeds I had scattered a month ago. Now they were thriving but badly sited: The mint, a famously invasive herb, was stuck with some periwinkle (vinca minor), a low-growing dense ground cover with tiny violet flowers, and the native sunflower, which grows to 10 feet, was dangerously close to the pavement, too much of a temptation for playground-bound children and basketball players.

Mint is not normally grown as an ornamental—more likely it sits in a kitchen garden—but it has a few features that make it ideal for my craggy plot. Its “wandering” quality will help it fill the barren spots under the katsura tree, plus it flowers nicely before becoming blowsy by August. And that penetrating aroma just might repel my rat pack (I’m sure they prefer meat to menthol). It’s worth a try.

As for those 10-footers—I placed them out of harm’s way, midway up the slope, next to some Manhattan schist that makes up the dramatic backdrop of my garden. By summer’s end, they will tower over the rocks, becoming my own garden skyscrapers.

It occurred to me that I’d never seen a book about grilling radishes or carrots, but I forged ahead.  read more »

Mary Wilson, the luscious-lipped founding member of the Supremes, took a moment in the middle of her rendition of Charlie Chaplin’s “Smile” last week at Feinstein’s to perk up the otherwise solemn-looking audience. Shimmying her ample breasts, she quipped, “You guys are so serious!”  read more »

Sand shark? I’d never heard of it, either. But how often do you get to confront your deepest fears and buy dinner at the same time?  read more »

Color was conspicuously absent from my Riverside Park garden. And one of the cardinal rules of tending a plot, set out by the gardening guru Gertrude Jekyll in her 1914 Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden, held that perennials should be massed to achieve continuous “drifts” (her brilliant coinage) of color throughout the growing season. Sadly, my spring bulbs were spent, the lolloping peony blossoms had turned brown and the blue spires of the ajuga were over. To make matters worse, the hydrangeas were looking wan and wimpy because I had failed to feed these “acid lovers” a few weeks back.

A trip to the Gowanus Nursery—yes, in Brooklyn—was in order. I had to be selective, though: The plants had to be disease-resistant, drought-tolerant and have a lengthy bloom time (ideally, starting right now).

I spotted a sweetly fragrant honeysuckle (lonicera “Munster’) with pink-and-creamy-white flowers that was touted to continue blooming until October. I could plant this hardy climber next to a lamppost (visions of vines clambering around it) with its roots in the shade to help its transition from the coddled nursery. Honeysuckle is also a sentimental favorite: As toddlers, my girls were taught how to suck the nectar from the bottom of its trumpet-shaped blossom.

Another nonstop flowering vine, silver lace (polygonum aubertii), also made the cut. This vigorous climber can top out at 30 feet and has tiny white blossoms that create a delicate carpet of spent flowers beneath it. I picked up a few low-maintenance white coneflowers (echinacea “white swan”), too. And finally, for my long-suffering hydrangeas, I bought a bag of Holly-tone, which should jump-start them into a big blue drift of color that Gertrude would love. Fingers crossed.

Visit the Gowanus Nursery at 45 Summit Street in Red Hook, Brooklyn, or www.gowanusnursery.com.

Old Acquaintance, written by John Van Druten in 1940 and in revival at the Roundabout Theatre Company’s American Airlines Theatre, is an early World War II–era comedic study of the very contemporary frenemy phenomenon.  read more »

Extreme gardening: Anyone who is serious about her plot has endured it. A friend whose garden includes an iris- and lily-bordered pond spends hours knee-deep in muck pulling the interconnected roots of cattails (“you can’t hire someone to do it”). Clearing brush, always oddly satisfying to me (although I remain nonplussed that only Republican Presidents ever seem to share my enthusiasm), also fits squarely in this category. But hauling 20-pound bags of mulch up the rocky slope of my Riverside garden on a humid June afternoon is one of the most, well, extreme examples.

Not that I don’t appreciate the 25 bags of organic cedar mulch that the Parks Department left for me last week. Cedar, with its lovely aroma and neutral pH, is a primo mulch. Laid a few inches deep, it not only suppresses weed growth, it’s essential to plant health, maintaining a steady root temperature and preventing rainwater from evaporating. Last year’s donation of mulch—plain wood chips, not cedar—was not only unsightly (this stuff could have qualified as kindling), but after a few rainstorms it gravitated downhill, where it still sits, slowly decomposing and probably robbing the soil of nitrogen, which is key to root growth. This year I got lucky.

I ended up spreading only 10 of the bags; the rest will have to wait for a cooler day. So for now, my garden looks like a patchwork, with a third of the ground having the reddish-brown tone of the cedar, a third filled with grayish chunky chips and a third bare, an invitation for some nasty weeds to stake a claim. Let me know if you’re looking for a workout.

For Tony Award–winning tap dancer Savion Glover, words don’t mean a thing: He talks with his feet. A rumble of clicketyclacks, a staccato of flip-flaps and a string of stomp-stomps with his metal-toed shoes …. With these, Mr. Glover will reveal his soul on the Joyce Theater stage beginning June 19.

Sporting his signature cascade of dreadlocks and 80’s-ish billowy pants, Mr. Glover, 33, has been dazzling audiences with hard-hitting footwork for more than two decades. Before being cast as the lead in the 1984 production of The Tap Dance Kid at age 10, Mr. Glover was just a hip-hop street kid from Jersey. But he went on to be mentored by Gregory Hines and, in the mid-90’s, brought about a tap revival, clicking into the mainstream with the Broadway hit Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk, a musical that chronicled African-American history through Mr. Glover’s self-made “free-form hard core” genre of tap.

Mr. Glover teaches people how to hear, rather than see, dance, from making cameos in videos by Puff Daddy and Kenny G, to appearing on Sesame Street and at the Olympics. Recently he provided the tap-dance stylings for the star of the animated film Happy Feet; Mumble, a tuneless penguin, serenaded his crush through his smooth tap moves. The movie was a worldwide commercial hit. And maybe if we were all willing to  risk a little embarrassment, we could, like Mr. Glover and little Mumble, find our souls in our feet.

The Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, www.joyce.org.

We sent our General Interest Culture Reporter, Gillian Reagan, and her mom (!), to a Saturday matinee at the Atlantic Theater Company on West 20th Street. They caught an early performance of the new musical 10 Million Miles, which opens tomorrow.  read more »

Under the stars, the Met performs for free.  read more »

Love it on the cob? Get to the grill!  read more »

The downside of working the earth.  read more »

A documentary about punk’s high priest makes an appearance in Brooklyn.  read more »

Yippee-yi! Eat some buffalo in Union Square.  read more »

Will the critters eat my veggies?  read more »

In Red Hook, an old-school sandwich makes life worth living.  read more »

The Washington Square Park dog run is for humans, too.  read more »

Solomon’s Seal: I wanted some before I even knew what it looked like. In the plant world, the common names can be wonderfully descriptive, like Wisteria Snow Showers, Baby’s Breath (what poet came up with that one!) or Devil’s Paintbrush. But what kind of plant—and a lowly groundcover, at that—would warrant such a turbo-charged Biblical name?

The Riverside Park Fund had dropped off a dozen of them for my garden, and hid them behind the bushes where they awaited transplant. They resembled a steroidal Lily of the Valley—two feet tall, with dangling, fragrant, bell-shaped flowers. They were new to me, but soon I was spotting them everywhere; a particularly lush crop sits along the Park Drive near the reservoir. And online, I discovered they were sold out at White Flower Farm, that holy of holies in the nursery biz. One of the horticulturists there said that its recent popularity might be due to a trend toward “greener, easy-care native species.” Take that, fussy hybrids!

As for the origin of the name, only King Solomon would know. One theory is that, when you cut into the rhizome, or rootstalk, the scar forms a hexagram—a little green Star of David. Another, according to Gerarde’s Herbal, a horticultural index from 1633, is that if you rub the root on a wound, it “taketh away in one night, or two at the most, any bruise, black or blew spots gotten by falls or womens wilfulnesse, in stumbling upon their hasty husbands fists, or such like ….” Sounds like a perfect plant to me.

Admit it: You think bitter greens are for rabbits. Would anything else wilfully force down those thick, chewy leaves? Well, maybe you. As the greenmarkets expand weekly, it’s worth trying some of the lesser-known varieties of greens. You’ll be surprised how easy it is to make them taste good; you just need a few minutes with a hot pan, olive oil, garlic and a splash of water.

There are many to pick from: This week’s market showcases mustard greens, dandelion greens, baby red kale and mizuna. Mustard greens are surprisingly pleasant—raw, they taste like fresh horseradish, which is actually better than it sounds. Sautéing them perfectly mutes that intensity. The kale, also sautéed, becomes almost buttery, but you’ll need to salt it, too.

The dandelion greens? Even with lemon juice, they sat ignored in a sorry lump on the edge of the plate. Sautéing them also generates odd little human-like hairs, which doesn’t help their case. I hear blanching helps, but we’re trying to keep it simple. Skip ’em unless you’re at a restaurant, especially when they’re cleverly disguised with, say, a poached egg.

Mizuna isn’t really a bitter green, but it looks cool—sleek, spiky leaves—and will impress your friends. No need to cook it—it’s great as a simple after-dinner salad. Sprinkle the leaves with olive oil, lime juice and salt; they don’t need any more pepper than they’ve already got.

Reunite with Kermit, Piggy and Fozzie at midnight.  read more »

Five nice New York boys make fun summer anthems.  read more »

Join them for a live DVD recording at the Knitting Factory.  read more »

Leek-like leaves stand up for a few weeks in spring.  read more »

The sublime ride to the very edge of Brooklyn.  read more »

How my trash heap became a 76th Street paradise.  read more »

Pig out at Brooklyn’s annual pork party.  read more »

Tour Dorothy Parker’s haunts—then lunch.  read more »

Sixty years after his death, the ‘king of fashion’ gets his due.  read more »

The crooner’s new album, Release the Stars, gets raw and autobiographical.  read more »

A scatological celebration in Brooklyn.  read more »

A Brooklyn artist needs you for his latest work.  read more »

Otto experts teach you more than ‘full-bodied’.  read more »

Modine, Delpy, Forster teach moviemaking on Prince Street.  read more »

Frank Stella comes to the Met’s roof.  read more »

UWS festival promises fun for the smart set.  read more »

ITunes celebrates Elvis Costello’s debut record and ten others.  read more »

Eugene Lang students sail away for school.  read more »

The Bronx Zoo invites you to a lunch for the birds.  read more »

At Natural Gourmet, a luscious meal won’t break the bank.  read more »

Earth Day is coming, and there’s a lot to do!  read more »

MoMA explains the font we take for granted.  read more »