The Perseverance of New York Wildflowers

In Williamsburg, in a seven-acre park on the edge of the East River, spring will soon unfold in blue blossoms. Blueberries are always the first to bloom in the pollinating meadow at Marsha P. Johnson State Park, a welcome sign to bees and people that things are starting to thaw.

On Monday, the prairie had its annual cut, its grasses cut to six inches to make room for the spring flowers. “Mowing encourages this rebirth and regrowth,” said Leslie Wright, regional manager of the city’s state park system. If New York City has a warm springtime, blueberries may open in late April, possibly followed by orange butterfly milkweed ruffles, purple hailstorm bee balm, and black-eyed yellow Susans that inhabit also the prairie – hardy species that can withstand the salt spray that face life at the water’s edge

Not all of these flowers are native to New York or even North America, but they have held up long enough to naturalize. These species pose few threats to native fauna, unlike more dominant introduced species such as sagebrush, a herb with an intrepid rhizome system.

Although blueberries herald spring now, they weren’t here hundreds of years ago, before colonizers forcibly displaced the Lenape people from their ancestral home of Lenapehoking, which encompasses New Jersey, Delaware. and parts of Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and New York State. The Lenape experienced spring with another bloom: white tufts of serviceberry flowers, which powder its branches like snow in April. Today, serviceberries still bloom in Brooklyn, Prospect Park and John Paul Jones Park.

A wildflower can refer to any flowering plant that was not cultivated, planted intentionally, or helped by humans, but still managed to grow and flower. This is one of the many definitions offered by plant ecologist Donald J. Leopold in Andrew Garn’s new photo book “Wildflowers of New York City”, and one that feels particularly suited to the city and its many transplants. ..

Mr. Garn did not intend to make “Wildflowers of New York City” a traditional field guide for flower identification. On the contrary, his respectful portraits invite us to revel in the beauty of the flowers that we meet more often in a crack in the sidewalk than in a bouquet. “They all share a beauty of form and function that speaks to the glory of survival in the big city,” writes Garn. He asks us to stop and consider the shoots we might come across each day and appreciate them not only for their beauty, but also for their ability to thrive.

More than 2,000 species of plants are found in New York City, more than half of which are naturalized, writes Garn. Some were imported for their beauty; ornate shrubs such as the winter buttercup, star magnolia, and hydrangea peegee all first reached North America in a single expedition to the Parsons & Sons nursery in Flushing in 1862.

Others came as stowaways, as writer Allison C. Meier notes in the book’s introduction. In the 19th century, botanist Addison Brown scoured discarded ballast piles – dirt and stones that weighed down ships – by city docks in search of unknown flowers, as he noted in a 1880 issue of the Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club. During a July getaway to Gowanus in Brooklyn, Mr. Brown noticed purple shoots of sticky nightshade, a plant native to South America. He also found purple tendrils of the piped thistle, which is native to Europe and Asia. The piped thistle failed to make it past the ballast pile to take root in New York City, but the sticky nightshade stuck around.

Marsha P. Johnson State Park, which sits on a 19th-century shipping dock and former garbage transfer station, is no stranger to ballast. The docks imported flour, sugar, and many other products until operations ceased in 1983. The state purchased the land and in 2007 reopened the site as East River State Park.

In February 2020, Governor Andrew Cuomo renamed the park in honor of activist Marsha P. Johnson, a central figure in the Stonewall riots and co-founder of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries along with activist Sylvia Rivera. Ms Johnson, who died in 1992 of undetermined causes, would have turned 75 in August 2020.

In January, the State Parks Department unveiled a $ 14 million park redesign proposal with a thermoplastic mural of rainbow stripes and flowers, the Brooklyn Paper reported. Although the state has promised to consult with the city’s LGBTQ community, Ms. Johnson’s family members and the trans community have not been consulted and have criticized the proposal. Local residents created a petition – titled “Stop the Plastic Park!” – for real flowers and natural landscaping instead of the harsh colors of thermoplastic wall paint. In response to the outcry, the state is holding workshops in March and April for the public to comment on the overhaul.

“I still have candles lit for Marsha and Sylvia, but I pray especially hard now that we get a plan that includes a lot of flowers,” said Mariah Lopez, executive director of Strategic Trans Alliance for Radical Reform, or STARR, a advocacy group.

Ms Johnson was known to wear wreaths of fresh flowers that she arranged from leftover flowers and daffodils thrown in from Manhattan’s Flower District, where she often slept. In one photo, Ms Johnson wears a wreath of roses, carnations, chrysanthemums, frilly tulips, statice and baby’s breath. Although the cumulative bunches of baby’s breath are now a staple of flower arrangements, the species is a wildflower native to Central and Eastern Europe.

Ms Lopez and STARR have slammed a proposal to build a new $ 70 million beach on the Gansevoort Peninsula, near the waterfronts where Ms Rivera lived and Ms Johnson died. In its place, it offers a memorial garden for Ms Johnson, Ms Rivera and other transgender people. “We will never feed enough people, we will never plant enough flowers, we will never be good enough to honor Sylvia and Marsha,” Ms. Lopez said. “They cared too much, even though no one cared about them.”

Ms Lopez, who grew up on the Upper West Side near a smoky fireplace, has always longed for more green space in the city. Her dream of the park includes a range of green and functional spaces: a paved area where people can sail and organize gatherings, a flower garden in homage to Mrs Johnson, a greenhouse and an apiary for bees. “You can never have enough bees,” Ms. Lopez said. “They’re not here to sting you. They mind their own business.

Parts of Marsha P. Johnson State Park will remain closed for construction until June, when the native plantation meadow will be in full bloom, filled with sunny heart-shaped evening primrose petals, purple echinacea buds. sea ​​urchin-shaped and falling red. columbine bells. At the end of summer, buttery tufts of goldenrod will follow. Soon the garden will also be teeming with bees, beetles, moths, butterflies and other pollinators. There are several bees carved into tunnels, designed to attract native solitary bees, such as carpenter bees, and provide them with rest after absorbing nearby nectar. Unlike bumblebees, carpenter bees do not have queens or worker castes. In some species of carpenter bees, females nest in groups, living alongside their daughters or other adult female bees.

The redesign of the park will add a new fence around the meadow, as well as interpretive panels on the pollinators that depend on its wild flowers. “What if there were no bees in the world?” Ms Wright, regional director of the city’s state park system, questioned aloud. “We have to protect them. This is the function of this sweet little meadow. She added that the bees will come when the blueberries bloom, in the warmer, bluer months.