“You know, for a gardening blog, there’s not much about gardening …” – What I imagine you all must be thinking by now.
I’ve got lots of stuff, honestly. I’m just really back-logged with everything I want to write about. Just not enough hours in the day, especially workdays!
But here’s a little something: some photos of the developing fall color in my neighborhood, Beverly Square West, one of the neighborhoods of the larger area known as Victorian Flatbush. Yes, this is Brooklyn.
Timely enough, given the record temperatures we’re experiencing this week. Tomorrow’s forecast has been “upgraded” from what I reported yesterday: the THI may reach 117F tomorrow.
Temperatures in New York City as measured by Landsat on August 14, 2002, at 10:30am, during a heat wave. Cooler temperatures are blue, hotter are yellow.
Source: NASA Earth Observatory. Map by Robert Simmon, using data from the Landsat Program.
Temperatures in New York City as measured by Landsat on August 14, 2002, at 10:30am, during a heat wave. Cooler temperatures are blue, hotter are yellow.
Source: NASA Earth Observatory. Map by Robert Simmon, using data from the Landsat Program.
The ability of vegetation to moderate urban temperatures is graphically demonstrated in these paired images from NASA’s Earth Observatory. The spatial resolution of these images is 60 meters per pixel. At that scale, I can just about make out the block where I garden:
Closeup of the vegetation map, centered on central Brooklyn. The green area at the left is Greenwood Cemetery. Prospect Park is the dark green area at the top; the white area within it is Prospect Lake.
Below the park, to the south, Victorian Flatbush, with its tree-lined streets, detached wood frame houses, and front lawns, spreads out as a series of olive green areas. The beige areas in-between the olive are rowhouses and apartment buildings. You can even make out a curving green line across the southern end of this area: That’s the old LIRR right-of-way, long abandoned, and overgrown with trees.
NASA has just published a report on urban heat islands highlighting the research of Stuart Gaffin, an associate research scientist with the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York City, and his colleagues:
In the summer of 2002, Gaffin and his colleagues used satellite temperature data, city-wide land cover maps, and weather data, along with a regional climate model to identify the best strategies for cooling the city. The team estimated how much cooling the city could achieve by planting trees, replacing dark surfaces with lighter ones, and installing vegetation-covered “green roofs.”
The team studied the city as a whole, as well as six “hotspot” areas—including parts of Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn—where air temperatures near the ground were higher than the city-wide average. Each area was serviced by Con Edison, the local power company, so the scientists could compare electricity use. Each area also had available space so that the mitigation strategies the team considered could be modeled in the study and potentially implemented later on.
August 14 fell on one of the hottest heat wave days in New York’s summer of 2002, making it a good day to take the city’s temperature. Measuring the temperature of every last sidewalk, street, parking lot, roof, garden, and grassy area in an entire city isn’t easily done from the ground, so the researchers relied on NASA to take the city’s temperature from the sky. NASA’s Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper collected thermal infrared satellite data. …
– Beating the Heat in the World’s Big Cities
This photo was taken April 21, 2006, from my “tree fort”: the back porch off the second floor of our house. The view is looking north along the backs of our neighbor’s houses. The tree just leafing out in the foreground is the apple tree growing over the fence from our next door neighbor’s back yard. The tree with pink flowers is, I think, a flowering cherry. The tall tree with yellow flowers on the right is a maple. I don’t know what the more distant trees are.
On April 21, 2006, Daniel Bertoni, Acting Director, Natural Resources and Environment, Government Accounting Office (GAO), provided testimony before the House Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health. His testimony follows two recent GAO Reports on this topic:
It’s sort of a good news (little), bad news (more), report.
First, there’s some hopeful news regarding Anoplophora glabripennis, the Asian longhorned beetle, or “ALB”:
On the basis of the available evidence, it appears that the Asian longhorned beetle will be eradicated in the three states that have infestations, although funding reductions have extended the likely completion date. …
The “three states that have infestations” are New York, New Jersey, and Illinois. However, ALB has been detected near ports of entry throughout the United States, including Florida, Texas, California and Washington states.
Not so good news on EAB and Sudden Oak Death:
… In contrast, the emerald ash borer and P. ramorum–the pathogen that causes Sudden Oak Death–are likely to continue to infest and damage forest ecosystems in the Midwest and on the West Coast, despite efforts to control them. …
And some observations on how things got so bad:
… We identified areas of vulnerability that we believe increase the risk of future forest pest infestations. Specifically, we found that despite efforts to expand USDA’s forest health monitoring programs, they do not adequately provide for comprehensive monitoring in urban forests or other locations considered at high risk from pest invasions. Monitoring in such areas is important because they are common destination points for internationally traded cargo, which is a frequent pathway for pests. Improvements could help prevent situations such as those experienced with the Asian longhorned beetle, the emerald ash borer, and P. ramorum, in which years of delay in detection allowed them to become established before control programs began. In our report on port inspections, we found that DHS has not used a risk-based staffing model to assign newly hired agricultural specialists to ports of entry. As a result, DHS does not have assurance that staff are assigned to areas of greatest vulnerability. …
Resources, Links, and References:
I’m writing this from my tree fort. Actually, it’s the rear porch on the second floor of our house, roofed and screened (mostly). Seated at the table here, my line of sight is about 17 or 18 feet from ground level.
It’s dusk. Most of the birds have settled in for the night. I hear, but can’t see, a cardinal calling out from high in a neighbor’s tree. To my left is our next door neighbors’ apple tree; its apples are showing color now, so maybe we’ll have parrots at the end of the summer again like last year. In front of me, in our backyard, are two Norway Maples towering overhead and our flowering cherry tree barely reaching my eye-level. Behind us, our back neighbor has another flowering cherry. On the other side of us, to my right, our other next door neighbor has in their backyard a cedar, a spruce, a dogwood, and something else I don’t know. Behind them is a birch. Beyond, more distant and all around, are more maples, oaks – everything.
This neighborhood is all about its trees. Our lot is 50′ wide at the street and 100′ deep, like most of the lots in this area. For New York City, that’s huge; most townhouses are 20′ wide or less. The houses are fully detached, wood-frame homes built at the turn of the last century, mostly late Victorian in style as ours is. No two of the houses are exactly alike. From up here on the back porch, you can see nearly every style of roof and dormer: shed, gable, hipped, gambrel, and eyebrow.
This leaves lots of room for trees, and gardens. Here, at my fourth garden in New York City, for the first time I can have multiple gardens: front, back, and two sides. I’ve watched and weeded and planted and watered them over the year since we moved in. My ideas for them, for what they will all become, have shifted a little over the past year.
The front yard faces West. It’s shaded by street trees for much of the day during the summer, which limits the varieties I can grow there. There is a sunlight gradient from the south side of the front yard, which is open and sunnier, to the north side, which is more shaded. There is also a small lawn. When we first moved, I thought I would eliminate it. But when I walk along the sidewalk on our block, I see the arbor of trees along the street on one side, and the sweep of lawn uniting the properties on the other. It is a parklike setting, and when this view is interrupted by hedges, walls or fences, I miss it. To preserve this, I can live with a little bit of lawn.
The front yard will be the heirloom/antique garden. All the plants there will be species and varieties which were available over 100 years ago, 1905 or earlier. Our house was built in 1900, so this is the “Neo-Victorian” garden referenced in this blog. No elaborate bedding plant schemes or anything like that. There will be heirloom bulbs, perennials, annuals, a shrub or two, and at least one old rose. Victorian gardeners were eclectic, fascinated with the new and bizarre, while embracing the old-fashioned and comforting. Which describes me pretty well.
On the south side of the house is the driveway. During the summer, the sun is high enough to clear even the three stories of our next door neighbor’s house. The bed along this side of the house gets full sun. It runs nearly the depth of the house, for 35 feet or more. Its width varies: it’s about 8′ at the deepest and tapers to a point at the rear corner of the house.
This will be the cutting garden, the rough garden, the wild garden … the garden for anything I want to grow that doesn’t fit anywhere else. This will be a mixed border. Variations in height, color and texture will make the beds seem longer, and deeper, than they actually are. There will be a place here for at least one other old rose and some other shrubs. There’s enough room here for them to grow large enough to partially shade the first floor of the house and keep it cooler in summer, while allowing sun in the winter to warm it. These will also visually anchor the house to the property, connecting it to the land and making it seem smaller than it is.
(I’ve moved inside for the rest of this. It got chilly and started raining as it got dark outside.)
The backyard will be a sanctuary garden, for people and wildlife. It will be separated from the side yard and driveway by a fence and gate. Visitors will pass through a deep trellis, providing a transition to mark the entry into the sanctuary. Vines on the trellis will shield the backyard further, providing a feeling of enclosure and reinforcing the sanctuary.
There will be seating back here, and a porch swing suspended from another trellis. The backyard will be all native plants (save for the Norway Maples, about which I can do little for now). I’ve had bird feeders up, but these attract junk birds – European finches, starlings, even the occasional pigeon – as well as native species. So I’ll be planting the native shrubs I’ve collected over the years. The tallest will grow up to 15′ in time, providing an understory. These will provide berries as well as shelter, and possibly nesting sites. At ground level there will be ferns and wildflowers. There will be a mix of things growing from the ground up into the lowest reaches of the canopy provided by the trees.
The north side of the property is narrow, maybe 6′ wide. Native plants, especially ferns, will continue onto this side of the house. There will also be other shade plants: hostas, astilbes, and so on. A narrow path will lead to another gate and trellis to demark the transition between the backyard sanctuary and the front, public side of the property. On the front side of the gate will be more shade plants, merging with our next door neighbor’s mixed bed along their driveway, blurring the line between the two properties. The path continues to the front of the house, to the front steps, and back to the heirloom garden.
While I could walk around the property in a minute or two, all these transitions, shielded views and sheltered places, changes in designs and textures, and the sheer number of different species of plants all have a larger purpose. I want visitors, and me, to slow down, to view, to feel, to smell, to listen to the gardens. The gardens will invite us to stretch out time and space, to connect, however briefly, with other rhythms and beats. The gardens will allow us to synch with the pace of the minute, the day, the seasons, the years.
It will take years to accomplish all this. But I’m hoping to be here a long while. I hope that things will be in good enough shape in two years that I can add my gardens to the Victorian Flatbush House and Garden Tour. Visitors to this blog will be able to watch my progress over the next two years. And if I get on the tour, you’ll be the first to know.
GAO just released a report on the status of efforts to eradicate Anoplophora glabripennis, the Asian longhorned beetle, or “ALB” for short:
Invasive forest pests have seriously harmed our environment and imposed significant costs upon our economy. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is the lead agency for responding to forest pests. This report evaluates the federal response to three invasive forest pests–the Asian longhorned beetle [Anoplophora glabripennis], the emerald ash borer, and the pathogen Phytophthora ramorum (P. ramorum) [Sudden Oak Death]. Specifically, GAO describes (1) the status of efforts to eradicate these species, (2) the factors affecting the success of those efforts, (3) overall forest health monitoring programs, (4) coordination and communication of the three pest response efforts, and (5) USDA’s use of panels of scientific experts to aid in the response efforts.
Invasive Forest Pests: Lessons Learned from Three Recent Infestations May Aid in Managing Future Efforts, GAO-06-353, April 21, 2006
http://www.gao.gov/docsearch/abstract.php?rptno=GAO-06-353
In August 1996, the first ALB in the United States was discoved in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I garden just a few blocks south of Prospect Park and the NYC ALB quarantine zone. To learn how to identify ALB, and NYC’s efforts, visit the NYC Parks ALB Home Page.