Naval Cemetery Landscape

A prairie grows in Brooklyn, atop the decommissioned naval hospital cemetery at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. The Naval Cemetery Landscape is part of the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative. It is small, compact, and very grass-green.The day we visited last week was hot as global-warming-damned August, but the flowers will still mostly not yet in bloom.Some of the grasses were.From the Greenway site: “This experience evokes the histories of settlement and cultivation, life and death, while slowing the heart rate* and connecting visitors with the stories of the site. The wildflower meadow, with more than fifty species of native plants,** offers much needed fodder for the pollinators critical to the ecological health of the region. Initially established in a strict geometric arrangement, the plantings will eventually drift across the site, creating new patterns and establishing a self-sustaining, ‘open-ended’ ecology intended to draw people, birds, moths and bees in a rich celebration of life.”

*The only other people there that blazingly hot morning were two joggers and a workman on break from digging up the sidewalk. He seemed to get it.

**Note that the pictures under the Design and Nature tab stress the pretty flowers, not the unsexy grasses.