Salt Marsh, Silk Stockings

Marine Park is the largest park in Brooklyn, but most people think it ends at the NW end of Avenue U. Across the street, however, is the Salt Marsh Nature Center, which overlooks Marine Park Creek, which connects to Gerritsen Creek and flows into the Atlantic. This part of the park is a large, U-shaped (with man-made island in the center) area. Until a couple of years ago, the Nature Center’s path wended its way through a field of towering phragmites, and, given phragmites, not much else. All that has changed, and is very much in the process of being changed. This part of the park is not open to the public now, but I got a chance to go behind the fence into the restoration efforts being run by the Army Corps of Engineers and the NYC Parks Department. The tour was part of NYC Wildflower Week and given by Kat Bounds of the Parks’ Natural Resources Group.

This is a good place to note that not every plant has a pretty flower. And not every lovely flower blooms all the time. (“Wildflower” is a sexier name for a wild plant.) Seaside goldenrod, beachplum, Virginia creeper, staghorn sumac, and bayberry were just a few of the plants we saw in their infancy. Tree saplings included chestnut oak, red oak, pitch pine, Virginia pine, black tupelo, tuliptree, and sassafras. (See the comments for a full list.) The restoration includes the building/planting of low salt marsh, meadows, and mixed forest regimes, including Atlantic coastal maritime.

This is a park in the process of becoming. But then, Central and Prospect were once in swaddling, too. (These pictures are big so open them up for the full effect.)The broom sedge and switch grass meadow.One of the woodland areas, here obviously dominated by pine (three species). The soil seen in the left background is glacial till from several hundred feet below the surface, excavated elsewhere in the city and reused here. The wood chip mulch is from blow-downs caused by last year’s deadly tornado and micro-burst.The low salt marsh, planted with spartina grass, and on the bank in the foreground a mix of species. The entire marsh is currently crisscrossed with yellow streamers to keep Canada geese away. Although coddled by self-styled “animal lovers,” the invasive geese are profoundly destructive to certain habitats, and would simply devour the infant marsh if not for this protection. A couple of killdeer, who are nesting in the area, were spotted in here, along with spotted sandpiper, American oystercatcher, and red-winged blackbird, so the goose netting doesn’t bother smaller birds.

Landfill was once used to expand the city into its squishy edges, before we realized how vital salt marshes and wetlands are. That landfill consisted of all sorts of crap, including coal dust, rubble and construction debris, and household garbage. For some reason, the garbage here included lots of silk stockings (bless those caterpillars, the stuff doesn’t seem to break down when buried!). Someone’s great uncle Morty was a wholesaler maybe and lost his socks when nylon came in? Bounds said they find the stockings in almost every hole they dig for plantings (along with bottles, shoe soles, and et cetera). Clearly a park, then, with great legs.

UPDATE: I’ve learned that the western part of Marine Park, left out of this restoration effort, is under constant threat from ATVs. These monstrous toys, illegal in the city’s parks, ravage this section the area with impunity. This schizophrenia seems so typical of the Parks Department: on the one hand, millions of dollars (in this case mostly federal) for a careful restoration effort, while right next door nothing is even done to maintain and protect the area.