NEW YORK — In Williamsburg, on a 28328sq.m. park by the
East River, spring will soon unfurl in blue blossoms. Cornflowers are always
the first to bloom in the pollinator meadow of Marsha P. Johnson State Park, a
welcome sign to bees and people that things are beginning to thaw.
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Last Monday, the meadow got its annual mow-down, its grasses
trimmed to 152 millimeters to make way for springtime blooms. “The mow-down
encourages this rebirth and regrowth,” said Leslie Wright, the city’s regional
director of the state park system. If New York City has a warm spring, the
cornflowers may open up by late April, eventually followed by orange frills of
butterfly milkweed, purple spindly bee balm and yolk-yellow, black-eyed Susans
that also inhabit the meadow — hardy species that can weather the salty spray
that confronts life on the waterfront.
Not all of these flowers are native to New York, or even North
America, but they have sustained themselves long enough to become naturalized.
These species pose little threat to native wildlife, unlike more domineering
introduced species such as mugwort, an herb with an intrepid rhizome system.
Although cornflowers herald springtime now, they were not here
hundreds of years ago, before colonizers forcibly displaced the Lenape people
from their ancestral land of Lenapehoking, which encompasses New Jersey,
Delaware and parts of Connecticut, Pennsylvania and New York state. The Lenape
knew spring by another bloom: white tufts of flowers from the serviceberry
tree, which powder its branches like snow in April. Today, serviceberries still
bloom in Brooklyn, in both Prospect Park and John Paul Jones Park.
A wildflower can refer to any flowering plant that was not
cultivated, intentionally planted or given human aid, yet it still managed to
grow and bloom. This is one of several 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.
Garn did not intend for “Wildflowers of New York City” to be a
traditional field guide for identifying flowers. Rather, his reverent portraits
invite us to delight in the beauty of flowers that we more often encounter in a
sidewalk crack than in a bouquet. “They all share a beauty of form and function
that offers testimony to the glory of survival in the big city,” Garn writes.
He asks us to stop and consider the sprouts we might pass every day and
appreciate them not just 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, Garn writes. Some were imported for
their beauty; ornate shrubs such as the buttercup winterhazel, star magnolia
and peegee hydrangea all reached North America for the first time in a single
shipment 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
the heaps of discarded ballast — earth and stones that weighed down ships — by
city docks for unfamiliar blossoms, as he noted in an 1880 issue of the
Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club. During one July jaunt to Gowanus in
Brooklyn, Brown noted purple sprouts of sticky nightshade, a plant native to
South America. He also found violet tendrils of the welted thistle, native to
Europe and Asia. The welted thistle did not successfully outgrow the ballast
heap to take root in New York City, but sticky nightshade has 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 goods until operations ceased in
1983. The state bought the land and, in 2007, reopened the site as East River
State Park.
In February 2020, Governor Andrew Cuomo renamed the park after
activist Marsha P. Johnson, one of the central figures of the Stonewall riots
and a co-founder of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries with activist
Sylvia Rivera. Johnson, who died in 1992 of undetermined causes, would have
turned 75 in August 2020.
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