Strawberry Moon Newsletter

Hi Plant People,

Happy (belated) SUPER Strawberry Moon!

I’ve got big news to share: I’ll be stepping aside as Director of Horticulture at Brooklyn Bridge Park this summer. I was awarded the Loeb Fellowship in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard and am moving up to Cambridge for a year with my family. It is of course thrilling and terrifying. This park has been my life’s work for over a decade, allowing me to experiment with strategies to encourage urban biodiversity in the world’s best laboratory, with all the best people. I truly believe it to be the best gig in New York City. But I have big plans and dreams to chase so I’m off! ♥

—

I was charmed and thrilled to be interviewed for chic beauty brand, F. Miller. Photog Georgia Hilmer took such pretty photos. As someone with one hairstyle, I consider this a great accomplishment.

—

I had a great time talking to the guys on the Native Plants, Healthy Planet podcast! You can listen here.

GARDEN NOTES

Serviceberries are ripe in Brooklyn and it brings me great joy to post my favorite piece ever written on native plants and our relationship to them. This story of Amelanchier by Robbin Wall Kimmerer is a gift that rightfully locates our ecological work within a cultural, economic, and historic context. Please read and share. I promise it will deepen your relationship with the organisms around you. It’s also lovely to hear her read it. Enjoy!

—

No Mow May is over and those of use who garden for wildlife are breathing a sigh of relief. It’s a complicated initiative. On the one hand, it is wonderful that people are paying attention and even taking action, to support wildlife. My mom sent me a video she took of a black swallowtail on her blooming Ajuga (hi mom!). On the other hand, listening to people romanticize dandelions gets old quickly. It’s hard to cheer them on when we know how little these plants offer the few pollinators forced to visit them. BUT, I am truly hopeful that No Mow May is a gateway action. It’s a short jump from seeing butterflies on your lawn to planting host plants and prioritizing native species. Even the dandelion people are outside, looking at flower visitors and there’s no better prescription for ecological literacy than that. So with that optimism, I strongly suggest you read Dr. Sheila Colla’s excellent critique of the No Mow May movement. It hits every target and distinguishes real stewardship from benign neglect. If we are going to reverse species decline and extinctions, we will need to do “the concerted – and joyous –work of participating in an active relationship and connection with natural systems.”

RESOURCE SPOTLIGHT

• Gardening for butterflies? Done and done. Gardening for BATS??? Let’s talk. Bat Conservation International just put out this helpful guide to welcome bats into our gardens. Tips include turning off lights, leaving tree snags, and all the same things we do to encourage wildlife. One neat trick was to plant light colored flowers because they are more likely to be pollinated by moths, which then the bats can eat!

• Do you know about BONAP? It’s a community effort driven by Dr. John Kartesz at the NCBG and I and consider it the most helpful resource out there. I use the site multiple times a day to look up species distributions. The maps are far better than the USDA’s, with more recent data that distinguishes between plants native to a certain area that are introduced or adventive elsewhere. You can get lost in the resources the site provides but I live on this page. For example, yesterday I was looking up which species of Phlox are native to NY, so I go to the Phlox page, and review it, noticing for the first time that my beloved P. stolonifera is not actually native here, but P. maculata is and we don’t have it in the Park. Endlessly useful.

• Lots of birds migrate at night. BirdCast from Cornell lets you plug in your county or state and see which species and how many birds are estimated to be flying above you that evening. It’s a fun way to observe migrations.

IN THE NEWS

• The Chelsea Garden show wrapped last month and, once again reflected the critical nature of the biodiversity crisis. A beaver-themed garden won Best in Show, calling on gardeners to rewild their land, by creating habitat for rare animals. It’s really wonderful to see this movement grow in the UK but still so puzzling that, even when people are intentionally creating gardens for wildlife, there does not seem to be an emphasis on native plants. Can anyone explain this to me? I’m genuinely confused by it. Anyway, full Chelsea galleries here and award recipients, with photos, here. My faves were the Mind Garden, the Brewin Dolphin Garden, the St Mungo’s Garden, and the Place2Be Securing Tomorrow Garden.

• But I’m happy to report that the US has its own show garden event and it’s quite good! The Philadelphia Flower Show wraps this week. It was hard to find galleries to share but I really loved Refugia’s garden, The Inner Landscape, as well as a collaboration between Abra Lee and students at Auburn University called Mixed Shades, Much Joy. Apiary Studio did Urban Afterlife and Martha Schwartz made a giant mushroom sculpture. Lest you think we’re trying too hard to emulate British traditions, rest assured that this is still America: the show featured a “Men’s Garden” which was literally just a tree fort and a Jeep.

• Tree and fungi people have debated for years who has the largest organism on earth, “Pando” the Aspen grove in CO or a giant Oregonian honey mushroom. Well they’ve both been upstaged by a massive colony of eelgrass (not a grass) off the coast of Australia, measuring an astounding 50,000 acres and estimated to be 4,500 years old.

• This is a dream of a piece, a floral florilegium, on writers writing on gardening. Jamaica Kincaid, Virginia Wolf, and Oliver Sacks were all gardeners and thankfully told us about it. I find this quote wonderful, “Is art resistance? Can you plant a garden to stop a war? It depends how you think about time. It depends what you think a seed does, if it’s tossed into fertile soil. But it seems to me that whatever else you do, it’s worth tending to paradise, however you define it and wherever it arises.”

• Margaret Renkle writes on her attempts to help monarchs by micromanaging them in her garden in the Times. It’s a hard one. I try to keep in mind that we’re not here to “save” anyone in particular with this work, but rather create the conditions for them to thrive on their own.

• Trillium blooms emerge facing south, but track the sun across the horizon over the course of the day. This movement, “heliotropism,” has now been shown to increase fertilization by 12%. Researchers think this is due to flowers being warmer, which attracts more chilly pollinators, who then hang out for longer periods.

• Margaret Roach profiled Trillium in her NYT column, in light of the recent report detailing their tragic risk of extinction.

• A hilarious review of bird nests by an art critic from McSweeney’s. On the Robin: “I’m unimpressed. There’s just something so nest-y about it. It’s trying too hard to be a nest.”

• One of the reasons it drives me crazy when people promote exotic plants as beneficial for native wildlife is that we just don’t know enough about these interactions to say if they’re truly helpful. Nectar is a witches’ brew of yeasts, sugars, and amino acids that pollinators can use medicinally. While pollen… new research is astounding. A new paper argues that the microbes that live within pollen are literally just as important for solitary bees as the pollen itself. What’s more, the specific composition of pollens and microbes provided to bee larva can be the difference between life and death. Knowing this, we simply cannot say that dandelions (for instance) are an acceptable substitute for spring ephemerals because we happen to see bees on them. It’s also a damning indictment of fungicides, systemic insecticides and any other gardening additive that will effect pollen. We must do better.

• Meanwhile, pollen can also kill! Researchers found 22 different known plant viruses on pollen, in addition to literally hundreds of unknown viruses. They also found that agricultural monocultures supported >100 viruses while native grasslands contained around a dozen.

• I just found out about the Dwarf Tomato Project and it gives me hope for the future. It’s an international community effort to cross dwarf tomatoes with heirlooms to create more compact versions of our favorite plants. They now have over 100 varieties available online, all following the Open Source Seed Initiative.

• I really like this post from The Prairie Ecologist, Chris Helzer. He describes his job as a “prairie referee,” which I think is an apt description for the work so many of us do. He writes, “All the species in a prairie are competing with others for space and resources. Our job is to manage the game such that ensures nobody always wins and nobody always loses. If we can do that, all those species should be able to persist and keep contributing to the resilience of the prairie.”

• So many of my favorite people in this piece on Boxwood in the NYT! Margaret Roach takes a wholistic view of this bedrock plant and gives us the state of the blight. Boxwood-guru and wonderful person, Andrea Filippone, shares her strategies for designing with boxwood now.

• Seeing native garden plants in the wild is thrilling and helpful. Jared Barns does a beautiful job of this in his blog posting on Amsonia hubrichtii (part 1, part 2). Apparently this Bluestar, like others, has water distributed seeds and that is why it is most often found on the banks of rivers and streams.

• Cool, new paper on urban forest invertebrates, how they live and how we can support them. Recommendations are: encourage native plants, leave leaves, protect exposed soil, protect and restore water bodies, maintain vegetation’s structural complexity, all the while reducing pollutants, urban heat island effect, invasive plants, light pollution and lastly, empowering people to become landscape stewards.

• Artist Mona Caron has unveiled an 8 story mural of a milkweed, Asclepias speciosa, on the side of a building in Denver. It’s part of her series on “weeds” which speaks to community and ecological resilience.

• A California court has ruled that bumblebees are fish and that is great news! It means that bees, as well as other insects can be included in state endangered species designations.

• This is a wonderful profile of indigenous ecologist Jessica Hernandez, who wrote Fresh Banana Leaves and calls on us to decolonize conservation. She says that indigenous people are “often seen as areas of expertise rather than experts ourselves… as research subjects rather than researchers.” It’s a solid reminder that everyone benefits when indigenous people are given back their land.

• The Queen of England has been ruling over her empire for 70 years and British people apparently not only like this but are throwing her a massive party. “The Queen’s Jubilee” brings us wondrous beauty, as well as the horrors of excess. In the beauty category, we have Nigel Dunnet’s new installation, the Tower of London Superbloom. It’s wonderful. Inspired by the superbloom of California, 20 million flowers fill the historic moat without disturbing the soil profile or architecture. Amidst it all is a Willow “nest” from which to view the flowers. As for horrors, Thomas Heatherwick is responsible for this …sculpture? It’s a massive, fake tree, holding (drum roll) real trees. One could not design a better homage to overbuilt, green-washed, architecture that serves ego rather than anything resembling the natural world. I personally find Heatherwick confounding, as he creates these lovely, chic works like Little Island, but then also…. Vessel…

• Research on the harms of Glyphosate continues to roll in. Bumble bees exposed to the herbicide were unable to properly regulate the temperature of their nests, a likely dire predicament in the wild.

• Here is a lovely profile of New Zealand artist and gardener Michael Shepard. He speaks of his garden as an “ecological island” and says, ‘I think the western mentality has pushed all life to the edge, so what I tried to do in this garden was give the life on the edge a space to be.” The profile is in a new Australian journal called Wonderland.

• Cities are the fastest growing ecosystems on the planet. And many species, including us, have adapted and even evolved to live here. This article gives us a comprehensive rundown on the state of urban evolution: urban white clover makes less cyanide in foliage, rats have smaller teeth to eat our pizza, water fleas are smaller but tougher, and tiger mosquitoes grow larger in red-lined neighborhoods. Limited genetic diversity tends to stifle urban evolution which, at least with plants, seems addressable.

• Some people take quite a romantic view of urban ecology. In this interview with Matthew Gandy, he uses the phrase “cosmopolitan ecologies to emphasize that these accidental gardens are really global gardens, and they show the interconnected nature and human culture, not just now but through history.”

• Here is a totally cute and short video on the functionality and importance of soils from the BBC.

• A lake in Florida is suing to protect itself and that honestly makes perfect sense when you read this wonderful New Yorker article by Elizabeth Kolbert on the legal rights of nature.

• Reports are in for the eastern monarch population status over this winter and it’s good-ish news? Populations are holding steady from last year, but still less than half of the population necessary to hold off extinction. To help monarchs, turn off outside lights at night, as new research shows that nighttime light pollution causes butterflies to fly at night in confusion.

• And, as a reward for those of you who made it this far: a brief history of butterflies in art! They’ve been used to evoke life’s impermanence, women’s natures, Jesus Christ, and of course, transformation. Pretty stuff.

UPCOMING EVENTS

• Polly Hill Arboretum

  June 22, 2022

  In person and open to the public.

  Did you know that much of Brooklyn Bridge Park was designed to echo the ecology of Martha’s Vineyard? It’s true and one reason it’s so fun to lecture at the Polly Hill Arboretum. I’ll be speaking on BBP and ecology, followed the next day by a tree walk with BBG Arborist extraordinaire, Christopher Roddick.

• 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 ecology at 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