LongHouse Reserve To Honor Nature and Plant Photographer Ngoc Minh Ngo

Photographer Ngoc Minh Ngo has long had an affinity for plants.

From images of vast landscapes to intimate botanical still lifes, her body of work — which has been featured in an array of U.S. magazines and international publications, plus her own books — highlights the beauty found in formal gardens, natural spaces and individual plants.

“Nature in itself, it’s a subject that’s dear to my heart,” Ngo shared during an interview last week. “My happiest memories of my childhood are spent in nature.”

She said she’s come to learn that plants have so much associated with them, not just the horticulture side, but a cultural side, a historical side and an environmental and ecological side. “There’s so many different layers of meaning to plants,” she said. “So that’s why I find them an endlessly fascinating subject.”

In recognition of her contributions to horticultural photography, LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton will honor Ngo with its LongHouse Land, Place, Spirit Award this Saturday, September 24, during its Landscape Awards Luncheon, where Ngo will give a garden lecture and slideshow presentation.

The Brooklyn resident, who has lived all over the world, is a self-taught photographer who discovered photography soon after she moved to New York. She grew up in a seaside town in Vietnam and moved in 1975 to California, where she stayed from the age of 12 through her graduation from UC Berkeley when she was 21. Next, she lived in Japan, then San Francisco, Paris and finally, in 1988, New York.

“When I fell in love with photography, it was mostly black and white photography,” she recalled.

Ngo set up a dark room in her own apartment after a photographer taught her how to develop black and white photos. When she outgrew her own darkroom, she started visiting a spot in New York City where she could rent a darkroom by the hour.

“There were lots and lots of different photographers doing different work,” she said of the darkroom spot. “I was exposed to different works by different people, and also there, I learned how to print color. I paid someone who worked there to show me how to print color, and once I learned how to print color, I think my own photography improved, and I was able to take it a step or two further.”

She was soon making a living printing color photos for other photographers. “And then just little by little, I printed up a portfolio and took it around to different photo editors and just went from there,” she said.

As her career advanced, Ngo photographed and wrote two books, “Bringing Nature Home: Floral Arrangements Inspired by Nature” and “In Bloom: Creating and Living with Flowers.” The former is a book of naturalistic floral arrangements by Brooklyn floral designer Nicolette Camille, and the latter is about people who work with flowers in different capacities, including a landscape designer, a muralist, a paper flower maker and a botanical tulle artist.

Then in 2019, Ngo and Italian writer Umberto Pasti published “Eden Revisited,” documenting his Northern Morocco garden that he spent 20 years making.

“His mission is to save the wildflowers of Northern Morocco because he had fallen in love with them when he first came to Morocco 30 years ago, and as development came to the country, these areas of wildflowers, the habitats, are increasingly diminished,” Ngo said. “In order to save a lot of these indigenous wildflowers — mostly bulbs — he would go and salvage them from construction sites and places where there’s disturbance and would bring them to this one place outside of Tangier in the countryside and plant them there.”

They worked on the book together.

“I told the story in pictures, and he told the story in words,” Ngo said.

“Eden Revisited” will be one subject of her garden lecture at LongHouse Reserve, and her upcoming book, “New York Green,” will make up the second half of the presentation. “New York Green,” due out next year, is all about green spaces in New York City.

Though plants and nature are the threads that tie together most of Ngo’s work, her photography ranges from close examinations of flowers to wide views of open spaces, and she is also a veteran interiors photographer for shelter magazines. Each photography style calls for its own approach and has different factors to consider.

When shooting a landscape, she doesn’t set out looking for something specific. She said it’s about responding to what she sees.

“Everyone looks at the same thing and processes it through their own history, preferences — and comes up with different things,” she said. “So when I photograph a landscape, it’s all about how I experienced that particular landscape. It’s not a thing that I look for in particular. But it’s more the other way around. It’s how that landscape comes to me and how I perceive that landscape at that particular moment.”

She pointed out that when shooting a landscape, there is very little that is within her control.

“You have to work very fast because the light changes very quickly. And you know, you can’t light a whole landscape,” she said. “You get whatever the weather condition gives you. But that could be wonderful. It could be so many unpredictable elements that gives you something that you would have never thought of.”

There could be fog, rain, sun and clouds can each affect the overall picture in terms of mood and color, she explained. “None of it is in your control. You just have to know how to use that to your advantage or how to render it in a way that you want.”

Her interior photography is often a controlled, collaborative process with a team of editors and stylists, Ngo said, while shooting her botanical still lifes, in a studio by herself, is in her complete control — up until the point that the flowers wilt.

Ngo said the award from LongHouse is an honor and a surprise.

“Honestly, it’s nothing I’ve ever expected,” she said. “I love the work that I do, and it’s just a nice feeling that people appreciate it.”

During the awards luncheon, LongHouse Reserve will also recognize its own horticulturist, Holger Winenga, as well as Perfect Earth Project founder Edwina von Gal, who will also deliver a garden lecture. Winenga will receive the LongHouse Horticultural Award and Von Gal will receive the LongHouse Visionary Award.

Winenga joined LongHouse Reserve in 2019, but as a former nursery owner, his relationship with the reserve goes back many years. The Sagaponack resident by way of Germany sold plants to LongHouse’s late founder, Jack Lenor Larsen, and installed the reserve’s grass garden nearly two decades ago.

Von Gal is a Springs-based landscape designer with an eponymous firm that focuses on sustainable design. She founded the nonprofit Perfect Earth Project to promote toxic-free lawns and landscapes and, more recently, started the Two Thirds for the Birds initiative, which encourages putting two native plants in the ground for every nonnative plant added to a landscape to provide food sources and habitat for birds. She’s also a co-founder of the Azuero Earth Project in Panama, which is dedicated to conserving wildlife through restoring dry forest.

The LongHouse Awards Luncheon festivities will last all morning on Saturday, September 24, and into the afternoon, with a light breakfast in the LongHouse Reserve gardens at 9:30 a.m., garden lectures at 10 a.m., and the awards luncheon itself starting at noon. Tickets are $75 for LongHouse members and $125 each for “Friends.” Purchase at longhouse.org.

Visit ngocminhngo.com for more information on Ngoc Minh Ngo and her books.