It’s a beautiful Friday in the Bronx, people. Enjoy. Now, let’s get down to business.

Weather: As I mentioned in the brief pre-amble, it’s a beautiful day in the Bronx. Nary a cloud in the sky right now and temperatures are expected to top out in the low-70s. Enjoy it will it lasts – showers are forecast for Saturday and Sunday (at least until about noon and then it should clear up for the rest of Mother’s Day).

Story of the Day: Garden’s Ambitious Azalea Project Opens Saturday
Flower-ophiles, this story is for you. (Plus it keeps with the “beautiful Bronx” theme I’m working on this morning.) The Bronx’s New York Botanical Garden opens its 11-acre Azalea Garden tomorrow and Times critic Edward Rothstein weighs in with a rave review. While the garden, made up of more than 70,000 new plants at a cost of $5 million, appears wild, but is actually a meticulously plotted, researched and arranged vision. It’s part of a larger plan for the Garden, which is being orchestrated by designer Laurie Olin of the Olin Partnership, called “Heart of the Garden.” Rothstein gushes: “This is a garden designed to display the suitability of plants to place, while demonstrating the inexorable passage of time — and that may be the most natural phenomenon of all.”

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