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Mulberry Overhang
We don’t have many trees or bushes that have differently shaped leaves on the same plant. Sassafras (S. albidum), with its three different leaf-shapes, is one. (The roots of these used to be made into sassafras tea and sodas; a crushed leaf smells like a soda fountain root beer and is immensely refreshing.) The mulberries…
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Three Gowanus Trees
The Valley of the Shadow of the Gowanus, as I like to call it, is the lowland between the ridge of Brooklyn Heights and the Harbor Hill Moraine. The western slope of Park Slope and the eastern slope of Punkiesburg (Cobble Hill) used to drain down into the marshy Gowanus creek, thought to have been…
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Arches
It does us good to remind ourselves that Prospect Park is a synthesis of the natural and the unnatural. The park is a highly engineered production, with drainage tiles laid underneath the Long Meadow, and fire hydrants in the middle of the Midwood, and the old reservoir built into Lookout Hill.Yesterday, the delightful Christopher Gray,…
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The Monarchs Are Here
A male monarch butterfly, Danaus plexippus, in the Battery Bosque yesterdy. You can see some examples of monarch caterpillars in my post from last August. (And you can tell this is a male, even this blurry, because of the small spots in the hindwing veins.) The Bosque, named after the trees that tower over it,…
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Beyond the Back 40
If you leave it alone, they will come. Oh, yes, they will. Daisy fleabane, Japanese knotweed, and some worts (perhaps a hogwort or two?) fill the back 2/3rds my building’s backyard. This veldt is beyond the fence containing my own Back 40 and under the purview of the upstairs neighbor, known here ’bouts as Stompy…
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Aphids
A fine crop of aphids are raising themselves in the Back 40. These tiny sapsuckers are a photographer’s challenge, a gardener’s nightmare. There are more and 1,300 species in North America, according to Garden Insects of North America. They generally reproduce asexually, with a sexual phase once a year (which produce over-wintering eggs). We may…
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Four Sparrow Marsh
Four Sparrow Marsh this early summer day, at low tide. While most everybody else in town was celebrating Gay Pride and the state’s passage of marriage equality (late Friday night, and about time, too), a few of us were being tormented by “mischievous and annoying insects.” I shouldn’t have loaned my head-covering mesh to friends…
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Fallout
The lighthouse keeper on Machias Seal Island — kept there by the Canadian Coast Guard to make sure the little island, claimed by both Canada and the US, stays Canadian, O Canada… but I digress — the lighthouse keeper took this sequence of photos on the night of May 24 this year. Bad weather caused…
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Old School
“The draining of the swamp lands is not a new idea. Such lands are not only unproductive of anything which can subserve any important purpose, but they are productive of numerous evils. Teeming with miasma, the home of mischievous and annoying insects they are blotches upon the otherwise fair face of nature. To tender them…
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Marsh Walk
Salt marshes are some of the most productive ecosystems we know of, but they have traditionally been treated as wastelands and dumping-grounds. On Sunday morning, I’ll be leading a tour of Four Sparrow Marsh, one of the last salt marshes remaining in New York City, for NYC Wildflower Week. If you’d like to come you…
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Backyard and Beyond 