It was a gray day in New York City. My friend Annelise and I were in a cab, grinding our way toward the annual orchid show at the New York Botanical Garden, which I planned to write about and she would film. This year, the garden has named a new orchid after the actor Awkwafina, and the show’s theme—“The Orchid Show: Singapore”—was inspired by the island that recently co-starred alongside her in Crazy Rich Asians. Her flower is a “Vanda hybrid (Susan Best x Crownfox Black Forest),” a rare type of orchid that can bloom in any color. If you are over 21 years of age, you may party with Awkwafina (the flower) on one of the NYBG’s “orchid evenings.” For a non-member ticket price of $38, you are promised entertainment in the form of “supertrees,” Singapore-themed cocktails, “freestyle dancers,” and, of course, many orchids.

But it was noon on the day of our visit and the park was cold. Once we’d collected our press tickets, we asked a man in mittens where we might climb a hill to get some good shots of the Bronx Park. He suggested some high rocks in the Thain Family Forest, which is the largest remaining area of uncut wooded landscape remaining in New York. The botanists Nathanial Lord Britton and his wife, Elizabeth, chose the site after visiting London’s Royal Botanic Garden at Kew, opening their own city’s garden in 1891 in the hope of preserving botanical specimens and edifying the public.

Once up on the forest rocks, we could see nothing but bare, depressing trees and cold brown water pooling in the earth—he had misunderstood our question. Signs on the trees asked things like, “Why is this tree tagged and numbered?” For an answer, you must download an app or visit a website. Other signs were more helpful, explaining that “evidence that a frozen sheet of ice at least 1,000 feet thick once covered the New York region is all around you.” The rocks scattered between the trees are known as glacial striae (flat) and glacial erratic (knobbly), remainders of the last ice sheet that “began to melt back from the New York City region about 14,000 years ago, leaving behind a thin layer of clays, sands, pebbles, and small boulders.”

I was keen to get to the orchid show and its Singaporean supertrees, but Annelise was busy searching for a “frame” that would make the bare forest into a picture-postcard. I had to admit the woods were beautiful: cold, fresh, luscious. A vision came to me of New York City—every skyscraper, every bus, every bit of this simulation of Singaporean botany in a glasshouse—encased in a thousand feet of ice. Perhaps this hot and frantic city, which is poised to get only hotter and more frantic, will look back on its icebound days with fondness.

The double lines of benches along the entrance promenade to the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory are all dedicated to the memory of people who loved the garden. One plaque, for Edward F. and Mary McDermott of Richmond Hill, Queens, reads, “Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? With daffodils, tulips, and peonies neat, and anything else the squirrels don’t eat.” As we pushed the glass doors of the conservatory open, the cold air became as hot and humid as our earth’s future. As we explained our project to the garden staff (who very kindly bent the rules to allow our tripod in, much to the wrath of some camera-mad visitors), one of them suggested that we make a horror movie called Attack of the Plants, about flowers so beautiful that they make people pass out. It was an intriguing concept: a botanical leisure experience heightened to such sublime levels of magnificence that the consequences are fatal.