For many years now I've heard about the Holiday Train Show at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. It always sounded like it would be fun to see, but with the cold weather and needing to travel there, somehow I never found the time or made the time to go there to see it. Someone I knew used to tell me that it was a favorite thing to do every year as a family tradition, and I'd always see it and think if it was something people did every year I'd like to see what it was all about for myself.
A few weeks ago I received an invitation to the Bronx Greenup awards celebration, and part of the evening included a special private visit to the Holiday Train Show. I've belonged to Bronx Greenup for almost twenty years and have attended other wonderful events, seed swaps and plant sharing, tours and educational programs and other wonderful times sharing information and recipes and visiting and volunteering in local gardens, but this was the first time I'd attended something that included a visit to the Holiday Train Show.
The awards ceremony was really a beautiful time from beginning to end, with local gardeners and community volunteers and the staff who teach and share knowledge with everyone gathering together to celebrate the graduation of program and class participants. There was wonderful hot chocolate and fruit, cheese and sweeter treats before, and the celebration and giving of graduation gifts was joyous. At the end they announced that we could go over to the Train Show for our private viewing, and I went with the first group that walked over.
The day had been a beautiful one, warmer than it had been and very mild for the season. As we arrived closer to our destination, we could see the twinkling lights decorating the area outside of the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, and the tiny trains on tracks making their winding way around and through the outdoor designs and sculpted plantings. That sweet scene would have been a beautiful one on its own, but it was leading us to the entrance where we walked into the Conservatory where the Holiday Train Show had transformed different areas into a wonderland of sparkling Christmas Trees, woodland animals and creatures, and room after room of train tracks that wound their way around small but very lifelike replicas of historic and well beloved homes and buildings and bridges in Manhattan and the other New York City boroughs as well as other New York and Upstate areas. Within and around these beautiful and creatively rendered buildings were plantings that were festive and native, and the buildings and bridges themselves were made thoughtfully of plants and vines. Each one was lit up from within our without, and had information about their history that shared the story about New York and the beginnings of its transportation and buildings to this day.
As I watched the wonderful trains make their way through this holiday landscape of the history of these areas where I and my own family's history have deeply been a part of, I began to think about roots and life and how we know certain things as part of our very being. Names I'd heard often and others of places where I've lived and been and traveled and marveled at connected together throughout this Conservatory garden by trains traveling along the tracks and circling around to return again.
As I walked back out into the lovely night to get my own train back to New York's Grand Central Station, I remembered a time when I was nine years old and my Mother had asked me what I wanted to do on a school vacation. I said that I wanted to climb the Statue of Liberty, go to Wall Street, and take a train from Grand Central, and so we did all three. On this wonderful and special holiday walk through the New York Botanical Garden and the Holiday Train Show, I saw all of those things in miniature and remembered my own past and present as I took my own train journey home.
