Ngọc Minh Ngo ís to plant images what Annie Leibowitz is to movie star portraits or Ansel Adams is to American landscapes. This isn’t hyperbole. Together with her immense reward for telegraphing a flower’s spirit and discovering the poetry in a panorama, she creates photos which can be artworks, and in reality, her images have exhibited on the Museum Yves Saint Laurent in Marrakesh in addition to Wave Hill Backyard & Cultural Heart in New York. Final 12 months, Ngoc acquired the Larry Lederman Panorama Pictures Fellowship on the New York Botanical Backyard.
We’re longtime admirers and have coated three of her images books right here on Gardenista, most lately New York Inexperienced, through which she captures and writes about the very best parks and gardens that her metropolis has to supply. So we’re extremely honored to have her reply our Fast Takes questionnaire right here. Learn on to study “essentially the most shifting and galvanizing” backyard ebook she’s ever learn, the crops she loves for her shade backyard, and extra.
Pictures by Ngoc Minh Ngo.
Your first backyard reminiscence:
Once I was a baby in Vietnam, I used to be allowed to remain up one night time to look at the flowering of a Night time-blooming Cereus. It was magical, not least as a result of it was so out of the odd, each the flower and the event. It was a flower like no flower I had ever seen. That the flower solely lasted one night time made it appear unreal. The entire expertise felt like a dream.
Backyard-related ebook you come back to repeatedly:
Derek Jarman’s Backyard. It stays essentially the most shifting and galvanizing ebook a couple of backyard for me since I first encountered it practically thirty years in the past.
Instagram account that evokes you:
@rootprojectuk, @phoebe_cummings, @edmunddewaal.
Describe in three phrases your backyard aesthetic.
Wild. Private. Painterly.
Plant that makes you swoon:
Virtually all of them, however particularly spring ephemerals like bleeding hearts, columbines, star flowers, trilliums, bloodroot. And flowering bushes, like American dogwood, magnolia.
Plant that makes you wish to run the opposite method:
Impatiens.
Favourite go-to plant:
All crops with a scent.
Hardest gardening lesson you’ve realized:
For years I attempted to develop all types of flowers that weren’t joyful to be in my shady backyard.
Gardening or design pattern that should go:
Overbred flowers.
Favourite option to carry the outside in.
I like to chop flowers from the backyard to have by my bedside in all seasons.
Favourite hardscaping materials:
Gravel.
Device you possibly can’t reside with out:
An excellent secateur.
Favourite nursery, plant store, or seed firm:
Sadly, my favourite native nursery, Gowanus Nursery, closed. Extra far-flung favorites are Comfortable Harbor Farm, Annie’s Annuals, Flora Grubb, Petersham.
In your wishlist:
An actual backyard the place I can have fruit bushes and greens.
Not-to-be-missed public backyard/park/botanical backyard:
Each backyard and park in my ebook New York Inexperienced, together with Brooklyn Bridge Park, Naval Cemetery Panorama, Wave Hill. Within the UK: Prospect Cottage, Derek Jarman’s backyard at Dungeness; Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex; Rousham in Oxfordshire. Rohuna in Morocco.
The REAL purpose you backyard:
For the fantastic thing about all of it.
Future initiatives?
I’m excited to launch my newest ebook into the world subsequent 12 months. Roses within the Backyard, to be printed in March 2025, delves right into a topic that has been very near my coronary heart. The fruits of a few years of pondering and studying about and photographing roses, the challenge permits me to discover each the character and tradition of this timeless flower, by way of a sequence of gardens spanning the globe.
Thanks a lot, Ngoc! (You possibly can comply with her on Instagram @minh_ngoc.)
For our full archive of Fast Takes, go right here.
(Visited 4 occasions, 2 visits in the present day)
