For a different kind of holiday travel, let a botanical train show whisk you far away

NEW YORK CITY (SBG) — As New Yorkers pile on jackets and sweaters to navigate chilly commutes and frigid nights out, the city’s trees are more rapidly than ever shedding their most colorful layer. Soon, the final fragments of vibrant foliage will give way to barren branches, and greenery along sidewalks will be found exclusively in the rows of Christmas trees awaiting their new homes. But city residents yearning for the warmth of summer in the company of lush plants don’t have to jet off to faraway destinations to fulfill those desires.

Instead, they need only to make the comparatively shorter trek to the Bronx, where they’ll be whisked away to the tropical hot spots of their dreams upon entering the balmy conservatory at the New York Botanical Garden.

It’s not the pathways of exotic palms and desert cacti alone, however, that motivate the masses to head to the garden's glasshouse during the holiday season. For the next two months, visitors to the conservatory will marvel over elaborate replicas of New York City’s most iconic buildings, all crafted out of plant materials in an incredible architectural feat, as well as 1,953 feet of train tracks weaving throughout the miniaturized sightseeing tour of the five boroughs and beyond.

A backdrop provided by the likes of anthurium plants from Colombian rainforests and black bat flowers native to Southeast Asia ensures that it’s still a trip to the tropics, but it’s an island oasis with far more brownstones than cabanas.

The 30th annual Holiday Train Show at the New York Botanical Garden opened to all on Nov. 20. With 191 different structures and 26 train routes on display this year, the garden’s largest train installation to date is a magnificent return to the public eye after 2020’s members-only show.

My family never had a model train circling our Christmas tree when I was growing up, but the connection between trains and the holidays wasn’t lost on me. Every December, we’d pause between stores at a shopping center near our house to gaze upon the tracks of a massive train garden surrounding the mall’s main fountain.

And watching the Christmas movie “Noel,” I’d hold my breath as the unceasingly optimistic ornament for whom the animated movie is named began to crack while greeting an old friend, the determined electric train who chased his tail around the tree year after year. In the movie’s climax, Noel falls from the branch and shatters on the tracks below. While “Noel” may not make any list of true Christmas classics, it’s far from the only example of a train appearing in a holiday movie. Perhaps most notably, there’s “The Polar Express,” featuring a magical train that transports children to the North Pole on Christmas Eve.

In adulthood, the association of trains and the holidays became more tangible for me during my trips from New York City to my hometown in Maryland.

Indeed, the prevalence of train travel during the holiday season is often cited as one of the primary factors influencing the popularity of toy trains at Christmastime. Seeing a miniature locomotive chugging around the red and green packages beneath the tree can induce a sentimental state for all those who rely on railroads to be able to sit alongside their loved ones for Thanksgiving dinner or to gather for gift exchanges on Christmas morning. It could also be a reminder of the route that packages may take before arriving at the front door or the innovation that first allowed department stores to flourish. The loop of track around the base of the tree becomes a victory lap for the mode of transportation that made the holidays possible.

But that’s just one theory.

Really, there’s no consensus when it comes to the origins of the train set as a holiday tradition. My home state tries to take credit, with claims that the German immigrant communities in Baltimore were responsible for propelling the “Christmas garden” trend forward with their passion for wooden handicrafts and their high regard for technological innovation; a model train display called nicely upon both interests. Separately, the Moravians in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania expanded the typical Nativity scene into progressively larger displays, a tradition that eventually grew from its biblical routes into models of villages, complete with trains.

Others point toward Lionel, a model train manufacturer that began to market the toy as a desirable Christmas gift in the 1900s. When the present was unwrapped on Christmas morning, a simple route around the tree kept the new plaything out of the way of trouble while still remaining accessible for as long as the child’s interest persisted.

The phrases “train garden” and “Christmas garden,” commonly used in the eastern United States in the early 20th century, conjure up images of exactly what you’ll find at the New York Botanical Garden’s Holiday Train Show — train tracks emerging from the depths of never-ending greenery and skyscrapers built from birch branches poking up alongside palms.

But in fact, those old-fashioned train gardens, contrary to their name, rarely included live plants.

The more figurative roots of the display within the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, particularly with regard to the exhibit’s deliberate timing to coincide with the holidays, can be traced back to the traditions of centuries past. Then, there are the literal roots — real tree roots have been integrated into some of the structures, along with other natural materials like pine bark, pistachio shells, and acorn caps.

Credit for the unique brand of botanical architecture presented to the public at the New York Botanical Garden each winter goes to landscape architect Paul Busse.

Busse, now retired, was drawn to trains from a young age. His grandmother’s neighbor was a retired railroad engineer, and Busse fondly recalls playing with the neighbor’s toy trains. His parents, too, had train sets that easily captured Busse’s attention. Busse's mother, who was an accomplished weaver, created her own 8-inch model of California's historic Carson Mansion, further influencing her son's creative path. (In adulthood, Busse used dried plant material to recreate the Victorian mansion in memory of his mother.)

For a young Busse, the initial attraction to these trains came largely from their ability to transport him to far-flung lands, both real and imagined. Soon, Busse was hooked, and his newfound hobby placed him on the route toward his eventual career with just a few station stops along the way.

Busse graduated from Ohio State University in 1972 with a degree in landscape architecture. He then formed a company that specialized in outdoor living spaces.

The idea to incorporate trains into landscape architecture came shortly thereafter. Here, too, Baltimore can take partial credit, as it was in a hobby shop in Maryland’s most populous city that Busse first became acquainted with G-scale model railways. The larger trains are more durable than smaller models and better able to withstand the elements, which means that they’re able to run reliably outdoors.

Busse used nearly all of the money in his pocket to buy a set, saving only a few dollars for gas.

It was an expensive purchase but one that ended up being well worth the cost. Busse’s first attempt at a train installation in a friend’s hobby shop generated media interest and caught the eye of the governor of Ohio, who then requested that Busse create a public garden railroad at the 1982 Ohio State Fair. Through his landscape architecture company, Busse began to build train displays for businesses in Cincinnati. Simultaneously, he ran two retail stores for hobbyists looking to drop big bucks on train sets.

In 1991, Busse redirected his energy to launching Applied Imagination, a botanical architecture company specializing in large-scale garden railway displays.

Regardless of how lovely of a respite the New York Botanical Garden’s Haupt Conservatory offered from harsh winter weather, attendance used to drop off dramatically in the colder months. Perhaps people were unaware that such warm interior spaces existed at a botanical garden, or maybe the long journey to the Bronx from the other boroughs seemed particularly daunting in colder temperatures.

Attempts to entice more visitors in the off-season led the garden to Busse and Applied Imagination in 1992. A year prior, Busse’s partnership with Cincinnati’s Krohn Conservatory had proved to be quite popular. Interested in securing a similar success story, the New York Botanical Garden asked Busse for a demonstration of his work. He made them a model of the Bronx’s Poe Cottage, and thus began a longstanding and fertile partnership.

In 1992, there were fewer than a dozen structures on display. Each year since, the show has grown exponentially. So, too, has the Applied Imagination team, now consisting of 15 full-time artists and fabricators, and the company’s reach, with exhibitions, both permanent and seasonal, stretching across the country.

Over the years, Busse has constructed botanical replicas of National Historic Landmarks and architectural triumphs of both the past and the present, ranging from the Lincoln Memorial to the Taj Mahal to the Great Wall of China.

If it were up to Busse, he would have continued to pursue his passion for years to come, but his body had other plans. Late-stage Parkinson’s disease impacted Busse’s mobility, and in 2017, he made the best possible decision for his health and for the business by asking his daughter, Laura Busse Dolan, to take over Applied Imagination.

Even without Busse at the helm, Applied Imagination has continued to operate in accordance with the renowned landscape architect’s innovative vision, adding approximately 50 structures per year to a repertoire of thousands.

Plastic buildings are forgone in favor of structures cobbled together from a wide variety of organic materials, a choice that adds considerably to the amount of labor involved in designing and then assembling each skyscraper, brownstone, and museum. But it’s this level of commitment to the natural world that enables the installation to feel perfectly at home among the plant life of a botanical garden. And in Busse’s opinion, the playful nature of the materials is superior to plastic in its ability to enhance visual interest. Based on the popularity of Applied Imagination’s garden railroad displays, it’s safe to say that many agree with that assessment.

Applied Imagination works out of a 4,500-square-foot workshop in Alexandria, Kentucky, a considerable upgrade from the Cincinnati basement where the company began. The workshop sits on a 12-acre property, and many of the supplies for the exhibits are sourced from the surrounding land with sustainability in mind. The team aims to use every part of each plant, coming up with innovative purposes for even tiny stems to minimize waste.

Edible components, though, are a no-go after a group of hungry squirrels gobbled up lampposts one year.

Much of the design is guided by nature. For the largest and most complex structures, which can take up to a thousand hours of labor, blueprints help the architects to form the framework out of waterproof sign boards. Then come the decorations. Bark, fungus, lichen, leaves, and acorn caps, among plenty of other materials, are adhered to the foundation and sealed with a coating for optimal preservation. Somewhere along the way, a touch of creative genius, or potentially a hint of magic, transforms the arrangement of familiar elements into something entirely unrecognizable from its initial form. For visitors, an appreciation of the building's overall form tends to come first, followed by the realization that the recognizable landmarks are molded out of materials that they could find on the ground in Central Park.

No matter how many times I heard praise sung for the garden’s train show over the years, the fact that the ornate sculptures were constructed out of natural materials somehow managed to escape me. The image in my mind was something akin to the mall train garden of my childhood, albeit on a much larger scale and in the presence of palm trees rather than pizza slices. It wasn’t until I was standing in front of a shrunken-down version of Coney Island’s 105-foot-tall Wonder Wheel that I fully began to comprehend the magnitude of what Applied Imagination has been able to create over the course of their 30-year run at the New York Botanical Garden.

But even had my understanding of the exhibit’s materials been more thorough prior to visiting, I don’t believe that I would have been any less stunned laying my eyes upon the botanical structures for the first time.

I walked through the exhibit no fewer than three times, trying to soak in the intricate details of every inch of the installation. It was, admittedly, a task of impossible magnitude, but it was also one that remained captivating for as long as my schedule allowed me to remain in the conservatory’s tropical warmth.

With nearly 200 structures to discover from start to finish, decisions will have to be made as to which sights are worthy of a longer pause and which can best be satisfied with a brief glance. Some of the buildings beckon visitors closer with their impressive size, like the 11-foot-tall model of One World Trade Center or the enormous replica of Penn Station. Others drum up interest through clever details, like the recorded commentary from actual baseball games that continuously emanates from the old Yankee Stadium. Then, there are those that attract attention proportionate to their high level of recognition — the Statue of Liberty, the Herald Square Macy’s, the aforementioned Wonder Wheel.

Despite attending the event solo, the time I spent in the conservatory still felt somewhat like a communal experience, as the wonder and awe that I encountered seemed to weave throughout the exhibit as seamlessly as the 1,953 feet of track. Standing next to a stranger in a moment of joint admiration of the miniaturized Lower Manhattan skyline across the reflecting pool was not just a meaningless interaction but another indication that the actual city is once again as vibrant as the one that Applied Imagination fashioned out of pine cones and cacao pods.

Every so often, I’d come across a building that invited me to pause before its facade for reasons that were entirely personal.

I took my time admiring Tarrytown’s Lyndhurst Mansion, where I had spent a long weekend last June cheering for Borzois and Bedlington terriers at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show’s COVID-inspired move to the suburbs. I studied every detail of the Trans World Airlines Flight Center, now the TWA Hotel at New York's JFK International Airport and one of the final places where I spent a blissful pre-pandemic day before the world started to shut down in March of 2020. Gazing at the runway with airplanes made out of gourds flooded me with memories of watching planes take off from the hotel’s heated rooftop infinity pool, back when I had no idea how drastically life would soon be impacted by COVID-19.

While the New York Botanical Garden’s Holiday Train Show is well worth a visit even for those who may not have this same level of connection to any of the 191 structures on display, New Yorkers may find that a tour of the city’s historic buildings and iconic architecture instead becomes a trip down memory lane.

For me, my visit transformed unexpectedly into an intimate opportunity to reflect on nearly a decade of life spent in New York City, countless memories triggered by whimsical replicas of the places where I had formed them. It was there in the Haupt Conservatory that I realized just how much I agreed with the very sentiment that had first lured Busse into this magical world — if you let them, the model trains racing around tropical plants and across wooden bridges will take you to places far, far beyond the present moment.