BOSTON, MA.- Steeped in tradition both old and new, the annual Hanging Nasturtiums display at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, along with an Edible Nasturtiums menu at The Gardner Café, trumpets the arrival of spring with a feast for all the senses. The visual beauty of cascading vines awash in sunlight against the museum’s pale pink walls and the sweet and savory flavors of the edible flower in new culinary creations continue and update a favorite Gardner tradition.

The Hanging Nasturtiums display is a century-old custom, begun by museum founder Isabella Gardner in 1903, that finds bright-orange nasturtium vines cascading in incredible lengths of 15 to 20 feet from the museum’s interior courtyard balustrades in a floral installation seen exclusively at the Gardner Museum every April.

Visitors to the Gardner during the month of April – coinciding with the Hanging Nasturtiums display – will also have a chance to taste the edible blossoms as part of a more modern Gardner tradition: a special springtime Edible Nasturtiums menu at The Gardner Café featuring these edible flowers. This year, Gardner Café Chef/Owner Peter Crowley showcases the blossoms’ bright flavor in an entrée of Cold Poached Atlantic Salmon with a salad of organic sprouts, green apple, and nasturtiums; and a delectable Chamomile Panna Cotta with lemon thyme poached pears and nasturtium blossoms for dessert.

“Each year, we look forward to the magical tumbling blossoms of the Hanging Nasturtiums display, a reminder that the Gardner Museum continues to herald the spring in Boston,” says Anne Hawley, Norma Jean Calderwood Director of the museum. “The Hanging Nasturtiums have welcomed spring to the museum since Isabella Gardner’s time, and today the experience is further enhanced by an equally enchanting and surprising use of the blossoms in the Café’s Edible Nasturtiums offerings.

The Hanging Nasturtiums courtyard display is on view from March 31 until mid April 2009, and the Edible Nasturtiums menu at The Gardner Café is available from April 1-19, 2009.

HANGING NASTURTIUMS – ANNUAL GARDEN DISPLAY IN THE INTERIOR COURTYARD
Isabella Gardner was herself an avid horticulturalist, winning awards for her orchids and other floral displays from the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. She first introduced the dramatic orange nasturtium vines into the museum the week before Easter 1903, and during her lifetime the display became a well-known tradition, unveiled annually. According to museum history, Gardner permitted only the orange variety of flower in the display; she thought the yellow color wouldn’t complement the museum’s pink walled courtyard.

“Isabella Stewart Gardner valued the drama that unusual and exotic horticultural displays add to each visitor’s experience of the museum,” says the Gardner’s Curator of Landscape Patrick Chassé. “The Hanging Nasturtiums tradition began as part of her own birthday celebration and I think it really gives some insight into her feelings about how art and beauty – whether on the walls or in a garden – should be an integral part of daily life.”

Thirty-four-year Gardner Museum veteran and Chief Horticulturalist Stan Kozak has been skillfully cultivating the spectacular vines for years, picking thousands of flowers from the vines in the museum’s greenhouses as they grow to prevent the plants from going to seed.

“The nasturtium vines that we use in the court are between fifteen and twenty feet long each and take ten months to grow, but the end result is worth every minute,” Kozak says. “We still use the same varieties that Isabella Gardner used back at the beginning of the twentieth century as a nod to the historical nature of this Gardner Museum tradition.”

The nasturtium vines will be installed by Kozak and his horticultural team at the museum on Monday, March 30th when the museum is closed to the public, and will adorn the central courtyard for the public to view for up to a month, coinciding with Isabella Stewart Gardner’s birthday on April 14th.