Nian Hua
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Hort Tidbit – June/July 2025: Delving into the 12 Months of Flowers
Hello everyone and welcome to summer! In this column, I will be introducing a new concept called the “12 Flower Goddesses”(十二花神 Shí’èr Huā shén). Each goddess is representative of her month’s flower. You can also think of this as each flower’s “birthday month” as it’s been described to me before. The flower of June, Gardenia jasminoides ‘Kleim’s Hardy’…
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IPM: Beneficial Insects at Lan Su
At Lan Su Chinese Garden, we practice Integrated Pest Management, or IPM. IPM is an ecosystem-based strategy that focuses on the long-term prevention of pests and the damage that they cause by monitoring for pests, cultural control, manual control, biological control, habitat manipulation, and use of resistant plant varieties. Pest control methods are selected to…
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Culture Spotlight: Pushing Hands
Every Father’s Day, I think about Pushing Hands《推手》—the 1991 debut film by my favorite Taiwanese director, Ang Lee, and the first in his “Father Trilogy.” It follows Mr. Chu, a retired Tai Chi master from Beijing who moves in with his son and American daughter-in-law in suburban New York. What unfolds isn’t loud drama, but quiet tension: cultural clashes, generational gaps,…