Backyard Getaway

Is there a better vacation in recessionary times than a trip to The New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx?

With a mere Metro North ride (on the Harlem line) from Westchester County, you're transported to the tropics or the desert, sometimes all at once.

Right now, The Botanical Garden is bringing visitors a touch of Kyoto, Japan with "Kiku in the Japanese Autumn Garden." In the courtyards of The Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, crimson maples, ebony pines and amber bamboos shelter painstaking kiku displays that evoke cascading waterfalls and the snowy peak of Mount Fuji. ("Kiku" is Japanese for chrysanthemum.)

What I love about The Garden is that whenever it brings back a favorite like "Kiku," it does so in a new way. I hadn't seen the "Driving Rain" arrangements before — which include the Mount Fuji salute (pictured here) — or the elegantly spare stone garden. These keep the familiar fresh.

There's also a 10th-century Japanese poem that captures the mood of autumn in New York as well:

They have not yet begun to fall but already
I regret their passing
When I see the colors of
The autumn leaves at their peak.

Inside the conservatory, you'll find a charming bonsai exhibit, festooned as simply as with a dish of acorns on fall leaves. Lovely. (My sister Gina calls this The Botanical Garden's "Martha Stewart moment.")

Just as exquisite are the man-made botanical works on view at the garden's library, home to some 500,000 books and more than 20,000 prints and watercolors. In the William D. Rondina and Giovanni Foroni LoFaro Gallery, you'll find "Ex Libris: Treasures From the LuEsther T. Mertz Library." The library's works, which date from the Middle Ages, are so well-preserved and the colors are so fresh that you'll just want to pluck "The Blue Egyptian Water Lily" (seen here) from "Temple of Flora" (1807) or grab a slice of the luscious orange melon that beckons from "Pomona Britannica" (1817).

With all the talk these days of books going digital, library director Susan Fraser says, "There's nothing that compares to these."

"Kiku" runs only through Nov. 15. But "Ex Libris" is up through Jan. 10. 718-817-8700, nybg.org

Photos courtesy of The New York Botanical Garden.