Tour Classes in Washington, DC

Every week we tackle a different facet of pizza history. You'll follow pizza's journey from humble beginnings in Southern Italy to its introduction to NYC in the late 19th century as your guide explains our favorite food’s incredible evolution through historic photos and archival documents. The exact content of each week's class changes so keep an...

Go Behind the Counter at NYC's Top Pizzerias Without Leaving Home One of our Professional Pizza Nerds will show you what's happening in the kitchens of some of NYC's top spots through this live video experience! You can ask questions and interact in real time throughout the event or just sit back and enjoy the view. Each class will be recorded so...

This blended class meets online for some sessions and on NYBG grounds for others. Registered students will receive login instructions and a syllabus with specifics. Explore the basic principles that influence the ecological relationships of the forest ecosystem. Using the Garden grounds as a site for observation and field study, learn to understand...

This class will take place online. Registered students will receive login instructions. Trees may appear to be strong and silent, but they can "talk"—to one another, to other plants, and to animals and insects. Discover how trees communicate via chemical signals in the air (to warn each other of insect attacks), as well as through complex fungal...

This class will take place online. Registered students will receive login instructions. NYBG Ethnobotanist Dr. Michael Balick has studied the relationship between plants and people for over 40 years. Explore the basics of ethnobotany, supplemented by stories and data gleaned from his own fieldwork. Discover how selected plant resources are used by...

Revisiting the Harlem Renaissance: The African American on the American Stage From Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake’s Shuffle Along to Wallace Thurman’s Harlem to Fat’s Waller’s Ain’t MisBehavin’, African American writers and musicians redefined the American theatre while Paul Robeson and Rose McClendon transformed as actors the American...

Study the crucial role birds, insects, and bats play in local ecosystems. Using gorgeous photographs taken over years of field study, expert naturalist Alan Wells discusses the many different types of pollination, as well as how the roles played by a plant's flower structure, nectar production, and fragrance.

This class will take place online. Registered students will receive login instructions. Did you know that Blue Jays can mimic the cry of a Red-tailed Hawk? Train your ear to find them as well as other talented mimics, comical improvisers, brilliant songsters, and heart-throb spring soloists. The vocalizations of our native birds are many and vary...

This class will take place online. Registered students will receive login instructions. Discover plants native to our region that flower in summer, such as Hairy Penstemon, Spotted Beebalm, Shrubby St. John's Wort, and Northern Bush Honeysuckle. Learn how to choose the right plants for your landscape conditions and explore the benefits they provide...

This class will take place online. Registered students will receive login instructions. Learn how to identify this unique order of insects as they take to the skies in early summer. Study their biology, behavior, habitat associations, and conservation efforts currently underway.

This blended class meets online for some sessions and on NYBG grounds for others. Registered students will receive login instructions and a syllabus with specifics.With its variety of habitats and position on the Atlantic Flyway, NYC is a bird-lover's paradise! Over 300 distinct resident or migratory species live or pass through here each year, including...

When the philosopher Alain Leroy Locke edited the Harlem issue of the Survey Graphic that appeared on March 1, 1925, he infused the literary awakening of the 1920s now called the Harlem Renaissance with a philosophy of emancipation that was a quiet revolution in thinking about what it meant to be "Aframerican," as he put it.  This quiet revolution...

Wander through the ever-changing array of blooms in our woodlands and prairies in this virtual walk. Learn how to identify spring wildflowers, and hear about their folklore. In April, the woodlands begin to blossom with ephemerals, and weeks later, the prairie joins in the fun! Each session will cover what’s blooming in our local woodlands and prairies...

Revisiting the Harlem Renaissance: Poetry and the New Negro Literacy Alain Locke believed that a New Negro, his metaphor for the new persona he saw art creating in the 1920s, required a new language, a new literacy, by which to make its new vision of itself legible for all. He located that new literacy in the work of young poets like Countee Cullen,...

If you'd like to learn more about birds' strategies to reproduce, let master birder Connie Sidles show you the secrets of birds' parenting lives. Raising the next generation is as problem-filled and fulfilling for birds as it is for people. Some birds go it alone; some use community help; some rely on family members. Sometimes the males help; sometimes...