Arverne by the Sea, Queens

I had heard a lot of hoopla about Arverne by the Sea, we got there and it was a pretty big letdown. The neighborhood itself is really depressing, very impoverished. I've been all over the city, but I've never seen anything like it. It was like being in a desolate Rust Belt town.

A view down the boardwalk. Bayberry in foreground, lots of shore little bluestem in background.


Northern bayberry (Myrica (Morella) pensylvanica) holds onto some of it's leaves through winter, although you can see quite a few on the ground. Lovely russet color. The fruits are harder to see but they are there. They have a high lipid content - excellent nourishment for migrating birds. Arverne, Queens.

A view towards the A train tracks


Golden hues of shore little bluestem (Schizachyrium littorale)


Northern bayberry (Myrica pensylvanica) leaves blanket the ground, shading out grass seedlings. The shrubs are also colonial, meaning they reproduce vegetatively. These strategies enable bayberry to succeed switchgrass, little bluestem et al in maritime/coastal grassland communities. It's also a great wintry color palette: gold, russet, gray.

Urban Blight Botanizing at Dubos Point

Salt marsh cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora) culms with sea lavender stems (Limonium carolinianum).

Poor Dubos Point. I found a reference to it as a site for "Urban Blight Birding" . This is too bad, since the 33-acre site is named in honor of Dr. Rene Dubos, he of the great phrase, “Think globally, act locally.” And while the spirit of this sentiment seems to have been lost on the NYC parks dept, that is probably a good thing. Their neglect often leads to more natural area. Parks targeted for "improvements" get excessive amounts of the built - boardwalk, trail, birdblinds while simultaneously diminishing the natural - incursion of invasive plants from disturbance and construction vehicles, loss of rare plants due to uninformed site design.

I should do more yoga - this frustration has to seep out somehow.


Just across from JFK...

Back to my site visit. Dubos Point was a saltwater marsh until 1912, at which point it was filled with dredged materials for real estate development. The project failed to materialize. Today, it is the largest salt marsh on the north shore of the Rockaway peninsula east of Rockaway Point.


High tide line with felled Spartina alterniflora, groundsel bush (Baccharis halimfolia) and marsh-elder (Iva fructescens). And, of course, detritus. This is urban blight botanizing, after all.


More floatsam. The most interesting thing is the coconut. I wonder if that came from nearby garbage, or instead from some tropical paradise. It's not unheard of, those suckers travel far. They've been found off the coast of Ireland. Today I counted 5 coconuts!

Some of the plants seen in the salt marsh areas:

Graminoids - salt grass (Distichlis spicata), blackgrass (Juncus gerardii), common reed (Phragmites australis), salt marsh cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora), salt meadow cordgrass (Spartina patens).
Shrubs - groundsel bush (Baccharis halimfolia) and marsh-elder (Iva fructescens).
Forbs - sea rocket (Cakile edentula), sea lavender (Limonium carolinianum), glasswort (Salicornia europaea), seaside goldenrod (Solidago sempervirens).

In addition to salt marsh, we also saw maritime grasslands. Both of these vegetative communities are rare in NYC.

Frozen toes in PBP

Today I visited The Meadow in Pelham Bay Park. I dressed so warmly, but instead of wearing my insulated boots I wore my summer field shoes - aka my old running sneakers. With only one pair of socks, I was dancing up and down to keep my toes limber. Hard to do when the high is only 25 F.

Anyway, this area became a meadow when the area was scraped for fill soil to create Orchard Beach - another of Robert Moses' handiworks. This time, though, the results aren't all that bad. It created a wet depression that is home to quite a nice assortment of plants, especially those that are rare in the city and the state. The clusters of staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina) are such a treat in the winter.
I found several of the hard empty shells before I saw the walnut tree (Juglans nigra). It is pretty easy to id in winter. It has big, stout, sparse branches and dark deeply furrowed bark. Hundreds of Canada goldenrod (Solidago canadensis) stems surrounded its base.

This little bluestem (Schizachyrium sp.) turned out to be the coastal species (littorale) - shore little bluestem. Pelham is outer coastal plain. The "interior" species (S. scoparium) is found across the borough in western Bronx in Van Cortlandt Park.

Lots of pasture rose (Rosa carolina) where we entered (see first photo) but this is multiflora rose (R. multiflora), one of the worst invasive plants in the state. Looks pretty here though, no?

Anthropologie & moss loss

Anthropologie's store windows and displays have me upset. They feature a lot of moss - wait, let me rephrase that - A LOT OF MOSS (and liverworts in there too) and fungi, mostly shelf fungi. I wish I had a picture...

Anyway, far too much, in just the one store. And how many other stores have the same displays? Why worry, you ask? Because, where do they get these biological elements? They are harvested from the wild. Probably with permits, but still, what is the ecological repercussion(s) of this? {My concerns also apply to mining peat moss for orchids and garden beds - bad, bad, bad).

This study, sadly, supports my sadness.

Yearly revenues from sales of commercial moss harvest permits were reported to be US$19,650. In contrast, estimates of total harvests based on export data and assumptions about those data suggest that the mean yearly harvest for the years 1998–2003 was between 4.6 and 18.4 million air-dry kg (yearly minimum and maximum estimated at 0.9 and 37.4 million air-dry kg, respectively). Moss sales (domestic plus exports) are estimated to total between US$˜6 million and 165 million per year. The wide ranges in these estimates illustrate how little is known about the moss harvest trade. In combination with lack of information about the size of the moss inventory, reaccumulation rates, and species and ecosystem functions potentially affected by harvest, results indicate that policy makers and land managers lack critical information on which to base harvest regulations.

When helping is hurting

Preserving endangered plant populations can be very straight forward. Save a site from development, save the plants. Other times it is complicated. This story is the latter, and why gardening and restoration, albeit noble and important, are no substitute for conservation.

This story is about the Presidio clarkia (Clarkia franciscana) pictured above and two gardeners who thought they were "helping".

Horticultural 'bad guys' meant well

NO MATTER HOW you look at it, Concord resident Bob Case is an unlikely villain in a recent kerfuffle over the Presidio clarkia, a delicate little blossom that grows in only two places in the world -- San Francisco's Presidio and on a small patch of the Oakland hills.

Read more of the story
Learn more about Presidio clarkia

Soundview Park, BX

Today I visited Soundview Park, targeting specific sections to see if there was any vegetation of interest. Most of the sections I looked at were fill soils with mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris) as the dominant species - exotic, invasive, nada.

The area that had the most interesting vegetation was the jetty. My presumption is that the jetty is similar to high quality (clean) sandy fill - no nutrients, no weeds.
Soundview Park is in the south Bronx, where the Bronx River opens into the East River. This sections is estuarine, meaning the water is brackish. The salinity levels of the Bronx River diminish (becomes freshwater) a little further north, near the Bronx Zoo. So, as expected, much of the vegetation I saw was typical of salt marsh/maritime areas. The grounsel bush (Baccharis halimifolia) and marsh elder (Iva fructens) seen above are testament to the presence of saltwater. It was a rather nice saltmarsh, small, and no botanical surprises.
Seaside goldenrod (Solidago sempervirens)


The park has been derelict for so long the the locals feel comfortable squatting on city land, whether for boats...


Or the dead. Dead what? I don't know. I don't think I want to know. After we passed the memorial, there was a wretched smell - a giant, rotting dead dog. People, I don't make this stuff up.

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