Staten Island
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Spring Beauties
We found two woodland wildflowers in bloom yesterday on Staten Island:Trout Lily, a.k.a. Yellow Adder’s Toungue (!) Erythronium americanum. Lots of these handsome, mottled leaves poking out of the carpet of leaf litter. Note that the particular plants above are single-leaf. It’s the ones with two leaves that produce a flower:A buzz of insects were…
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Skunk Cabbage, Take Two
So I just missed the blooming of the skunk cabbage this year. In fact, I’ve never seen it. The photo in my previous post was taken in the Native Flora Garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden on Tuesday; there were just a few post-bloom leaves there. The pictures in this post come from today on…
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Back 40 Update
A better view of the pin oak sapling. The Staten Island native meadow mix bed. This is my biggest pot; like most everything in my backyard, it was found on the street and recycled. While moving some soil, I found a number of grubs who had buried into the earth for the winter:They buried themselves…
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Top of the Island
Freshkills Park had its second annual “sneakpeak” open house Sunday. On the western end of Staten Island, Fresh Kills, as it was then called, was the site of one of the world’s largest landfills. The last barge of trash was delivered in 2001. Other historic highlights: NYC’s ocean dumping outlawed by Supreme Court 1934; Fresh…
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Field Trip: Staten Island
Staten Island was the last of the city’s five borough’s to develop. Most of that development came after the Verrazano Bridge opened in 1964, so it was late “post-war” but it was definitely suburban (some of it god-awful). It remains the least populated part of the city; hence, it is the greenest of the boroughs.…
Backyard and Beyond 