Autumn: American Chestnut

Prospect Park’s American chestnuts are still with us, no thanks to the onslaught of wild weather this year. One of the young trees is bent over, weighed down by last week’s snowstorm, and not rebounded. The heavy, wet snow combined with still-leaved trees — a fine illustration of why our broad-leaved trees lose their leaves before winter — was a disaster; Central Park and the NY Botanical Garden seem to have been hit harder than Prospect this time, but, city-wide, the last couple of years of freakish weather have been devastating.