Orchid Show Returns to NY Botanical Gardens with Lily Kwong as Guest Designer

The 20th annual Orchid Show returns to The New York Botanical Garden with landscape artist Lily Kwong as the guest designer this year in a show that runs from February 19th to April 23rd.

Kwong was an inspired choice by the executives at the Botanical Garden, termed by floral experts as “the Harvard laboratory for flowers.” It’s a big departure from the past two years when NYBG’s orchid show was designed by superstar Jeff Leatham, florist to the Four Seasons hotels, Philadelphia Flower Show as well as stars ranging from Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus to Oprah. Leatham’s exuberant designs were about exploding purple vanda orchids and rainbows of colorful blooms.

Kwong’s show looks for cultural expressions and connections. As the show explains, The Orchid Show: Natural Heritage explores the diversity, adaptability, and worldwide cultural significance of these formidable flowers.

Her vision is “inspired by classic paintings of Chinese mountain scapes passed down through her family from Shanghai.” Naturally, there will be an extraordinary array of orchids—including iconic and rare specimens—in what is described as “towering mountainous forms that blend ecology, culture, and fantasy.”

Again, Kwong is a landscape designer so her vision is influenced by the harmony of land, rocks and flowers. In fact, organizers say that the show is influenced “by Kwong’s own heritage, medicinal traditions, and her artistic interpretation of nature as a healing force” to reflect how humanity and nature can coexist peacefully.

What a lovely message. And let’s not forget that, unlike Western culture that abandoned the use of flowers throughout history, Asian culture not only embraced the development and cultivation of flowers but used blooms as part of healing, inspiration and decoration. Some of our favorite flowers used in our homes today came from Asia.

“It felt urgent to celebrate an Asian-centered perspective in the midst of this charged and precarious moment,” she said. “The piece is meant to offer a bridge of cultural understanding across the valley between us, and act as an invitation to celebrate the diverse lineages that make up our country.”

Love this idea, don’t you? Rooting us together through flowers. The show becomes “an immersive world in which humanity and nature coexist peacefully.”

Part of the reason that people from around the country and especially New Yorkers put this show on their calendar is that you are literally uplifted and the molecules in your brain change as you walk through the exhibit and are enveloped with feelings of beauty and peace. Plus the sheer variety of the orchids which the experts at NYBG tenderly care for during the year and throughout the decades.

After all, in the language of flowers, orchids represent the luxury and nobility of love.