This blog gives voice to the trees that surround us, and delves into history as a living, breathing thing. It explores the culture of arboriculture and of conservation. It takes what I see as I go about my day and gives it some context in what I hope is an entertaining way.
I first launched the blog from the Cabin, where I developed a fascination with the outdoors that led to me becoming a professional arborist. It was an 18th-century log structure, with logs that had been patched many times, a kitchen in the basement and a crumbling outhouse (a two-seater!) — the perfect perch from which to fly to times gone by. It was here that I wrote my two historical suspense novels, The Orphanmaster and Savage Girl. both set eons ago in Manhattan, and Love, Fiercely, which focused on the eccentric who compiled what is still the finest (and lengthiest) tome ever written about New York.
In this tiny cabin in the woods, 50 miles due north of New York City, some feverish activity took place. We called ourselves the slipper people, my husband and I – Gil being a writer, too — because all day long we hunched over our computers churning out the next best seller. We never had to get out of our slippers.
It seems sudden now but it must have come upon me gradually: the reality that there was a whole green world out there. We had six acres of woods, a towering magnolia that flushed pink in spring, box turtles that preferred a certain sandy spot alongside our driveway to lay their eggs. Still, becoming an arborist—and spending my days in workbooks rather than slippers!—was a different direction than I ever imagined when I started as a writer.
Earlier in my life, my experience of trees was confined to the mundane, on the one hand, or the spectacular. Trees were the giants that streamed along the highway in a solid green whoosh. I couldn’t tell you the names of any species aside from oak or maple, and my knowledge of those two was limited—one turned brown in autumn and one blazed with color.
Now I went to work for a tree company that operated in the five boroughs of New York, embracing a new life that would include delicate lindens, craggy honey locusts, soaring London planes. I saw the soil beneath these trees’ roots, and the gnarled, venerable roots themselves. I admired the pruners who performed aerial feats above my head, and re-visualized New York as an Eden of branching, breathing species. Then, as I made my way around off the job, outside New York City, I took a new hands-on look at grand old trees, street trees, leaves and seeds and stems.
What came to interest me most was not just the biology of a grand old copper beech, but its culture—all the people that slipped under those sinuous hanging branches over time to engrave their initials in its bark.
You will find both science and story when you dip into the posts here. Cheers!
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this Memorial Day: Kara Hultgreen F-14 pilot in the U.S. Navy, who perished in a tragic accident in 1994. I got to know Hultgreen lo so many years ago while researching Tailspin: Women at War in the Wake of Tailhook. I wrote the book at a tipping point – in 1992, the Navy changed its outdated policies…
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A trip to see a large old tree, rotten to the core, in my capacity as a member of my village’s Tree Board, led me to the neighborhood where I grew up. In fact, it stands right across the street from my childhood home. That street served as my madeleine during this visit. Indulge me, recalling…
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the Arnold Arboretum in Boston. The sprawling 281-acre park was laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted in 1872 and still represents a great refuge if the crush of the metropolis (ha ha, crush? In Boston? I guess it’s all relative) begins to get to you. Of course we took the quiet, meandering little Beech Path.…
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and possibly of the year, and maybe in the history of the world, and I am going for a walk with my friend Barbara, an author, the type of person who can use the word lyrical in a sentence and get away with it. I always like the Lyndhurst estate, acres of lawn and statuesque trees surrounding…
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is that while for most folks it’s about planting a few symbolic trees, its reach is immense. I attended a celebratory event in White Plains on April 29, at Highlands Middle School, produced by the White Plains Beautification Foundation, a group that believes “the beautification of our City lifts the spirits of all who live…
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took place on Ellis Island. That’s my favorite kind of event, don’t know about you. A duck took it into her head to create a new family in an abandoned enclosed courtyard. We have a few of these areas in the ruined hospital complex: semicircular, small spaces where patients would have been encouraged to go…
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buds out at the end of April-early May, strutting its stuff alongside highways and abandoned roads. Then it explodes into bloom. There are a few I pass going to and from Ellis Island, in Liberty State Park. No one pays them any mind. But the tree also plays well with others, at home in a…
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late in life. It was a simple series of white flowers on a stem, nothing fancy, yet he insisted that it accompany him from the hospital to his room in the Care Center. A friend had brought it as a gift, and it somehow spoke to him, he who had never had a thought for…
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may not be the biggest or the buffest, but it is the best because I see it outside my office window every day. It grows outside the municipal building in our village. I’ve been looking forward to the moment it blooms. The cherry trees are not the only ones to boast the perfection of spring…
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from a sasquatch. Peoples’ lack of knowledge about tree species comes as something of a surprise as I begin to lead tours at Ellis Island. It has dozens of mature sycamores lining a landscaped lawn just in front of the main immigration building, as well as elsewhere in the complex of 29 buildings. Pose the…
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is here. And magic. Trees are still budding out, but in planters on the street flowers bloom. At Hekate, a “sober bar” on Manhattan’s lower east side, there is a little of all three. The music is the band Maputi, with Nora Balaban on the mbira, Banning Eyre on guitar and Rima Fand playing violin.…
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was my first thought upon entering the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin. Not true though. It’s only that they have such a massive presence everywhere you look. Other flowers also are poking up. Most of them I don’t know by name, though the garden is if anything overboard with its signage. Now even…
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First off, seedlings are available at 79.95 a pop. They’re rare. They’re historic. They’re cool. The story of their parentage goes back a ways. Let’s start with the more recent history. A crazy guy in Austin was spurned by his would-be lover under a gracious old Southern live oak that stood downtown amid all the…
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at times, it is awfully good to focus on the basics: coffee, tacos, and dogs. Fortunately there is an abundance of all three in Austin, Texas, where I happen to be sojourning for several days. I knew good things were in store when I spotted the taco food truck actually inside the airport terminal. It was…
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congregate volubly at Ellis Island for those who would pay attention. Some fortunate people enter through a back door bridge from Liberty State Park in New Jersey rather than the tried and true ferry. If you insist on visiting the Statue of Liberty, fine. I’ve seen her enough and I’ll probably never scale the heights…
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I really think her time has come. Finally. “They cannot roll back the rising tide of reform,” she said. “The world moves.” Yes, she had her problems. She was born into an abusive household on the rural Ohio frontier, one of 10 children, and didn’t start elementary school until the age of 8. Her mother…
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Don’t they? That’s the first thing that caught my eye on the bulletin board of teeny magnets in front of the expresso machine where I was purchasing about two gulps of five dollar latte. For a long time I thought I made no mistakes, then I thought I made nothing but mistakes. Now I’m going…
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between things, as Gil would have it, then it seems my course in the days since coming back to New York was about restoring some of those integuments, strengthening them. I went to a few places I love. Driving south to Wave Hill on a winter Sunday is like visiting family, its mansions and gardens…
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Across New York State, where I live, hunters took 1,346 black bears during 2021. DEC Commissioner Basil Seggos declared, “Although they aren’t always successful, thousands of dedicated hunters venturing afield each year help keep populations [of black bears] at desired levels, maintaining healthy bear populations in the state.” Both bows and muzzleloaders came into play. The heaviest…
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the Arizona desert moves itself to sprout. The ocatillo puts forth its first miniature green leaves. Fairy Duster joins the party. Pima Dynamite trails may be full of mountain bikes and power lines, but they go on and on despite humankind’s interference. This preserve was saved from development by a champion named Arthur W. Decabooter.…
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is something Gil and I sometimes say when we imagine that an idea we’ve come up with is something probably too esoteric or just ridiculous to interest anyone else. And I have had quite a few of these over the years. Books usually start with this kind of glimmer, and you can expect some ideas…
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First you have to see it. Can you see it? Maybe you can’t go all the way. Maybe the rocks underfoot prove too much for you, even if the saguaro forest at Spur Cross Ranch tempts you. Beefy, odd, some more masculine than others. A well placed bench welcomes us. Behind is a mature mesquite,…
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is a saying that that has become part of the vernacular, though no one quite knows who said it – Talleyrand? Napoleon? Gertrude Stein? It captures the spectrum of experiences I had today on my desert trip north. Sublime would be the weathered, battered signs that dot the old west. Up in Wikea, not an…
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Nowhere is sometimes beautiful, especially out a car window, roadside nowhere. If you’re in the right mood, that is. We drive north from Scottsdale to Cave Creek and pass pretty much nothing. Isn’t nothing interesting? If you have maybe too much too think about, beefy saguaros in a parking lot can seem pretty cool. Or…
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asked my brother as we scaled Pinnacle Peak in the late afternoon, among throngs of pleasure-hikers and trail-runners who didn’t seem to have a care about possibly spraining their ankles in the grit. He didn’t mean the cactus, which had an interesting appearance. Some of the saguaros appeared charred, girdled, as if they had been…
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is nowhere to be found in the series The Gilded Age. I recently had a conversation with a profesional arborist who also happened to be an English-literature nerd. We were comparing favorite authors, and I told him I loved the novelist Henry James and also his brother, the philosopher William James. When I added that I…
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were happy when Susan Orlean’s recent New Yorker article focused on a sylvan topic — The Tallest Known Tree in New York Falls in the Forest. Yet it rose some hackles in arborist circles as well. Yes, the January 2022 article actually singled out a white pine in that dated all the way back to 1675: good.…
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New York’s finest author (to my mind) was born into the uppertens 160 years ago, and wound up giving us some of the most indelible writing about the city, including The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, and countless Manhattan-centric short stories. Her engrossing memoir, A Backward Glance, has become a classic. In her autobiography, we learn…
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I’d rather look up to the peaks than down to the valleys. So I’m fortunate that any number of stupendous trails wind around the base of the mountains at Brown’s Ranch in Phoenix. Desert vistas abound at this former cattle ranch, which dates back to 1917. But first you must pay attention. A warning. I…
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are in order when you’re sprung from your Covid cell, told you’ve tested negative and are free to storm the world again. I walked in the miraculous Arizona desert landscape, among plants that are ancient yet fresh, survivors on only a few drops of rainfall a year. The oft-quoted lines from a Mary Oliver poem…
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in the middle of a pandemic while our democracy and society crumble? This girl!” This girl goes by the handle Badass Cross Stitch, but her civilian moniker is Shannon Downey, and she is out to teach us all to embroider. On her way across the country she is offering on-line tutorials about hoops, fabric, needles…
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that no one now has ever heard of is William Bartram. Maybe you are the exception. If you visit Bartram’s Garden outside Philadelphia you will find the oldest ginkgo tree in North America, grown from a seedling that was imported to Bartram in 1785 as a gift from noted plant collector William Hamilton of The Woodlands,…
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sag under their coat of snow while a god’s eye floats above. I’ve been hunkered down, distracted by the weather, researching my book about forests. To the process of book building I raise a toast: “Let be be finale of seem,” as Wallace Stevens put it in his poem “The Emperor of Ice Cream.” More interesting…
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to our grandchildren, it was so harsh, it was so difficult. Every day a challenge. Look at the newspaper, Covid infections run amok, out-of-control wildfires, people who had clearly lost all of their political marbles. Violence in prisons, larcenous gangs performing break and snatch routines in luxury stores. Was it really that bad, grandmother? Well, yes. And…
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and, like written poetry, sometimes you must talk yourself into reading them. Lyndhurst, the estate near where I live, makes it easier, because its 67 park-like acres offer an arboricultural bounty. Forget the house –a gothic revival castle designed in 1838 by Alexander Jackson Davis, when romanticism reigned. (Where was Frank Lloyd Wright when we needed…
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previous to his going to battle was the delectably mysterious caption of an old print hanging above the table at Elephant and Castle. The latte in a bowl also was delectable on this windy Manhattan day. I had just been reading a novel called Jacket Weather by current New York literary darling Michael DeCapite, in which Elephant and…
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is probably the best cold walk of all. The Old Croton Aqueduct today was a hospitable place for runners as well as musers. It was built underneath this trail between 1837 and 1842 by a group of largely Italian stone masons so that New York City would get clean water from up north. When the…
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take you to Hastings-on-Hudson, one-time home of good-witch actress Billie Burke and her husband Flo Ziegfeld. They repurposed a mansion in 1910 on a centrally located estate (calling it Burkeley Crest), and installed a menagerie that it is said included among other wonders, an elephant and some bears. At the age of 24, she wasn’t…
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Read no farther if you don’t like the Bronx, or dogs, or people, or trees. I’m moving on as an arborist to sites elsewhere in New York City, but thanks for the memories, Grand Concourse: Six miles of walking a day (sometimes just after dawn). It’s a good thing when your legs hurt. Graffiti –…
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along the Grand Boulevard from 175 Street to Fordham Road. Some have been planted among the new shrubs in the medians, and others in the new tree pits, sixty trees all told, a mixture of honey locusts, English oaks, gingkos, swamp white oaks, willow oaks and zelkovas. Checking out the work of the landscaping crew,…
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at the New York Botanical Garden’s Annual Holiday Train Show. I am not sure all of the hustling, bustling, a-little-bit-shoving visitors make note of how the marvelous creations come into being. A company called Applied Imagination (founded by a landscape architect) does it all (as they do in myriad cities across the country), re-creating the…
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have something in common. Neither one is actually white, it’s only a trick of the eye. White is what we see when an object absorbs no visible light but instead reflects back to our eyes all colors in equal proportion. Paper birch trees appear white to us because they reflect most of the sun’s rays. In…
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in the small town of Belfast, Maine, where ornaments have been hung on light poles by members of the Fire Department since the 1980’s (oh so long ago — “vintage”). No one can explain to me why this passion for a plastic Santa has taken hold, only that yes, it it is quirky, and perhaps Santa…
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and his bashful first rendition of the first bars of “Octopus’s Garden” on Get Back, which I binged furiously this past week along with much of America. Maybe it was My Octopus Teacher, a loving and fascinating documentary about a man searching for answers under the sea. Or perhaps it was the holiday email from…
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on the Grand Concourse takes some interesting forms as winter approaches. A fine new scooter (just the sight of it a torment to me since I crashed on an e-bike in August) sports a nifty add-on – custom mittens to keep a rider toasty. The lime green paint that the developers slathered over the plywood…
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Going south to Washington. DC is only an excuse to stop by Faidley’s, in Baltimore. Faidley’s is open. Say no more. It’s one of those kinds of places with quippy signs. Applebee’s has fake ones, mass produced. In this case they’re not boastful, merely true. The best crab cakes in Baltimore, on the eastern seaboard…
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is welcome on a sentimental afternoon, a day for choosing and cutting and a putting up a Christmas tree, the sooner the better, the day after Thanksgiving. The tree farm we patronize offers many types, making it hard to decide. But we go for the concolor fir, just because we’ve done that before. That’s sentimentality.…
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at Hemlock Hill Farm, but none that I could see was a Tsuga. Hemlock Hill has been in business since 1939, and there was probably a hemlock or two around then. While the farm reigns supreme as the local purveyor of natural Thanksgiving turkeys, there are other reasons to pay a visit when the holidays come.…
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The construction worker exclaimed over the beauty of a tree, which I explained was a Chinese elm. I agree with him one hundred percent. Wrote down the name for him to look up later. The early afternoon cloud hanging dopily in a haze of blue, framed in the side view. Lovely. The sprawling city sunset.…
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at Teatown, the 1,000-acre nature preserve in the Lower Hudson Valley, which is a good place to check out the region’s final splash of fall color. I used to live down the road. Lucky me. Teatown is a great destination. But first we had to stop at Fable Farm, where Geoff is now selling the…
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or, should I say, treed. For some reason I made up mind to teach a bit about writing to some really smart, environmentally knowledgeable folks who had probably excelled in forestry school and never gave much thought to putting pen to paper. They had most likely never studied with Elizabeth Hardwick or William Matthews or…
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for a variety of reasons, say experts. It might be a power trip. She has all the freedom in the world, while he has none – sometimes forever. Some women swear that there is real romance in getting engaged and tying the knot in prison, even if the wedding cake is a Twinkie, which has happened…
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about history, trees, the weather, or whatever else captures my fancy, on some occasions I find myself dumbstruck. I have written before about Seneca Village, the community of African-Americans that flourished between the 1820’s and the 1850s in Central Park before it was Central Park. New York’s great green gem of a park came about…
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don’t dominate the Grand Concourse. But you do see them if you keep your eyes open while rolling around the site for six miles a day, as I do. Here are a few. Lacebark Chinese elm almost bursting the bounds of its tree guard. Flying cupcake, created by some wildly cheerful person. Flouncy sweet-sixteen dress…
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Where would Andrew Wyeth be without grass? If you didn’t know, the Christina of Christina’s World had to stay low to the grass – she had polio and preferred crawling to a wheelchair. True. Is grass only for the country, as Wyeth depicted it? Increasingly, no, since landscapers are wild for it. This isn’t exactly the country,…
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when you’re in this sometimes spooky part of the Bronx. Why, I had been asking myself, did the ladies selling plants on the sidewalk offer pots of marigolds to willing buyers. Why was I feeling so unsettled? Why did the ghosties look so dangerous, hanging against a dead tree? Of course it’s all in fun.…
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hits everyone. At least it does me. So back we go through the just-reddening woods to the happy place of 35 years ago: a cabin in an artist colony. The place was founded in 1902 beneath Overlook Mountain, in Woodstock, by wealthy Brit Ralph Whitehead and his wife Jane Byrd McCall of the Philadelphia McCalls. Whitehead…
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I was agog at Henri Matisse’s painting La Danse. The Museum of Modern Art has changed since then, upwards and outwards. When you go out on the sixth floor terrace you do feel lofted by glass and steel. Everything has been re-curated, the contents of the collections shifted around so you get a new view of…
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known as the Grand Course, we have our distinctive urban forest. Just as the southwest has the ubiquitous saguaro, these precincts have the ubiquitous honey locust. Yes, there are some oaks in the tree pits along the avenue. You can recognize red oaks among others by the sharp points at the tips of their leaves.…
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along the Dobbs Ferry beach on the west side of the train tracks. The beach is wide at low tide, plenty of driftwood. Dead fish. Beach glass. Rocks that have spent time in the water. We used to take the dogs here to swim. A tributary debouches into the Hudson and it’s said a Lenape…
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So my mother calls the sissoo tree that grows outside her balcony. It also grows in front of all the other balconies and throughout the landscape of the retirement community where my parents make their home. “The roots are lateral and they uproot sidewalks and crawl into pipes underground. They drink up a lot of…
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curl around each other in the desert. The Bajada at the foot of the McDowell mountains in Scottsdale – the word means the slope of alluvial material that has washed down from the heights above – has the kind of brawny cacti that you want to find “out west”. That saguaro has lived many lives.…
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you see its age. My mother calls this elderly specimen The Twisted Tree, and you can see the character built into the mesquite’s gangly branches over the years. It sheltered a family of owls for years. Its bark is venerable. There is something for all who need it. Birds descend upon the prickly pear and…
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is what you get when you combine a funkily sublime old vaudeville theater and a performance by a Japanese avant-garde jazz pianist and composer at the height of her career. Sony Hall had opened in Times Square in 1938 as the Diamond Horseshoe, and became one of the iconic venues of the vaudeville circuit. Later…
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shows its face in the Concourse’s commerce as it does every place these days. Some stores don’t make it. This one’s especially sad, I think, because of the personal tag under the professionally printed sign. In the dusty adjoining window, a mannequin moons passersby. Then there is the epitome of fabulousness as well as success,…
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Fortunately, a tugboat made itself available for landlubber sightseeing. We would view New York Harbor as we had never viewed it before. And believe me, we had viewed it before plenty of times. Once, even, on a tugboat, in fog so dense you could have been sailing in any harbor. Walking to the South Street…
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A bus shelter ad went up on 187 Street. A fresh-faced young women in pastels, a fanny pack at her waist, a skateboard flipped up in front of her feet. And a hajib. She looks like she’s having a ball. The company behind the ad, Modanisa, touts itself as modern. It offers all sorts of outfits,…
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like eagles, like vampires, like velociraptors. Motorized scooters and e-bikes have taken over the streets here, as well as plain old scooters, the type on which you stand to move forward. Good balance required for that. And of course the old-fashioned kind of bicycle. Scooters tear up the Grand Concourse, on the service roads, but most…
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Don’t they? They just grow and will go on growing forever. We all know that animals go extinct. Think of the thylacine, whose species died out in New Zealand toward the middle of the twentieth century. This incredible dog-like marsupial with the jaw of a crocodile was hunted out of existence, and the last one…
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to begin with, roasted, encrusted with falafel and embellished with baby arugula and lemon salsa verde. But it is something else again when it has been crafted “by Chef Bill Tellepan who found great inspiration from the plant-based menu for the Met Gala.” At the Metropolitan Museum, all things become elevated, and that includes an overpriced…
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Yes. If intelligence is the ability to seek out nectar and pollinate flowers, yes. In terms of long-term travel to their southern climes and back, Monarchs in particular never cease to amaze. But are they dependable? In terms of showing up when they’re expected, to bask in humans’ adoration? Not so much. The events of the…
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to some people, but others take painstaking care to preserve them. Meet Jimmy, one of my favorite individuals at work. His job is exclusively to build and repair tree guards on the Grand Concourse construction site. He is, he told me, officially a carpenter by trade, as far as the union is concerned. That’s an…
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is not just a creaky old John Hughes movie. Pink has become the ethos, the philosophy, the dream and the religion for girls of the elementary school age and under. Until they betray pink for purple… This conclusion will not surprise anyone with eyes in their head over the past quarter century. I’ve been told…
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on the Grand Concourse. I pass at least one hair salon on every block, interspersed with supermarkets, household goods, bodegas, hookah shops and the goat restaurant. The signs are not all for hair braiding. Straight hair gets its due. Including this goofy martian coif. But mainly the ads showcase braids. Extravagant hair styling makes me…
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quoth General William Tecumseh Sherman in an 1879 speech. Stating the obvious, clearly, but a rhetorical flourish still current today. Rivalling the predations of human warfare, though, is the battle against the flres now ravaging so much of the West, including one of the greatest beings on our planet. In the path of the destruction,…
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and wound up even better. At 7:30 am I stood on the Grand Concourse sidewalk petting Spartacus, a dog belonging to a neighborhood guy. This massive animal, an Italian Mastiff (or Cane Corso) was a puppy at 150 pounds and destined to grow bigger. He was gentle as a kitten. The afternoon progressed as usual,…
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but it’s as if the universe knows it’s the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 and presents us with a day that eerily resembles that day, the bluebell sky, the lovely cool of late summer, the feeling of peace and anticipation of all the good things fall will bring. You know what comes next. And everyone has…
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A raised traffic median is just a long trough with soil in it. And, of course, plantings, and sometimes trees. The City of New York has applied its hive mind to widening the street medians of the Grand Concourse, which is what brings me here – to inspect the existing trees that might be impacted…
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stay for the polka dots. That was my idea at the New York Botanical Garden, along with hundreds of other visitors still drying out after being pummeled by Ida. Yayoi Kusama has been the artist in residence for months, transforming outdoor and indoor spaces, populating them with her whimsical works. Now 92 and one of the most…
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I thought when I saw the 1905 statue that stands square in the middle of Ocean Grove, New Jersey. My Stokes, of course, is I.N. Phelps Stokes, the white-shoe iconographer and Manhattan-phile I wrote about in Love, Fiercely: A Gilded Age Romance. This was a different branch of the Stokes clan and a man famous for…
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once you see it. And it is all around you. Some surfaces would seem to be left alone. Church walls, for example. Or cars. But everything else is fair game, and especially popular are store gates, the kind that get opened in the morning and pulled down at night. Every surface is game. You’ll find…
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both pleasant and foul, follow me as I walk the avenue inspecting trees to make sure they’re not injured by the major construction project underway, alerting the contractor to tree pits that have had stuff dumped in them. First is citrus heaven, as I go past the many small produce stands where the proprietor peels…
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for the curious, and useful in dinner party chat. Canopy cover is vital in arboriculture, in description of those overhead limbs that weave together and block some of the sun’s rays, but what about those trees whose branches seem to avoid touching those of other trees? Do they actually exist? There are several. The phrase describing…
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in the Bronx. A fresh length of topsoil is laid down in one of the new medians at 175 Street on the Grand Concourse. This will bring shrubbery and trees in all shapes and sizes to the neighborhood. It will, we hope, transform the lives of people here in some organic way. Meanwhile, I happen…
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Should be the nickname of this small piece of the Bronx. You can’t escape the litter. Maybe there just aren’t enough appropriate receptacles? Someone carefully put her half-full cup on the ground. I don’t like Dunkin iced coffee either, but I don’t leave it just hanging out there. There are guardians of the clean everywhere…
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is the subject of Matthew Lopez Jensen’s Tree Love: Street Trees and Stewardship in New York City, https://www.terrain.org/2021/unsprawl/tree-love-new-york-city/. I highly recommend the article’s beautiful photos and elegant prose.
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don’t expect to have it to yourself. Once upon a time if you happened to be passing through Chelsea you could wander up to the one and a half mile long park and the sensation would be one of openness, a respite from the claustrophobia that comes with living in a city with 8 million people.…
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you could tell something was going on. The tiny park across the street on the Grand Concourse had been miraculously covered in clean mulch overnight, its tree pits and the ground all around and under the benches dark brown and shredded, all new. The sign announcing the name of the park, the Bergen Triangle, is…
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or is it just me? I’m standing on the sidewalk, looking up at a block-long office building with its name prominently displayed across the front: POE BUILDING. It seems incongruous now, but makes sense when you consider when the building when up, in 1917. The Grand Concourse had just been laid, and the people of…
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is fundamental on this Grand Concourse construction site, where I am the resident arborist. I’ve always had a penchant for the plywood trenches built for the crew to go down into the bowels of the earth to repair the sewer pipes. They look so much like upside down houses, and the carpenter on this crew,…
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is a bodega staple I’ve always thought is among the best things in the Bronx. Hot, strong, milky and cheap. It’s universal in the borough, along with the chopped cheese sandwich (also known as a chop cheese), a mess of ground beef, melted cheese, tomato, lettuce, a mystery sauce and some other things on a…
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you wouldn’t guess we have native plants waterfalls towering old trees (this one a kentucky coffee tree) wildflowers magical floating spheres amid reeds more wildflowers But we do. When you come to New York, go to Times Square or the Statue of Liberty, by all means, but visit the Botanical Garden in the Bronx if…
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when we arrived at Jones Beach. Could this be a more perfect beach day? I commented that if the deep azure of the sky had a few puffy clouds it might be even more perfect. It was wonderful, though, getting on the sand so early that the crater was just feet away from our chairs.…
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I heard a lecturer today refer to birds whose populations had been depleted at one time because people chose to hunt them in great quantities, often to eat. Robins, he enumerated specifically. A recipe for robin pie was printed in Wehman’s Cook Book, in 1890: “Cover the bottom of a pie-dish with thin slices of beef and…
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that is the Grand Concourse in the Bronx has certainly seen better days. But there is still an awful lot of life there. Crews are installing new sidewalks and new medians separating the wide boulevards (2 lanes and a service road in each direction). They need a tree inspector to make sure no harm comes…
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Actually, not earth at all, but the Hudson River at Pier 55, now a surreal topography of walkways, views, plantings and trees. After Superstorm Sandy, Barry Diller decided he might as well plunk some of his millions into creating this new park, named Little Island. Two hundred sixty million dollars. Would it be boon or…
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or not, the canopy was so far overhead. Tilia Americana or Tilia cordata? I stood in the Bronx next to a playground on on Gouveneur Avenue, marveling at the height of these monster lindens. The smallest of them had a DBH of 7 inches while the largest ran to 40 DBH. (DBH equals Diameter at…
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when you plant a memorial tree. The Awards Committee of the New York State Urban Forestry Council sought applications last fall to reward communities that had been a Tree City USA for at least the past five years. I went to Glen Island Park in New Rochelle to celebrate one of the winning entries. Competitors…
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becomes apparent when you step along any residential street in South Ozone Park. Shrines in front yards rule. The air is heavy with mysticism, and the population’s diversity puts it ahead of the other boroughs, with large Italian, Hispanic and Guyanese populations, among others. You have to think there are some druids among them worshipping…
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pretty much define what’s so great about the Metropolitan Museum. Everyone who has gone there a lot has favorites. It’s hard not to love the Atrium outside the American Wing. You can drink ridiculously overpriced coffee and gaze out the bank of windows at Central Park in its summer glory. But your personal favorite might…