The Irish Hunger Memorial is today's Archtober Building of the Day. We first encountered the memorial after arriving at the Battery Park City Ferry Terminal from Jersey City . The memorial, designed by artist Brian Tolle , landscape architect Gail Wittwer-Laird , and architect 1100 Architect to honor and to educate about the 1845 - 1852 Irish famine, consists of "an authentic Famine-era cottage" and "a rugged landscape thickly planted with native flora, plants often found growing fallow fields." The plant palette includes bearberry, blackthorn, Burnet rose, cross-leaved heath, foxglove, gorse, Ling heather, soft rush, and yellow flag iris. The memorial's landscape reminds me of building-less parcels that are spontaneously vegetated. Nany M. Page and Richard E. Weaver, Jr. in Wild Plants in the City ( Arnoldia , Vol. 34, No. 4, 1974) write, Where do these seeds come from? Some, of course, already may be present in the soil of a new lot, and