Quick Takes With: Ngoc Minh Ngo

Ngọc Minh Ngo ís to plant photography what Annie Leibowitz is to celebrity portraits or Ansel Adams is to American landscapes. This is not hyperbole. With her immense gift for telegraphing a flower’s spirit and finding the poetry in a landscape, she creates images that are works of art, and in fact, her photos have exhibited at the Museum Yves Saint Laurent in Marrakesh as well as Wave Hill Garden & Cultural Center in New York. Last year, Ngoc received the Larry Lederman Landscape Photography Fellowship at the New York Botanical Garden. 

We’re longtime admirers and have covered three of her photography books here on Gardenista, most recently New York Green, in which she captures and writes about the best parks and gardens that her city has to offer. So we’re incredibly honored to have her answer our Quick Takes questionnaire here. Read on to learn “the most moving and inspiring” garden book she’s ever read, the plants she loves for her shade garden, and more.

Photography by Ngoc Minh Ngo. 

Your first garden memory:

When I was a child in Vietnam, I was allowed to stay up one night to watch the flowering of a Night-blooming Cereus. It was magical, not least because it was so out of the ordinary, both the flower and the occasion. It was a flower like no flower I had ever seen. That the flower only lasted one night made it seem unreal. The whole experience felt like a dream.

Garden-related book you return to time and again:

Derek Jarman’s Garden. It remains the most moving and inspiring book about a garden for me since I first encountered it nearly thirty years ago.

Instagram account that inspires you:

@rootprojectuk, @phoebe_cummings, @edmunddewaal.

Describe in three words your garden aesthetic.

Wild. Personal. Painterly.

Plant that makes you swoon:

Almost all of them, but especially spring ephemerals like bleeding hearts, columbines, star flowers, trilliums, bloodroot. And flowering trees, like American dogwood, magnolia.

Plant that makes you want to run the other way:

Impatiens.

Favorite go-to plant:

All plants with a scent.

Hardest gardening lesson you’ve learned:

For years I tried to grow all sorts of flowers that were not happy to be in my shady garden.

Gardening or design trend that needs to go:

Overbred flowers.

Favorite way to bring the outdoors in.

I like to cut flowers from the garden to have by my bedside in all seasons.

Favorite hardscaping material:

Gravel.

Tool you can’t live without:

A good secateur.

Favorite nursery, plant shop, or seed company:

Sadly, my favorite local nursery, Gowanus Nursery, closed. More far-flung favorites are Snug Harbor Farm, Annie’s Annuals, Flora Grubb, Petersham.

On your wishlist:

A real garden where I can have fruit trees and vegetables.

Not-to-be-missed public garden/park/botanical garden:

Every garden and park in my book New York Green, including Brooklyn Bridge Park, Naval Cemetery Landscape, Wave Hill. In the UK: Prospect Cottage, Derek Jarman’s garden at Dungeness; Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex; Rousham in Oxfordshire. Rohuna in Morocco.

The REAL reason you garden:

For the beauty of it all.

Future projects?

I’m excited to release my latest book into the world next year. Roses in the Garden, to be published in March 2025, delves into a subject that has been very close to my heart. The culmination of many years of thinking and reading about and photographing roses, the project allows me to explore both the nature and culture of this timeless flower, through a series of gardens spanning the globe.

Thanks so much, Ngoc! (You can follow her on Instagram @minh_ngoc.)

For our full archive of Quick Takes, go here.