LGBT @ NYBG
The New York Botanical Garden does a fantastic job with the Orchid show every year. NYBG is a member of NGLCCNY and proud to partner with them and the Loft for the LGBT @ NYBG series—an initiative that hosts events throughout the year to celebrate the LGBT community. Stay tuned for upcoming events during Impressionism: American Gardens on Canvas.
Ben Hider - Event, Food and Portrait Photographer based in New York City and Westchester
The Orchidaceae are a diverse and widespread family of flowering plants, with blooms that are often colourful and often fragrant, commonly known as the orchid family. Along with the Asteraceae, they are one of the two largest families of flowering plants. The Orchidaceae have about 27,800 currently accepted species, distributed in about 880 genera.[2][3] The determination of which family is larger is still under debate, because verified data on the members of such enormous families are continually in flux. Regardless, the number of orchid species nearly equals the number of bony fishes and is more than twice the number of bird species, and about four times the number of mammal species. The family also encompasses about 6–11% of all seed plants.[4] The largest genera are Bulbophyllum (2,000 species), Epidendrum (1,500 species), Dendrobium (1,400 species) and Pleurothallis(1,000 species).
The family also includes Vanilla (the genus of the vanilla plant), Orchis (type genus), and many commonly cultivated plants such as Phalaenopsis and Cattleya. Moreover, since the introduction of tropical species into cultivation in the 19th century, horticulturists have produced more than 100,000 hybrids and cultivars.