What a dump!

Signage on the fencing around the new visitor's center construction site at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden informed me that the garden was once Brooklyn's place of refuse. Something tells me that the philanthropist Alfred T. White had something to do with the parcel's staggering transformation into its current form. How often do such complete reversals happen? Now the lotuses that rise out of the murky pools there have added significance.

I wouldn't put this sort of miracle past White, but I can't say for sure because I haven't read the book about him, The Social Vision of Alfred T. White, published by Proteus Gowanus. Last time I checked the Brooklyn Public Library didn't have it in circulation.

This plant somewhere between the Tamarisk and the Butterfly Bushes swarmed with so many stinging insects I got a little queasy. There were wasps of diverse waistlines, various communal and solitary kinds of bees, several bee imitators, tiny bees the size of seed beads, diminutive butterflies and this Ermine Moth with whom I was very proud to share the refuge of a very lovely dump for a few minutes.

The Wonder Tree

Also the Igiri Tree. It's surmised that the common name arises from the rapture one feels when witnessing the tree's cascading panicles of red berries laid bare after the leaves fall, having modestly kept their secret all summer.

But that says nothing about the sense one gets when standing underneath the tree's domed canopy now while the berries are still ripening, nothing about the trees untouchable quality which refreshes the idea of lush internal worlds that turn one's isolation inside out, nothing about the sense that form is music materialized, and that what surrounds us is far more familiar than we know.

fanatics

love in the garden

splash

The dynamism in the veins of the cabbage leaves seem to derive from a sudden impact as they respond to the solar intensity that beats down, washing them with the energy they strive to catch.

This beauty grows on one of the boundaries of the Childrens Garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where my two youngest children are finishing their last week of camp. It's been amazing, my son now knows the names of weeds I've pulled up in ignorance my entire gardening career, and knows what it feels like to pull them up, if they resist or not, and if you can eat them. He's been coming home with harvests, multicolored chard, kale, turnips, basil and lately cucumbers, which he peels and slices himself. The little one loves to bring me nasturtiums, "the spicey ones" she calls them as she watches in wonder as I eat them.

These efforts to reinvigorate our relationship with agriculture do a little to redemocratize and and redeem the most basic luxury, soil, as seen in the Childrens Garden program, more so at Added Value in Red Hook and at various community gardens throughout the city which seem incredibly powerful agents in restoring lost richness to the barren figure of modern man, to teach that freedom is much more than a stop at 7-eleven and 6 Flags. I'm grateful my children have been able to attend this camp with this focus on the kind of thrills that are, without a doubt, worthy of a future.

Tatterfly

Question or Comma, I just learned they're pretty hard to tell apart. You have to see the outerwings to view the stigma, and this one doesn't have much wing left. I think I'll just call them Punctuation Butterflies from now on, and let the powder wings keep their secrets.

Another Visitor

They don't call them Butterfly (butter?) Bushes for nothing. I haven't been able to identify this one.

On Tamarix

Reading up on this shrubby tree, the 5-Stamen Tamarisk, (Tamarix Ramosissima) I learned that the genus, called salt cedar, thrives in saline soils, and discourages the growth of competing plants by sending the salts through their systems to the blossoms and foliage, where it falls onto the ground currying the soil with too much salt for seedlings of other plants. In places, Tamarisk varieties have crowded out Willow and Cottonwood. Varieties were also planted heavily to reclaim the prarie once overgrazing and inept farming turned it into a dustbowl.

I was drawn to this plant at the BBG because of its feathery foliage and delicate, airy, wandering habit. What drew so many honey bees, bumble bees, fire flies and syrphid flies to it, I can't say. Every clump of flowers crawled with life. Perhaps the insects crave salt.

On Coneflowers

Bumble bees like this one can't get enough of the pinchusions, but Honey Bees don't seem drawn to Echinacea at all.

As for the Hoverflies/Syrphid flies, they seem to be everywhere. Click the image to enlarge it and compare the hieroglyphics on its abdomen to these. Surely they are secret messages. Can you read Syrphidic?

Pictograph Fly

Forget crop circles, for landing pads, could anything beat a lily petal? Double click the image and tell me what those markings on the tiny wanna-bee fly's abdomen mean in your ancient alien tongue.

hornet's nest

A wrathful hornet took revenge upon the gardener who had destroyed its swarm's low hanging nest in the Dove Tree, a canopy of heart shaped leaves and nuts resembling large green olives. The gardener had come back the following day to find the tenacious swarm attempting to recolonize branches of the tree near the spot of the previous day's devastation, so the gardener took up arms, loppers and hose, and cut higher into the tree while drenching the insects to discourage rebuilding, or at least cause them to build a nest high enough so that no garden visitor might casually ramble into a cornupcopia of angery stings.

I heard him holler and, in pain, drop his implements, and when 2 little girls came along soon after, strolling under the locus of the hornet's ambition, I shooed them away, scaring them with too much neurosis. It seems to run in the family, given that two young members of my swarm came to colonize my bed last night, each having dreamed about stinging insects.

sweetharsh

It's startling to see the shock of softness emerging from the thistle, a tower or bristle and spine. Which brings me to Boehme on God and Creation. He tried to translate the indescribable origin of the world, his vision of the separation of God into Abyss and byss, into what he called creaturely language, so we have some chance of understanding something about something that can't possibly be understood. The result is fascinating, tactile, metallic, cinematic, momentus, flashing, abstract and sensory, as if he had studied every quality of a wave bending, crashing, retreating, rejoining, reforming, and all the infinite in between stages that go past faster than the eye. A sample of the metal, from the section "The Gates of God:"

Behold now, when the bitterness, or the bitter sting [or prickle] (which in the original was so very bitter, raging and tearing, when it took its original in the harshness) attaineth this clear light, and tasteth now the sweetness in the harshness, which is its mother, then it is so joyful, and cannot rise or swell so anymore, but it trembleth and rejoiceth in its mother that bare it, and triumpheth like a joyful wheel in the birth. And in this triumph the birth attaineth the fifth form, and then the fifth source springeth us, viz. the friendly love; and so when the bitter spirit tasteth the sweet water, it rejoiceth in its mother, the sour tart harshness, and so refresheth and strengtheneth itself therein, and maketh its mother stirring in great joy; and then there springeth up in the sweet water-spirit a very sweet pleasant source or fountain; for the fire-spirit (which is the root of the light, which was a strong fierce rumbling cry, crack or terror in the beginning) now riseth up very lovely, pleasantly, and joyfully.

red eye

Botanic Garden Collection

Fall Back, Stay There Awhile

The story about the reduced heart attack rate attributed to setting the clocks back has resonated with many I think. No surprise that the clock trick is a stress-reducer, but this year it holds special promise. It's like time travel, a chance to magically shirk this precarious economy and travel back to the golden age of false numbers and shoddy equations.

Lovely to pretend it's still spring and instead of getting colder out, it's getting warmer. The economy is fine, the 401K robust, cherry blossoms are on the trees, there's going to be a Whole Foods in Brooklyn, and no one knows who Sarah Palin is.

If you want to join me in my happy delusion, have a look at these photos I took at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in Spring. Feel the warmth of the Spring sun and the glory of new beginnings. I've been saving them for today.

By the way, thanks, JB, for the good company and botanical illumination you provided on that amazing day. Are you related to the Baumanometer people?

Amaranth at the BBG

Red Amaranth looking especially fit in the Herb Garden at the BBG. The sign informed me that the leaves are cooked as spinach in Jamaica, and that the Hopi die ceremonial bread with it. I always appreciate these reminders of how wide the world is.

I understand the BBG has reenvisioned the Herb Garden and will replant and shift things in the next few years. I assume this plan has supporters and detractors as some always resist change and others push hard for it. Makes for some tension.

Here's my two cents, plant a section dedicated to Chinese herbs.

Brooklyn Botanic

Some views appreciated by blogadiers yesterday at the gathering the Flatbush Gardener kindly arranged at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. First up, the light touch of the Bald Cypress, a deciduous conifer growing near the Koi Pond, which was complemented by the lacey leaves of the Dawn Redwoods not far away.
















The spikes of Horse Mint growing in the Native Flora Garden. Our own BBG was the first botanic garden to host a native plant section.
















Longwood hybrid Water-Platters















Climbing supports in the Rose Garden















Silverweed in the Herb Garden, an astringent, makes a good gargle for sore throats. Sweeten with honey.















One of the garden's elegant brides.

A Bee on the Apricot Blossoms

The tree worship continues...

American Beech Tree, Botanic Garden

I was surprised the sign didn't say American Graffiti Beech. Bark scars a lot like skin does.