Print it: The New York Botanical Garden’s latest venture

The New York Botanical Garden introduces its latest collaboration.

Over the last few years, the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx has teamed with Oscar de la Renta on an elegant line of pink and green floral items for the home, with Chesapeake Bay Candle on a group of fragrant offerings and with Erwin Pearl on a gorgeous collection of botanical-inspired enamel jewelry and accessories.

Now the Garden introduces its latest collaboration — a selection of 53 botanical prints available through Frontgate, the luxury home design retailer, which will give purchasers a taste of the more than 18,000 works in the Garden’s Rare Book and Folio Collection.

“Frontgate has done a beautiful job curating a brand that is sophisticated and well-appointed, with an heirloom quality that the Garden wants to offer as well,” says Meredith Counts, director of licensing and product development at the Garden. For Counts, the licensing partnership with Frontgate is another aesthetic opportunity to educate the public about the Garden. The selection of prints includes 12 orchid offerings from James Bateman’s “The Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala,” which Counts calls “one of the most important botanical works. 

“The orchids are drawn to life size in this 3-foot-long book and they are sublime.”

Now they have been rendered full-scale in giclée prints, using archival inks and paper.

From the delicacy of this enticing, varied flower we move to the brilliant bursts of color in the Exotic Flora Art Collection and the green Resplendent Quetzal print, from a group of stately palms and a sensuous pineapple to the stylish arabesques of garden design.

It couldn’t have been easy to winnow the selections from the vast number of volumes in the Garden’s LuEsther T. Mertz Library, some of which date from 1200. 

After talking with Frontgate and forming an aesthetic to pinpoint a number of works, Counts had Frontgate representatives come to the library to make the final selection, a process that took a little more than eight months. The works were then photographed with a large-format camera to create large-scale prints with the highest resolution possible, Counts says.

The results will have botanical lovers swooning.

As for Counts — who joined the Garden team in 2011 and set about revitalizing the licensing program — she’s on to the next deal, “a fragrance collaboration with an iconic brand.

“There are lots of possibilities,” she adds, “always.”

For more, visit frontgate.com.

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