Prospect: A Year in the Park

Quiet riot

I confess: I've been avoiding Sakura Matsuri, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's cherry-blossom festival, for awhile now. In the rare years (like this one) when the blossoms manage to coincide with the event, it's mobbed; when the blossoms are too early or already underfoot, it's still mobbed. The point of "hanami" ("flower viewing") is admittedly to party; apparently there's a Japanese saying, "Dumplings rather than flowers." But the last time we went, we even waited 40 minutes for a Bento box.

But I won't miss the annual "running of the perennials": the BBG Members' Preview of their annual plant sale. At 4:30 sharp, garden loons descend with rusty red Radio Flyer wagons on the Cherry Esplanade, which was still madly blossoming yesterday after last weekend's orgy of hanamania. Young children did backflips on the tender grass; older ones, like mine, were pressganged into helping plant-crazed parents haul their loot.

 

 

 

I got heucheras, which thrive in my shady, arid problem patches, and 3 different kinds of cherry tomatos, because the big beefy heirlooms keep dying tragically in midseason of unnamed diseases. There's also a rose geranium and an alpine strawberry in there, an Asian eggplant and a "Labrador violet," which is dainty and not at all like a goofy drooling dog.

 

 

 

 

 

It was just about the quintessence of spring, this last day of April—cool breeze, fresh green, and overhead the lavish blooms that my college-bound daughter described at age 5 as looking like "the trees were wearing fluffy pink sweaters." And now, to kill those plants.

All photographs Brenda L. Becker

Gold, linger

Sorry...after "Skyfall," I couldn't resist.

This time of year, just before Thanksgiving, I love the last bits of gold that cling to the dark foresty bits. But the foliage, and the forest, got walloped in the home stretch by a double shot of Sandy and snow, making "Caution" tape a common sight this November fluttering on piles of fallen branches.

 

 

 

 

 

A walk along Wellhouse Drive revealed plenty of gold, and even green, still spangling the woods on Lookout Hill.

 

But this ginkgo, which is a personal friend of mine, stood broken and battered. The truck underneath appeared to have just dragged the electric boat Independence out of the lake; the poor boat was covered with bird poo and feathers, and its future is uncertain.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There's a lot more big sky along the lakeside, where more old friends are suddenly missing.

But a few revelers are left at the autumn party. This seems to be a witch hazel of some sort by the Greenwood Avenue playground; I thought witch hazel only bloomed in January.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If this isn't "scarlet oak," it should be. It was "blooming" near the Maryland Monument, with its evocation of spilled patriots' blood.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Did you know that the fall colors have been in the leaves all along, just waiting for the green to fade away and reveal them? I hope I grow old like a leaf.

Pinkmarket, bluemarket

Before sampling the madness of yesterday's GoogaMooga Festival, I did make it to the Greenmarket at Grand Army Plaza. Rhubarb was still a painful $5 a pound (it takes a lot of raw rhubarb to make a pot of stewed rhubarb, and I cannot get through spring without a pot of stewed rhubarb). However, local strawberries were "down" to 2 boxes for $10. Sigh.

What caught my eye were the flowers. It's a great time of year for tender, old-fashioned ones that few commercial florists ever carry. Above: Dame's Rocket, a.k.a. Hesperis. In my garden, this flower refuses to grow anywhere except between the cracks of cement; there is nothing like a dame.

I believe these are "Bachelor's Buttons," a.k.a. Cornflowers. (Apparently they grow wild in some cornfields.) Now when someone describes "cornflower-blue eyes," you can verify.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I don't know what these are. If I had a SmartPhone, could I get an app that would let me wave my phone over a blossom and identify it? If you know what these are, leave a comment and let me know!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GREENMARKET DOG OF THE DAY

The fringed sausage is definitely named Banjo. Her big buddy is named something serious that begins with G...Grimsby? Anyway, they are great friends. It's nice to know a friend has your back...literally.

 

When the robins come

Are robins becoming more numerous? Every spring, there seem to be more of them. This guy was taking a violent bath in the park's lake.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Freshly storm-soaked and chilly, Prospect Park at sunset was subdued and lightly populated. Spring green, a thousand shades of it, is everywhere, along with splashes of delicate white.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's surprising how many trees glow red in their first tender foliage. This maple on Nellie's Lawn was one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The baby leaves on this oak blushed, too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Almost home, in the Parade Grounds, I happened on this sidewalk memorial. A quick Googling revealed that Tamon Robinson was a beloved employee in a Fort Greene "Connecticut Muffin" coffee shop where, curiously, we just stopped in last Sunday after catching a movie at BAM. We had wondered about the oaktag memorial poster in the window; apparently the young man was run down by an NYPD squad car last week under mysterious circumstances and later died. Not surprisingly, his grieving family is seeking answers. How he came to be mourned among the ballfields of Flatbush, or by whom, I do not know.

 

If I shouldn't be alive

When the Robins come,

Give the one in Red Cravat,

A Memorial crumb –

If I couldn't thank you,

Being fast asleep,

You will know I'm trying

With my Granite lip!                                      

                            --Emily Dickinson

Bipolar weekend

 

This was yesterday afternoon, the Lilac Collection, Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Tonight, listening to cold rain lashing the windows and gusts howling, it seems long ago.

Every year, it is my stated mission to inhale lilacs from every single bush, allegedly to detect nuances of scent among different varieties. (For example, white ones have a very light scent; blue ones are incense-like.) In truth, I am just drugging.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the Cranford Rose Garden, a few bushes were already crowned in glory. Roses in April, really?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

    

Our native wildflowers in the Northeast are delicate debutantes, all in white. Left to right: Solomon's seal, false Solomon's seal, and trillium. The shady floor of the Native Flora Garden was carpeted with them. Trillium is also called wakerobin, and there were plenty of wide-awake robins marching around in the undergrowth.

We observed sadly that Streamreach, our beloved Ent near the BBG's wandering waterway, who shaded many games of "float stuff downstream" during Daughter's childhood summers, had sustained two mighty wounds since we last paid him homage. But he's standing, half an Ent still nobler than another tree whole, and I hope tonight's brutal winds do him no further harm.

Time-lapse green roof at BBG

February launched with uncanny warmth, so the Daughter and I headed to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Snowdrops? In 62-degree sunshine, I half-expected lilacs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The parking lot was a scene of wild activity, as construction forges ahead on the new Visitor Center. Guys everywhere pointed at plans and big machines in the happiest guy-like fashion.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yes, this really was the glacial moraine in the Ice Age.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This bothers me: The new building really looms behind the Japanese Garden, famously designed to create the illusion of endless vistas and serene isolation. It sort of lurks behind the scrim of trees like the Mother Ship.

 

 

The building's "Living Roof" should help it blend in. I confess I didn't even notice it (in February a green roof is a brown roof). Check out this cool time-lapse video; if only life were this easy.

 

BBG Living Roof Installation from Brooklyn Botanic Garden on Vimeo.

Pretty poison

Aw, what's that spunky plant willing to brave this week's balmy January weather and push up through the leaf litter? Who's giving us some welcome, hopeful green in a preview of spring? Yes...it's poison ivy, staking its claim just inside the Center Drive and dreaming of summer's bare ankles and toes to come. Sigh. goutweed! Thanks to one of the park's landscape management experts for pointing out that goutweed (Aegopodium podagraria) "is NOT a native plant, but has been very difficult for us to control. Poison ivy would have reddish new leaves, but as far as I have seen is not out in leaf yet."  Three leaves, leave it be, anyway! To learn more about goutweed's nasty habits, go here. (The stuff does look lovely in summer, though, with its snowy canopy of flowers, and according to the Plant Conservation Alliance, it is used in parts of Russia as a salad green; there should be enough locavorious vegans in Brooklyn, not to mention Russians, to get the job done.)

  

Subtler touch of green was found in the moss on these roots.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Very Large Array of dumpsters along Center Drive is unnerving, but I did like the hues of these cans.

 

Thanks to my friend and coach Artist Karen for dragging me back to the park for a long walk after a fortnight of near-paralysis in front of my computer. Without her prodding, I would have extended that funk by another day.

 

 

 

 

 

And I would have missed Tuesday's Blurry Bird of the Day: a Downy Woodpecker, frantically swaying and pecking on a phragmites. I found this ludicrous; c'mon, bird, there are still plenty of trees left in Prospect Park even after the latest round of forest surgery! But according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology:

The active little Downy Woodpecker is a familiar sight at backyard feeders and in parks and woodlots, where it joins flocks of chickadees and nuthatches, barely outsizing them. An often acrobatic forager, this black-and-white woodpecker is at home on tiny branches or balancing on slender plant galls, sycamore seed balls, and suet feeders.

That's what I aspire to be..."an often acrobatic forager"...if I can only get out of the house.

In search of Happy Light in 2012

This winter, I'm throwing the book at SAD; I even bought a Verilux "HappyLight"®, before which I slumped in the frigid pre-dawn this morning. But I'm also determined to use Prospect Park as my full-spectrum light therapy...and to recommit to the daily park visits that prompted this chronicle three years ago. New Year's Day was spent in the HappyDark of the movies and a German restaurant, but on Monday afternoon I dragged Spouse to see the sun's last rays gild the lake.

 

 

 

 

 

And this morning, I braved the bitter wind to see the sun peer over the treeline behind the Long Meadow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The dogs were already out in force, jubilant in the bitter air. (Which reminds me: My limited edition of Park Bark: At Play with the Dogs of Brooklyn, a photo celebration of the park's dogs and their owners, is getting close to sold out! Thanks to all who ordered a copy for a holiday present, and if you'd like to get in an order (Valentine's Day approacheth), by all means go here and let me know if you'd like a dedication written on the flyleaf.)

 

 

 

 

 

WACKY TREE OF THE DAY

Monday afternoon, I spied what looked like a bunch of lime-colored, corrugated softballs in the leaves, under a thicket of thorny branches. One clung to the tree overhead. I struggled through the thorns and pocketed one to identify later. As I suspected, it was an Osage orange (Maclura pomifera). I've heard of these in the park but never found one before.

 

Here are some cool facts about Osage oranges:

* They are related to the mulberry, and are not citruses. (The fruits supposedly smell a little orangey, but mine didn't.)

* Few animals except horses eat the fleshy fruit (technically called a drupe), which is inedible and mildly poisonous to humans--but an extinct ground sloth may once have relished it as a slothalicious treat. Some folks also claim bug-repellent properties for the fruit, which exudes a milky sap (as I discovered when I sliced it open).

* Its nicknames include "hedge apple" and "horse apple." Grown as a hedge, it predated barbed wire as a way to fence in cattle.

* The tree's wood has been prized by bow-makers dating back to the Comanches for its flexibility and strength; early French settlers called it bois d'arc, or "bow wood."

* Merriwether Lewis sent cuttings of Osage orange to Thomas Jefferson.

Happy New Year...see you in the park!

Not one lasts

The day after Thanksgiving involved pie for breakfast. Later, I dragged the three of us to the park. A brisk mid-afternoon walk, this time of year, quickly becomes a sunset walk.

Drummers' Grove stood empty.

Oak leaves piled up against the Oriental Pavilion.

Across the lake, an animated party (bridal, apparently) worked with a photographer by the rustic shelter. He had rigged up elaborate reflectors, but none as good as the lake itself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

Seed structures everywhere...in readiness for dispersal, death and rebirth.

 

We drank coffee on the Boathouse steps as the sun sank behind the trees.

 

Good Lord, Advent starts tomorrow...just in time to ease the heart as the shadows stretch their longest.

 

 

I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts.

The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper sunburned woman,

       the mother of the year, the taker of seeds.

The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes, new beautiful things

       come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind, and the old things go,

       not one lasts.

Autumn Movement   by Carl Sandburg

 

 

 

 

Drenched

Huge thunderstorm passed over the park, then the sun burst out. Then it happened all over again. Then I took a walk. Everyone disappeared and reappeared twice in rapid succession:  dog-walkers, runners, soccer players. The sun dappled in just before setting, trees dripped, and everything smelled like the deepest woods possible. The humid warmth that has lingered like a clueless guest was vanquished, and a cool mist cloaked everything. Autumn is right on time.

I suspected I'd find some fungus, and I did. Somebody already got to these for a tasty bite; since no squirrel or vole was Socratically prostrate nearby, I presume they were edible.