Problem Plants

Problem Plants

Nativeness, Biodiversity, and Urban Flora in the Anthropocene

As I wrote last week, winter in Bushwick can look and feel pretty bleak.Dirty ice, frozen garbage, and soggy dog shit line the sidewalks, whilesparrows and pigeons pick at frosty french fries and arroz con pollo in thegutter. The carcasses of last season’s spontaneous plant population (theweeds), shriveled or turned to mush, linger in heaps along the edges ofvacant lots and in untended street tree pits.

But I know that there is life buried in Bushwick’s frozen soil, and that keepsme scheming and planning through the winter months. As the weatherwarms and the days lengthen, dormant roots will stir and a plethora ofseeds will begin to germinate, leading eventually to the riot of green that

Bushwick in winter (photo by Dan Phiffer)

https://medium.com/@eirons/problem-plants-ad1ce1759cfe#.wzshcfdnd

inhabits Bushwick’s marginal spaces in mid-summer. But for now I wait,think, and plan.

Last night I had the chance to convene a gathering of like-minded folks:other plant nerds also sitting in wait, anticipating the return of our urbanverdure (after the proper and seasonally appropriate freeze, of course!).This gathering of plant fanciers was part of a closing celebration for theCenter for Strategic Art and Agriculture, a Bushwick-based gallery, eventspace and garden that hosted my Invasive Pigments project as its finalexhibition. Founded by Lorissa Reinhart at The Silent Barn, the Center hasfunctioned for the past two years as a wide-ranging, richly programmedexperimental art, theater, music and gardening venue. I’ve benefitedimmensely from working with the Center, cultivating my first InvasivePigments garden, holding workshops, tours, an exhibition, and finally lastnight’s event, a panel called “Problem Plants: Weeds in Ecology, Art andCulture”.

Bushwick’s Summer Flora (Troutman St. between Wyckoff and Irving)


The speakers on last night’s panel hailed from a range of disciplines, fromtropical ecology to sculpture to theoretical biology. Dr. Amy Berkov gave a usfunny and fascinating look into the milkweed/beetle saga that is ongoing inher LES community garden plot, while Anne Percoco showed us intriguingimages of her public projects engaging marginal, plant-infested urbanlandscapes from Jersey City to Bangalore, India.

Dr. Sasha Wright waxed poeticon the benefits of biodiversityfrom a theoretical perspective(she even had us loving hergraphs!), and Miriam Simun heldus rapt with an account of hersearch for the federally protectedAgalinis acuta flower, whichblooms just one day a year. The

Q + A was packed with relevant questions and comments, and left mehungry for more of this sort of dialogue. I heard the same from the mixedaudience members, who ranged from urban gardeners and food justiceorganizers to environmentally involved artists and curators, landscapearchitects, art students, and curious neighbors. It was refreshing to jump

A view of the CSAA panel from the audience (Thanks to Giada Crispiels)

Anne Percoco’s larger than life wheat-pasted-weeds


beyond the binaries of art/science, technology/living systems, native/exotic,and even more refreshing to have the panelists and audience right therewith me.

The panel planning and the discussion last night has pushed me to take alook back at my own projects. Reviewing my Invasive Pigments projectreminded me to finally consider some of the data I’ve gathered on the plantsI’ve been working with, and to make some comparisons with other data sets.Admittedly my sample size is small and my methodology somewhatunorthodox, but the results still have me thinking.

First, a little background: back in early March of last year, I went on anurban soil prospecting and collection trip. I visited eight sites aroundBushwick where I’d seen diverse spontaneous plant populations in previousgrowing seasons. Armed with a trowel and quart-sized mason jars, I dug upfrozen, seemingly lifeless dirt and transported it to the CSAA garden, whereI laid it out on the rich soil remaining from last year’s vegetable garden.Come April the beds began to come to life, sprouting a good mixture ofvolunteer vegetables and hardy urban weeds. Over the following monthsmost of the vegetables and herbs were out-competed by the voracious weed

A sphinx moth feeding on milkweed in Amy Berkov’s garden plot (photo by Amy)


population that eventuallytowered more than twelve feetabove the beds (although thecherry tomatoes gave everyone apretty good run for their money).

I kept careful track of the range of species that popped up in the garden,watching as they sprouted and found their niches, some climbing up ropesand poles (hedge bindweed, false buckwheat, mile-a-minute weed) othersleafing out in the understory (asiatic dayflower, pokeweed, black medic),while the fast-growing surged into a canopy (common lambsquarters, redroot pigweed, devil’s beggarticks) and the early pioneers (sheperd’s purse,dandelion, crab grass) succumbed to shade and dwindled away.

collecting and distributing urban dirt

The Invasive Pigments garden in mid-July


As the growing season drew to a close in late October, I tallied up thespecies numbers and sorted them by the conventional native/non-nativebinary used in other studies of New York City Flora: thirty-two species total,ten of which are considered native, with the remaining twenty-two fallinginto the non-native category.

After some internet research, I’ve found that my numbers are almost exactlyflipped from the most comprehensive large-scale study done in recentyears*, DeCandido et al.’s A first approximation of the historical and extantvascular flora of New York City: Implications for native plant speciesconservation, published in 2004. (*that I’ve found, anyway. Know another?Let me know!).

At first I was puzzled by the discrepancy between our numbers, but digging

Mile-a-minute weed (Persicaria perfoliata) climbing skyward

Stats from my slide presentation last night


into the methodology of the DeCandido study, I discovered that we have afairly different understanding of where one might go to find the “wild urbanflora” of New York City. DeCandido and his team focused on parks greaterthan 40 hectares in size that also contained a significant amount of “naturalarea”, with a natural area defined as “one that is composed mostly ofunmanaged vegetation.” I also work with “unmanaged vegetation”, but thepopulation I’m focused on doesn’t live in parks or “natural areas”, butsprouts from the cracks in the sidewalk, the rubble of vacant lots, and therich pools of muck around edges of storm drains. While city parks arefragmented and disturbed compared to the pre-colonial landscape (whichwas managed by humans, just very differently!) the everyday urban streetsbear scant resemblance either of these hallmarks of “naturalness”.

The DeCandido study also found that New York City (the five boroughscombined) has lost more than 40% of its native plant population. Brooklyn(Kings County) has the lowest species diversity of any borough (just 695 ofthe 2177 species found in greater New York City) and has lost 75% of itsnative species. Additionally, Brooklyn lacks the larger parks found in StatenIsland, the Bronx and Queens (Marine Park, Brooklyn’s largest park, is halfthe size of the largest parks found in the other boroughs). If we insist oneradicating or “controlling” the non-native plant population that fills ourstreets, we’ll be eliminating the bulk of the biodiversity that our plant-impoverished borough has to offer. This tells me that it’s high time weembraced our exotics, non-natives, interlopers and escapees. As Peter DelTredici suggests in his indispensable “Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast: A

Two “unmanaged” landscapes: Ailanthus habitat in Bushwick and the Central Park Ramble (thanks Flickr user jon.t)


Field Guide”, these plants have become the “de-facto native vegetation” ofour urban environments, and considering all the benefits that urbangreenery brings (from the built environment to mental health), we’re goingto need every one of those meddlesome, aggressive species as our climategets less stable.

As it happens, during the panel last night, Sasha (building on ideasintroduced in Amy’s milkweed talk) went to great lengths to back up thisargument for non-native species with data! She stressed that the presence ofnon-native species does not inherently lower species diversity overall (whileacknowledging that in extremely rare cases, unusually aggressive specieslike the infamous Kudzu can require human intervention). She showed usthe results of a range of ongoing studies that have found that plantcommunities with a mixture of native and introduced species actually havehigher overall species diversity and are more resilient in the face of habitatdisturbance.

This especially makes sense in an urban setting like Bushwick. Plantsgrowing in Bushwick 400–500 years ago have had a very hard time adaptingto the new environment we’ve created for them. Dominated by impervioussurfaces (streets, parking lots, buildings, sidewalks), the low quality soil they

From Sasha’s slide presentation (via Sax & Gaines, 2003)


grow in is leached full of a range of pollutants and compressed byconstruction, foot and vehicle traffic. This soil is embedded in anenvironment defined by highly variable microclimates (wind tunnels andheat islands) and infested with an invasive species that more than oftenwants them dead or cut into hedgerows. Plants like Miriam Simun’s darlingAgalinis acuta don’t stand a chance in this environment, so they’ve retreatedto the outskirts, where they continue to dwindle as strip malls and beachfront homes sprout in an ever widening circle around the City.

The non-native interloperswho’ve taken up residence in theharsh urban environment ofBushwick aren’t pushing outnative species, they’re fillingempty niches. Adapted todifficult conditions, with flexiblereproductive habits andopportunistic growth patterns,

these urban plants are much better-suited to living side by side with Homosapiens, despite our indifference to (or even aggressive dislike of) them.

Thus, I’ve come to think of the plants with whom I share the streets ofBushwick as companion plants for the Anthropocene. While we don’tcultivate them knowingly, the way we might a prize rose bush, we’ve set upthe conditions that facilitate their growth, and we are now bound together,coevolving in an increasingly volatile environment.

The diminutive Agalinis acuta on Simun’s fingertip (fromAgalinis Dreams)


When a street tree dies in Bushwick…




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