Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. This summer, the New York Botanical Garden is inviting you to experience the famous flowers of Van Gogh, Irises, peonies, gladioli, by walking in and around the flowers. Starting this Saturday, there will be 18,000 plants, 300 species, and of course, an entire lawn full of sunflowers. The new exhibition is called Van Gogh's Flowers. All summer long, there will be select dates where the Botanical Garden will remain open at night to experience what they're calling Starry Nights with live music, art, and drone shows. Joanna Groarke is the New York Botanical Garden's vice president for exhibitions and programming. She's with me now to preview the opening of Van Gogh's Flowers. Nice to meet you.

Joanna Groarke: Nice to meet you. Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Vincent van Gogh, or Van Gogh, wherever you're coming from, he's a Dutch painter from the 19th century. What did you think about trying to capture his flowers with this exhibition? What was the goal?

Joanna Groarke: Well, Van Gogh is an artist who, he's one of our most beloved artists. His deep connection to nature and his love of flowers and color is particular exhibited in the work that he produced while he was living in the south of France. We've drawn inspiration from him for so long that we just felt like it was the perfect opportunity to bring his work to life with the help of horticulturists and other contemporary artists.

Alison Stewart: I was going to ask, what does the research look like to identify and to source the right flowers from a painting?

Joanna Groarke: It's one of my favorite things to do with my colleagues, is to sit down and look at paintings and say, "What do we think that plant was?" Because, of course, horticulturists, gardeners are scientists first and foremost, and so when they see an artistic rendering of a plant, they are looking for certain morphological features, and so we have to do a little bit of forensic work. They're looking at the plants, we are then looking at what would have grown during that time in history, and we're making, in some cases, educated guesses, and in others, we're looking to source material, including the artist's own letters about the plants that he was observing and painting.

Alison Stewart: Then when you're sitting down to design the Van Gogh experience, what are important factors to consider when you're designing?

Joanna Groarke: First and foremost, as such an accomplished colorist and someone whose work is beloved for its beauty, we wanted to make sure that the experience that we created was beautiful and that it featured some of the plants that we observe in his most beloved and most famous works. Sunflowers, of course. He wrote to his brother that, "The sunflowers are mine. These are going to be my flower that I paint." Irises come to mind, but we also want to make sure that we are creating experiences that stand out in a 250-acre landscape that feel unique and that feel enveloping in a way that can only be accomplished here at the Garden.

Alison Stewart: I've heard you mention his letters several times. What did you get from the letters that was helpful to you?

Joanna Groarke: Van Gogh wrote to his brother sometimes more than once a day. These letters, he wrote to other members of his family and other friends, other artists, but his brother was his most frequent correspondent. He is telling his brother about his daily experiences. He's telling him about ambling out into nature and everything that he sees. He's working out his approach to art, his approach to color, how he's going to use color and brushstrokes to evoke nature. This is something that we found really inspiring as people who are also experimenting with nature.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Joanna Groarke. She's vice president for exhibitions and programming at the New York Botanical Garden. We're speaking about Van Gogh's Flowers, a new exhibition that transforms the flowers in Van Gogh's paintings. It opens to the public this Saturday. I know you enlisted some contemporary artists to help you with reimagining this. We'll talk about them in a moment, but why did you want to use present day artists to collaborate for this show?

Joanna Groarke: My colleagues who work in the horticulture department here at the Garden, I think of them as artists. The work that they do, they are really-- gardeners are our first installation artists, I think, and we knew that their creativity would come to bear in the creation of this exhibition. Van Gogh was so interested in the work of other artists, and so many artists who create today using color and scale in creative ways reference his work. As we were thinking about how to introduce not only plants that pay homage to the artist's creativity, but also other types of installations in our landscape, we turned to contemporary artists.

Alison Stewart: All right, the first one is Graphic Rewilding. Tell us about Graphic Rewilding.

Joanna Groarke: This is an artistic duo that's based in the UK. They have created a practice around introducing large scale flower environments into urban settings. We were inspired by their work because when you study their work, they're using heavy contour, much like Van Gogh himself did, and they're painting flowers and other botanical material. When we approached them and asked them about working with us on this project, they were excited and confirmed that Van Gogh is an important inspiration for their work.

They were really wonderful collaborators in thinking about how to bring to life, yes, irises, which is one of the pieces they've made for us, but also to study-- they studied some 50 of Van Gogh's works and selected flowers from all of them to display in an installation when you first arrive at the garden. It's really a wonderful way to immediately dive into this topic.

Alison Stewart: The next artist is Amie Jacobsen. She's based out of Kansas City. Where will we see her influence in the show?

Joanna Groarke: Amie's works are really wonderful. She is a sculptor and she made painted steel representations of some of this floral still lifes that Van Gogh is known for. What I love about her works is that she's created three dimensional renderings of the florals themselves that are oversized. They're much larger in scale so that you feel that you're stepping into a living gallery. They're surrounded by plantings that the horticulture team created. The backdrops where you would have seen washes of color that Van Gogh used in his work, our horticulturists have come in and created the color contrast and that vibration of color with complementary plantings.

Sweet potato vine becomes an acid green behind oleanders, or coleus provides the shadow that you would see behind the vase that holds a display of fritillarias. It's really a really compelling way to experience these works.

Alison Stewart: I have to ask about the sunflowers. There's going to be an entire lawn of sunflowers. Do you have any idea how many sunflowers were planted?

Joanna Groarke: We will have thousands of sunflowers over the course of this exhibition. Sunflowers are famously flower a little bit later in the season, and so this became a little bit of a horticultural puzzle. We had to come up with a list of plants, sunflowers and others that flower in shades of yellow that complement the sculptural flowers that we have on the lawn that were created by contemporary artist, Cyril Lancelin, and then we found some early blooming sunflower varieties that would be happy even today. It's a rather chilly May day here in New York City, but the sunflowers are still blooming. We are actually going to be able to have fields of sunflowers all summer long, which is really wonderful.

Alison Stewart: I understand, if my information is correct, there are 32 types of sunflowers planted in this show?

Joanna Groarke: Yes.

Alison Stewart: How noticeable are they in terms of their differences?

Joanna Groarke: Sunflowers are part of a family called Asteraceae, and they all have that disc, that signature disc that's usually brown or maybe a little greenish in the center with the often yellow petals radiating around them. The sunflowers that you'll see here, that's the telltale sign that you're looking at a sunflower. Our sunflowers, some of them will be very tall. Over the course of the summer, you'll see them reach 6 feet tall. Some of them are smaller, more shrub like plants that have multiple stems that will flower. You'll survey the lawn, you'll see all different forms and varieties, and you might be surprised by some of the variety that this group of plants offers.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Joanna Groarke. She is the vice president for exhibitions and programming at the New York Botanical Garden. We're speaking about Van Gogh's Flowers, a new exhibition that transforms the flowers of Van Gogh's paintings. It opens to the public this Saturday. I read for this opening weekend that there's a special exhibition having to do with Legos, as in the toy.

Joanna Groarke: Yes. We have been fortunate enough to host Lego for a couple of weekends now. This is their final weekend here at the garden. They'll be here Saturday through Monday. Visitors can come to the garden and get a chance to see some of the different Lego botanicals that they have created. Each visitor who joins us for that event will be able to make a sunflower and take that home with them.

Alison Stewart: All right, so for folks who want to go at night, there are these select dates for what you're calling Starry Nights, this famous painting. What do you have planned for Starry Nights?

Joanna Groarke: During the day you can see Van Gogh's still lifes and his flowers. Starry Night is arguably the artist's most famous painting, and we wanted to find a way to bring that to life. You can come to the Garden, you can see our exhibition as the sun goes down. You can hear live music. We'll have a local quartet playing,-

Alison Stewart: How lovely.

Joanna Groarke: -French tunes that evoke the bistros and cafes that the artist would have frequented during his lifetime. We have dance performances evoking the movement of the swirling clouds in Starry Night, and each night, when the conditions permit, will also include hundreds of drones that will take to the sky and bring to life the Starry Night painting overhead.

Alison Stewart: Drones? Please explain.

Joanna Groarke: Sure. Well, drones, very small ones, equipped with light, have been choreographed and will perform a sort of dance to music and light that will bring the form of Starry Night and some of Van Gogh's other recognizable paintings to life in the sky.

Alison Stewart: Do you have a particular painting of his of flowers that really speaks to you?

Joanna Groarke: The painting that I keep coming back to in this exhibition is his still life of oleanders. These are a beautiful pink flowering plant that he planted outside of his doorway when he was living in Arles in the south of France. He cut a few stems and he made a still life painting of them. The way that the pink radiates against this acid green background is just really arresting, and it was a plant that he felt really signified springtime and energy in nature. That's the one that I keep coming back to every time I walk through the conservatory and through our living gallery.

Alison Stewart: As you're thinking about these different exhibitions, you've done Frida Kahlo before, I believe, and now you're doing Van Gogh. Are there other artists that you hope to work with that you've been thinking about doing a show?

Joanna Groarke: We are always thinking about artists, in the case of someone like Kahlo, who had a garden of their own that was very important in the creation of their work, and then artists like Van Gogh, who at first could have sort of confounded us. He didn't own his own garden that he tended over the course of his lifetime. He engaged with nature and other gardens in other ways. We're always looking out to see who might be an interesting choice, who has that connection to nature. Sometimes that's a painter, sometimes that's an installation artist, sometimes that's-- Well, we'll have to see what's next.

Alison Stewart: By visiting this show and becoming immersed in the world of Van Gogh's flowers, what do you hope visitors will understand better about Van Gogh and the flowers he's painting?

Joanna Groarke: I think that Van Gogh took a great deal of solace from the time that he spent in nature. The challenges that he faced living with mental illness is well documented, but he often wrote and reflected on the time he spent in nature as time that was very healing, very energizing. I think that what we hope our visitors will come away with is that sense, not only that this was an important resource and an important experience for this incredibly creative artist, but also that nature is a balm for us all and an opportunity to immerse yourself in nature and color is endlessly energizing.

Alison Stewart: All right, what's the best way to get to the Botanical Garden?

Joanna Groarke: We are open Tuesday through Sunday, 10:00 to 6:00. We're open select nights. You can take Metro North directly to the New York Botanical Garden. You can take the subway. We have ample parking. We have many ways to get to the New York Botanical Garden.

Alison Stewart: It's just great. It's a great location, too. It's just so much fun to be there.

Joanna Groarke: It's my favorite place.

Alison Stewart: My guest has been Joanna Groarke, vice president for exhibitions and programming at the New York Botanical Garden. Van Gogh's flowers will be open to the public this Saturday. Thanks, Joanna.

Joanna Groarke: Thank you.