Local Ecologist

A (mostly) Wordless Wednesday contribution. Follow Cathryn Swan's Washington Square Park Blog for hyper-local park news. For city-wide bloom information, view the 2011 Blooming map at New York Restoration Project (h/t Urban Omnibus ), and finally, the NYU Garden Shop highlights a plant weekly; this week it is the Bleecker Street Kwanzan cherries ( Prunus 'Kwanzan') which are covered with large, showy pink flowers.

Heading toward the exit at (blank) Street station, I noticed these amazing figures on the wall tiles of the station.  On looking at many and photographing several, I thought they would be a good subject for a blog post, specifically, the first in an occasional series about things seen in subway stations and other places in the city. So, can you guess which subway station houses these figures? Updated, 5/16/2011: The figures, part of a larger work titled "Carrying On" by Janet Zweig is located at the N/R Prince Street Station. Subway.org has a write-up of the frieze and you can view more figures at our Facebook page.

Image: Not "my" pachysandra ( image courtesy of Kurt Stüber via Wikimedia Commons) I did not know that pachysandra ( Pachysandra terminalis ) flowers.  "Almost insignificant from an ornamental perspective," notes OSU's Horticulture & Crop Science plant list website, but I was wowed.  In addition to these small terminal inflorescences, my NYC neighborhood offers cherry, Callery pear and magnolia blossoms as well as tulips, daffodils, and Camellia 'April Remembered' ( Camellia japonica 'April Remembered'). Weak branch structure but gorgeous showy flowers! And even more: flowers outside the Macy's Flower Show and sidewalk hydrangea gardens. For more blooming posts on this 15th day of April, visit May Dreams Gardens .

Since learning about The Tree Year 2011 project from a Metropolitan Field Guide post, I have been contemplating which tree in my neighborhood to observe this year.  (The United Nations declared 2011 the International Year of Forests.)  Should record the blooming of the Callery pear we adopted as part of MillionTreesNYC?  The London planetrees I can see from our window?  The weeping willow in a nearby garden?  The English Elm in Washington Square Park?  Should I select a tree located outside of my neighborhood? After publishing a Marsh Madness entry on the Minetta Brook  last week, which included information about the English Elm, I settled on this elm as the subject of The Tree Year project.  Below are photographs from days 1 and 2 of observation. Day 1 - March 31, 2011 (the phone pictured is 4.5 inches long) Day 2 - April 5, 2011

Walking by the Center for Architecture gallery today I noticed that the High Performance Landscape Guidelines: 21st Century Parks for NYC exhibit had been removed. The landscape guidelines were prepared by the Fellows of the Design Trust for Public Space and landscape architecture and operations staff at the Parks & Recreation Department. Fourteen percent or approximately 29,000 acres of NYC is parkland and the Guidelines were developed to transform these existing parks into sustainable ones as well as to design beautiful and ecologically-healthy new open spaces.  The parks -- new and renewed -- will comprise the city's green infrastructure; they will not only meet the recreational needs of an estimated 9.1 million residents by 2030, they will help the city to achieve the sustainability goals outlined in PlaNYC . The manual is organized around "hundreds of best practices" or strategies to achieve these goals.  The manual also includes site inventory and ana

A second trip to Savannah reinforced several things that I liked during my first trip; all features that constitute a well-designed city. 1. Alleys The backside of this lovely city is not shabby. Alleys can serve multiple functions: garage access, municipal services access, secondary pedestrian route, and recreation. (In Chicago, green alleys are one strategy to manage stormwater runoff.)  Does anyone know the origin of the alley in Savannah? 2. Big Trees Approximately 27 years ago, "Savannah had an aging urban forest where more trees were cut down than replaced" and "there were no tree protection ordinances for new development." The Savannah Tree Foundation has transformed the way urban forestry is practiced in Chatham County through "direct action and awareness." Now, Savannah’s Park & Tree Department "plants one third more trees than it removes each year" and "most local governments in Chatham County have establishe

Welcome to the 58th Festival of the Trees! I am pleased to host for the third time. Thank you to all the contributors and a special thanks for Arati, Dave, and Jade. I received contributions about "Arbor Day celebrations and other real-world tree festivals" worldwide, homages to trees from the personal to the communal, at the neighborhood scale to that of nations. Let's start in North America and branch out from there. Image: Coast live oak, Oakland, California From Cumberland Island off the coast of Georgia, Honor Woodard shares a personal celebration of the live oaks on the island. Another celebration took place in Georgia. Rebecca of Rebecca in the Woods looks up a tree cavity to discover what's inside a hollow tree while Dave of via negativa poetically presents the physiology behind tree knots .  Crystal M. Trulove had a magical experience planting trees in her Portland, Oregon neighborhood with Friends of Trees and at the end of the day her daught