The Perseverance of New York City's Wildflowers - The New York Times - 0 views
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The Perseverance of New York City’s Wildflowers
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Cornflowers are always the first to bloom in the pollinator meadow of Marsha P. Johnson State Park, a welcome sign to bees and people that things are beginning to thaw.
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If New York City has a warm spring, the cornflowers may open up by late April, eventually followed by orange frills of butterfly milkweed, purple spindly bee balm and yolk-yellow, black-eyed Susans that also inhabit the meadow — hardy species that can weather the salty spray that confronts life on the waterfront.
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Not all of these flowers are native to New York, or even North America, but they have sustained themselves long enough to become naturalized
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These species pose little threat to native wildlife, unlike more domineering introduced species such as mugwort, an herb with an intrepid rhizome system.
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A wildflower can refer to any flowering plant that was not cultivated, intentionally planted or given human aid, yet it still managed to grow and bloom.
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This is one of several definitions offered by the plant ecologist Donald J. Leopold in Andrew Garn’s new photo book “Wildflowers of New York City,” and one that feels particularly suited to the city and its many transplants.
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Ms. Lopez, who grew up on the Upper West Side near a sooty smokestack, has always longed for more green spaces in the city.
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In February of 2020, Gov. Andrew Cuomo renamed the park after the activist Marsha P. Johnson, one of the central figures of the Stonewall riots and a co-founder of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries with the activist Sylvia Rivera. Ms. Johnson, who died in 1992 of undetermined causes, would have turned 75 in August 2020.
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Mr. Garn did not intend for “Wildflowers of New York City” to be a traditional field guide for identifying flowers. Rather, his reverent portraits invite us to delight in the beauty of flowers that we more often encounter in a sidewalk crack than in a bouquet.
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Marsha P. Johnson, a central figure of the Stonewall riots and a co-founder of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries
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Ms. Johnson was known for wearing crowns of fresh flowers that she would arrange from leftover blooms and discarded daffodils from the flower district in Manhattan, where she often slept.
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In one photo, Ms. Johnson wears a crown of roses, carnations, chrysanthemums, frilly tulips, statice and baby’s breath.
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Although cumulous clusters of baby’s breath are now a staple of floral arrangements, the species is a wildflower native to central and Eastern Europe.
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Ms. Lopez and STARR have criticized a proposal for a new $70 million beach scheduled to be built on Gansevoort Peninsula, near waterfronts where Ms. Rivera once lived and Ms. Johnson died. In its place, she suggests a memorial garden for Ms. Johnson, Ms. Rivera and other transgender people
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“We will never feed enough people, we will never plant enough flowers, never be good enough to honor Sylvia and Marsha,” Ms. Lopez said. “They cared too much, even when no one cared for them.”
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“I have candles lit always for Marsha and Sylvia, but I’m praying especially hard now that we get a plan that includes lots of flowers,” said Mariah Lopez, the executive director of Strategic Trans Alliance for Radical Reform, or STARR, an advocacy group.
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Her dream of the park includes a range of verdant and functional spaces: a paved area where people can vogue and hold rallies, a flower garden in tribute to Ms. Johnson, a greenhouse and an apiary for bees.
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The redesign of the park will add a new fence around the meadow, as well as interpretive signs about the pollinators who depend on its wildflowers. “What would happen if there were no bees in the world?”