This year, the Botanical Garden is celebrating its 20th Holiday Train Show. Busse and his crew, known better as Applied Imagination, have been displaying their botanical architecture at the Garden’s holiday exhibition since the beginning.

Daubmann explained Busse’s work during an interview, “What he does is very distinctive. We really don’t know of anyone else who can do what he does.”

While the Garden owns 175 models constructed by Applied Imagination, they display 140 of them to alter the exhibition from year to year.

“This year we didn’t add new buildings, we added a new experience called The Artist’s Workshop. It describes how the buildings are made,” Daubmann excitedly shared. “For 20 years, people have asked, ‘how do you build the buildings?’ This year we’ve answered that question.”

A new room was added to the conservatory for the purpose of explaining the construction of Busse’s models. Storyboards take visitors from the building as a bare shell through the material application. But the three explanatory panels do not do justice to the work involved for each reproduction, since structures can take Applied Imagination anywhere from 40 to 1,000 hours to complete.

The trains used in the show are G-scale, the largest model train available. These trains, also known as garden-gauge trains, are weatherproof and often used outside. Moreover, they are substantially more rugged and work well with the soil terrain on which the exhibition is held. The naturalistic replica of the Chrysler building is nearly five feet tall, and the Empire State building is, of course, even bigger. Penn Station is about four feet by three feet, so the large train models fit the scale of the rest of the showcase.

Seth Pollack from Queens, New York was also experiencing his first Holiday Train Show at the Botanical Garden.

“It’s definitely something that’s for New Yorkers because there are so many authentic reproductions that you would have to have seen the buildings before to really be able to appreciate it,” he said.

The Botanical Garden offers other holiday festivities this month as well. For children, Gingerbread Adventure is a hands-on lesson about the herbs and spices used to make gingerbread. There are scheduled performances for youngsters as well. During the weekends, the Garden shows classic holiday films, in addition to a screening of the Holiday Train Show with David Hartman, a 30-minute documentary about the exhibition.

During the holidays, tourists flock to New York to experience the beauty and nostalgia of the Big Apple at wintertime. With fun for all ages, the Botanical Garden’s 20-year-old tradition should be a stop on the list of holiday visits.

The Holiday Train Show is open until January 16th. For more information visit www.nybg.org/hts/

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