Even Better Than The Real Thing

The Times previews one of the quirkier ways New York City is fetishized — the New York Botanical Garden’s annual Holiday Train Show:

The scene inside was New York in delicious disarray: the Apollo Theater next door to the Chrysler Building, the golden Prometheus statue from the Rockefeller Center skating rink reclining just beyond the center field wall of Yankee Stadium, and half of the Brooklyn Bridge teetering on a wheelbarrow.

Workers were busy sprucing up these miniature landmarks recently and placing them carefully along 1,000 feet of miniature train track that winds through a landscape of plants in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory greenhouse.

The 150 miniatures are part of the Holiday Train Show, which opens on Saturday. The miniature city is made not of concrete and steel but of leaves, twigs, mushrooms, branches, berries and pine cones. In this botanical metropolis, the romanticized models are made out of bits and pieces of plants.

. . .

They are the creations of Paul Busse, a quirky Kentucky landscape architect who has built the models for the holiday season since 1992. This year, the new batch of miniatures includes Yankee Stadium, with floodlights fashioned from acorn shells and fans made from a potpourri.

. . .

As he crouched next to the New York Public Library, he inspected the lion statues on the steps, with their fuzzy wheat manes and peppercorn eyes. He checked the stained glass on the facade of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, fashioned from translucent flower petals coated with urethane. He dusted off the red script of the Radio City Music Hall sign, painstakingly made from radish seeds.

“Every year, we take a ride into Manhattan,” he said. “But after working with our buildings, the real thing can almost be a letdown.”

Bonus: New York Botanical Garden Holiday Train Show Information Page