Orchid Explosions in ‘Mexican Modernism’ at the Botanical Garden

The glowing orange wall dripping with pink and crimson blossoms that greeted me in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory at the New York Botanical Garden on a recent Friday was hardly what I expected. Of course, it is time for the 22nd Annual Orchid Show, and that show’s mission, Joanna L. Groarke, the garden’s vice president for exhibitions and programming, said isto deliver a “shot of color when people really need it.”

But with “The Orchid Show: Mexican Modernism,” they’ve surpassed that simple base line by miles. The show this year was conceived as a tribute to the great midcentury Mexican architect Luis Barragán (1902-88), and the problem, as Marc Hachadourian, the director of glasshouse horticulture and senior curator of orchids, explained it, was to find a way of reconciling Barragán’s reputation for clean, modernist lines and minimal surfaces with the extreme, showy splendor of one of the world’s most cultivated plants.

Part of their solution, exhibited in three extravagant set pieces that anchor the beginning, middle and end of a steamy stroll through the garden’s hothouses, lies in the particular colors on offer this year. Leaning heavily toward whites and pinks that complement Barragán’s signature palette of creamy rose, orange and purple, they help the pieces strike your eye as unities well before you can take in any detail.

In the Palm Dome, where I started, a rich, rusty orange wall, a smaller white wall, and a protruding, square-bottomed water trough evoke the architect’s 1960s Fuente de los Amantes (Lover’s Fountain) in Mexico City. Emerging from cavities built into each of these walls are hundreds of pink and white Phalaenopsis, dense bursts of color and life almost too rich to number.