Pink Moon Newsletter

Hi Plant People,

Happy Pink Moon!

How marvelous that tonight’s full moon is named after a native wildflower: Phlox subulata. Moss Pink blooms in multi-colored carpets all throughout April, as their long-throated flowers provide nectar to early moths and butterflies.

I like to imagine that, in order to warrant a moon name, this flower was once wildly abundant, coating hillsides in shade of pink with moths flitting among them in the moonlight. Apparently the blue and white strains give off different volatile organic compounds in their scents, possibly because they’re adapting for different pollinators.

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I am thrilled to present the latest resource we created at Brooklyn Bridge Park: our guide to mulching. Mulching is one of those things we often learn to do by rote, “applying” annually rather than as a response to what is truly needed in our gardens. At BBP, we use mulch sparingly, and then only as a slow motion soil amendment while always considering the desires of plants and animals in the garden. This guide is meant to be printed and distributed to anyone who might find it helpful. Please feel free to share!

GARDEN NOTES

Have you started seeing bees in your garden yet? We have queen bumble bees flying low, zig zagging around, searching for suitable nest sites in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Once you see them on flowers gathering pollen, you know that they’ve found their nest and are in the act of provisioning it. Want to help? Here is a guide but also, be sure to plant early spring flowering plants, as the queens will nest in sites they know will provide food to family.

Cellophane bees are also out and about. Look for them on willows, aspens, and maples or nesting in bare soil.

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It’s Ramp season and maybe, just maybe, you don’t need to eat them? Yes, yes, we can sustainably forage and buy them without the bulbs, but that should be the bare minimum because honestly, when has a profitable natural resource in this country been responsibly managed? They’re being overharvested while Wild Garlic and Garlic Mustard are right there.

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Daffodils are blooming now and while they’re not ecologically important in North America, they’re still fun and interesting. Species with long, tubular corollas are pollinated by bumblebees, honeybees, and solitary bees in their native Europe. One might think that the tube would be a cumbersome thing but bees actually love it. As the sun shines on the corolla, it heats up ten degrees warmer than ambient air, providing a lovely, yellow greenhouse on a cold spring day.

RESOURCE SPOTLIGHT

• There is Shazam for birds! Merlin is a new app from Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology that ID’s birds by listening to and mapping their songs. I’ve used it to ID house sparrows in downtown Brooklyn and mockingbirds imitating car alarms.

• I had given up on bee hotels. I kept seeing them offered by chain stores and reading about how they encourage disease. But this one, by Colin Purrington is beautiful, educational, and safe. His technics for preventing parasites and strategies for attracting different species are fantastic.

IN THE NEWS

• The best ladies in the news! Margaret Roach talks with Heather Holm in the NYT on the importance of wasps in the landscape. Not only are wasps cool and mostly safe, but they also keep the herbivores in our gardens (read “pests”) in check.

• Split-gill mushrooms send electrical pulses along their hyphae and researchers are speculating that this might be a method of commination!!!! It is far, far too early to know but…. I want to believe.

• Good news: you’re important. And so is humanity. The idea that nature is better off without humans is rooted in the damage that certain cultures have wrought on the land. But not all cultures have done this. A paper from April found that “humans have been reshaping at least three-quarters of the planet’s land for as long as 12,000 years. In fact, they found, many landscapes with high biodiversity considered to be “wild” today are more strongly linked to past human land use than to contemporary practices that emphasize leaving land untouched.” Many of the organisms around us have adapted to the actions of people, or are even dependent upon us. We actually have a responsibility to work with the plants and animals around us. So let’s all recognize that “people” aren’t the problem. Certain cultural, economic, and exploitative relationships to the land are the problem. Which is great! Because we can change and do better. This comprehensive article puts it all in context but one great way to accomplish this is to give land back to the indigenous peoples who know how to manage it.

• Observers have found a second type of leaves on giant Redwood trees! These small, tight leaves are used for fog and rain water collection. A large Redwood can absorb >14 gallons of water in an hour through the leaves. Furthermore, depending on the fog and rain patterns of the region, the water-collecting leaves grow higher up or lower down on the tree. (h/t JB)

• Have you noticed that tropical animals tend to be brighter? There’s new evidence that songbirds are in fact more colorful in the tropics! And then fade to less colorful, the father away from the equator they go. Interesting theories as to why are:

  • it’s easier to be colorful when the food is colorful

  • birds are brighter when more species live together so that they can recognize each other

  • it’s important to be colorful in a dark, forested habitat

  • it’s not actually helpful to be a brightly colored migratory female

  • and that the wet/productive climate lowers evolutionary constraints on fabulousness (sadly, as a New Englander, I cannot but agree with this…)

• Native plants in the mainstream media! The Washington Post did a sort of “classic” piece on native plants (native plants > turf + monarchs + Tallamy + HOAs). The perfect thing to send to the uninitiated.

• Have you heard of No Mow May? It’s an initiative that started in the UK, where homeowners don’t mow lawns for the month of May, to better support regional pollinators. It seems to be spreading in the US! And gets people thinking about using land to support non-human organisms. The next step, of course, is to introduce people to native plants and a more nuanced concept of “lawn.”

• I’m sorry to report that honey bees are now killing endangered seabirds in Hawaii. Honeybees are invasive in Hawaii and love the borrows the birds dig. So they move in, sting everyone, and occasionally kill chicks. Apparently they’ve been doing the same thing to endangered Australian cockatoos for years. It’s just heartbreaking.

• Diverse meadows require diverse bees. It’s obvious but, entomologists have found that when you have specialist pollinated flowers, you need those specialist pollinators to pollinate them, otherwise you limit plant reproduction. It’s a solid reminder that we’re not just “feeding the bees” here, we’re encouraging dynamics between plants and pollinators for the benefit of the entire ecosystem.

• One might be inclined to read this thrilling article on the capture of a notorious international plant poacher with glee. Certainly California succulents are safer for it. But the sad truth is that these massive markets take advantage of poor and desperate people, paying them to do the dangerous parts of their crimes. Breeding rare plants for sale seems like a good way to reduce their destruction in the wild, and we must always assure the plants we buy are captive grown, but the big picture here is that people and our environments are linked. Poaching will continue where people are living in poverty.

• Apparently, the Starling’s Central Park origin story was myth-busted. I’m definitely among the people who have repeated the romantic story about a Shakespeare-obsessed guy releasing the first pair in the park 150 years go to bring all the Bard’s animals to North America, and thus began the massive ecological destruction those angry little stealth bombers have brought. But apparently, Shakespeare had nothing to do with it, there isn’t clear genetic evidence that those birds were the original population, and the researchers the Times spoke to, at least, downplayed the birds’ ecological impact. It’s a long and interesting piece, in which I learned the word (new word alert!) “snarg,” bits of bird that have gone through a jet engine. Enjoy!

• A photo essay on the abject beauty of Starling murmurations. How do they do it? “each starling responds to six or seven of its nearest neighbors, a number that seems to optimize the balance between the cohesion of the group and the effort of the individual….a change in the state of a single starling can affect — and be affected by — every other starling in the flock, no matter the flock size.”

• Big Ag is now publishing books for kids that tout the benefits of herbicides. They’re funded by the American Farm Bureau Federation, a reactionary lobbying group made up of the biggest polluters of freshwater in the US. In one book, Berry Good, students tell an ag rep that they don’t want chemicals in their food. They’re told that the ag rep is “similar to a doctor … They are both experts and, as long as we follow the instructions they give, like when I give my kids medicine, we can ensure everything will be safe and healthy.” Nefarious.

• An incredible and beautiful art installation of fruit trees is opening this month on Governors Island. Artist Sam Van Akin took 250 varieties of apples, many historic and rare, and grafted them into 102 trees to form “a liv­ing archive for antique and heir­loom fruit vari­eties that were grown in and around New York City in the past 400 years.”

• Christopher Alexander, author of A Pattern Language, passed away last month. That book completely changed the way many of us think about space.

• Diverse farms are better farms. Researchers on California strawberry farms found that the more semi-natural habitat a farm had, the more helpful the birds were, managing pests without contaminating crops. And another study on California sunflowers found that diversifying crops keeps bees healthy. When bees visit monocultures, they spread disease like people touching a dirty doorknob, and parasites can jump from managed to wild bees. But when diverse hedgerows were next to sunflower fields, all species of bees had less parasites, possibly due to '“more doorknobs” and possibly due to the medicinal effects of diverse pollen and nectar.

• Hedgerows have been found to be a fantastic method of diversifying farms, helping bees, AND increasing crop production. Why doesn’t everyone do this?

• Betty Reid Soskin, a 100 year old park ranger with the National Parks Service, and real life “Rosie the Riveter” has retired.

• Sakura, the Japanese tradition of Cherry blossom viewing, is in full tilt. Here is a lovely history of the practice, which brings delight, the author writes, as well as melancholy, as we are “startled into thoughts on the brevity of life”.

• People love to plant trees. I love to plant trees. But more effort needs to be expended upon planting trees properly. Beneficial tree planting includes planting native trees, where they will be cared for, where they can live for a very long time, and where they address the needs of the people around them. When companies plant massive farms of exotic trees where they do not naturally occur in order to “offset carbon” or receive government incentives, it’s environmentally harmful with incredibly high failure rates. The Miyawaki method of densely planting saplings is growing in popularity all over the world, but I remain suspicious of any method that doesn’t look at land and prioritize what it wants to be and which plants would grow there. I take heart that there are wonderful forest plantings happening alongside this “forest for profit movement” and some people even opt to plant a savannah.

• Of course the most important thing isn’t tree planting, but to STOP CHOPPING THEM DOWN. Like, existentially important. The new IPCC evaluation says we have to or we will imperil life on earth. And who is responsible for this mess? It’s the USA! We are literally responsible for 27% of global ecological breakdown even though we are 4.25% of the world’s population. You can see biodiversity disappearing in the US here but we are doing this all over the world, much of it through the war machine.

• Did you get to visit this incredible exhibit in Manhattan? It’s a massive spiderweb by Tomás Saraceno, upon which people can feel vibrations from spiders building their webs.

• Apparently ecological restoration is now a selling point for developers! Of course I am in favor of this movement but we must be ever-vigilante against greenwashing.

UPCOMING EVENTS

• Garden Conservancy Lecture: Ecological Horticulture in an Evolving World

  April 21, 2022

  2:00PM - 3:00PM

  Virtual and open to the public.

  This will be an interesting webinar. They’ve asked me to speak on one of my favorite topics: ecological gardening and the politics around it. But also on one of the most terrifying topics: myself. We shall see!

• Conference: No Biodiversity without Human Diversity!

  April 28, 2022

  Virtual and open to the public.

  This is a German conference on conservation that interrogates the colonialist history of ecological work in much of the world. Looks radical.

• Pollination Ecology at the Hillsdale Workshop Experience

  May 7 & 8, 2022

  In person and open to the public.

  I’m doing an in-person lecture on pollination ecology for the first time in years! The venue is large and safe. And it’s part of a marvelous festival in Hillsdale, NY where local garden, cook, and crafts people, teach their community about what they do. Looking forward to this tree walk with local, cute arborist, Chris Roddick.

• Waterfront Alliance Conference: Building a Livable Future

  May 24, 2022

  In person and open to the public.

  I’ll be on a panel about wildlife’s return to the waterfront with Done Reipe and an urban whale researcher!

• Nantucket Garden Festival

  July 12 - 14, 2022

  In person and open to the public.

  How wonderful to share the bill with Christopher Roddick at this beautiful gathering this summer. I’ll be speaking on BBP, he’ll lecture and give a walk on trees!

• Hollister House Garden Study Weekend Symposium

  September 10, 2022

  In person and open to the public.

  Super thrilled to speak about Brooklyn Bridge Park in my hometown at this fabulous symposium.

www.rebeccamcmackin.com