But you can experience these primeval native plant communities on one little acre at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which opened its expansion of the century-old Native Flora Garden on Wednesday.
“I’m pleasantly surprised by how big the meadow feels,” said Darrel Morrison, the garden’s designer, who is known for ecological landscapes like the 80-acre meadow at the Storm King Art Center in the Hudson Valley and the tiny swatch of native woodland right off Washington Square at New York University. “We’re trying to capture the essence of a bigger landscape in a miniaturized form.”
The opening of the expanded Native Flora Garden comes just a month after the three-and-a-half-acre Native Garden opened at the New York Botanical Garden, with 400 species that reflect a broad population of plants native to the area east of the Mississippi River.
By contrast, almost all of the 150 native species in Brooklyn (the goldenrods, the flat-topped asters, the cute little blue-eyed grasses blooming in the meadow, as well as the moisture-loving pitcher plants and orchids, the lichens and bearberry of the sandy Pine Barrens) were collected within 200 miles of New York City.
What’s the difference? Basically, local species evolve according to local climate, soil and pests. Big bluestem, a prairie grass from Long Island that is planted here, will have an advantage over the same species that evolved to suit particular conditions in Illinois.
And growing these local species preserves their particular genotypes, which might otherwise become extinct. Genetic diversity can exist even within a single species in the same region, like pyxie moss, a threatened plant that grows in the New Jersey Pine Barrens.
This expansion of the Native Flora Garden, which was planted on the adjacent two and a half acres more than 100 years ago, is really just another step in the botanic garden’s evolution toward ecological awareness.
The 1911 garden was created in a systematic fashion in which botanical families of plants were arranged in separate beds, said Uli Lorimer, the horticulturist and curator of the Native Flora Garden. “The idea was you would come to the garden and learn about asters and ferns and jack-in-the-pulpits, and then go out to the still-wild corners of New York City and find them,” he said. “Then in the late 1920s, the decision was made to redesign the garden along ecological, habitat lines.”
That design included a meadow and bog, a deciduous forest, a conifer forest and limestone and serpentine rock formations, as well as pinelands and a kettle pond. But over the years, the sunny spaces have turned back into forest and the sun-loving plants have been shaded out.
“That’s one of the big reasons that, five years ago, we decided to start this expansion project,” Mr. Lorimer told me as he led the way through the original Native Flora Garden, a lush woodland with 500 native species, including stands of spring ephemerals like Dutchman’s breeches, trout lilies, trillium and bloodroot. Since he arrived at the botanic garden in 2004, Mr. Lorimer has added about 100 species collected within the region.
“I thought it was important to sample the local genetic diversity,” he said, bending over a handful of sundial lupines that were surviving in a patch of sunlight. “Look, this one is starting to make seed pods, so we’ll have some local stock.”
It’s lovely to walk through the old garden, which can be entered through an oak gate with copper insets. Native rhododendrons and magnolias, Joe Pye weed and mallows, sensitive fern and fringe sedge, meadow rue and wild gingers nestling in the moist crannies of a limestone ledge combine to create a space that feels almost primeval.
“This garden has been relatively undisturbed for more than 100 years, so it has this wonderful authentic quality, as if it’s always been here,” Mr. Lorimer said. “People ask me, ‘Is this what Brooklyn looked like before the Europeans got here?’ And, truthfully, you would never see this many things in one small area, but it has the same character of what could have been here. So I generally say yes, because people come away with this feeling of how special this place is.”
For information on the new Native Flora Garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden: bbg.org or (718) 623-7200.
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