A Wednesday's Observations

1. Five minutes ago, a beautiful sound, high up, familiar, half-listened to then focussed upon, and I rushed to the terrace to scan the sky. There they were, in a perfect V, flying dead north. Geese!

2. The green bike lane on Prince Street is perfect for cruising on foot past the tourists. Thank you, Mayor Mike.

3. How does one explain that one cannot plant "tall sculptural evergreens" in boxes 7 inches wide and 14 deep. Or that a lawn cannot grow on 2 and 3/4 inches of soil?

4. Rosemary can overwinter in New York on a terrace. We came upon three today that had done perfectly well facing south, protected from the north and west.

5. The small new shoots emerging from dormant dwarf campanula on a terrace in the West Village are extraordinarily happy-making.

6. We should all plant more Juneberries (Amelanchier). Berry picking in DUMBO park is only three months away. Moral support pickers needed.

7. I attached the spray nozzle to my hose this evening and watered the pots. The water hung like a necklace on the bright green chive leaves.

8. And yes, the Cornus mas, up top, is in bloom (this one in Cobble Hill Park, growing amongst the ghosts of the fallen of 1776): Cornelian cherry. Cornus signifying dogwood...most undogwood-like. It make sour red fruit in summer. Naturally, I feel that it might make very good jam.

9. And what do I tell friend Molly about what makes a perfect dinner party? Magic. That's what makes a perfect dinner party. Perfect, happy suprise. Pleasing people. Integrity. Flowers. An evening like this, when the bare terrace begs to be populated. Candles. Love. Good food. Small impeccable things. Friends. Love...that takes the form of a dish of almonds, or a camellia in the bathroom, or a cassoulet, or hot bread, or small candles in the pots outside. Or a roast chicken...

Iced in Brooklyn

In the morning, when we woke, the world was wrapped in ice. I decided to go out, and see. One's childhood still flows in adult veins. And I was a child in a city whose winters brought occasional, glittering freezes, helped by a garden hose left to sprinkle in a crabapple tree, overnight (whose idea was that?). When we moved, we didn't see frost again. And even though I have lived in the US longer than I lived in South Africa, that sense of awe at snow, ice, and icicles (especially), is as fresh as it ever was.

I walked through nearby Prospect Park. It was so beautiful that I continued to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, but that will be its own post.

I think a Viburnum, possibly prunifolium (black haw). This shrub has slipped under my ID radar.

Cornelian cherry (Cornus mas, native to Crimea,  and southern Europe; it doesn't know borders and has no soldiers)

Rose hips (Rosa multiflora)

Spicebush (Lindera benzoin)

                    Sweetgum, liquidamber (Liquidamber styraciflua)                                                 

Hemlock (Tsuga canadensis)

Hm, wasn't paying attention. Possibly a dogwood. And Traffic lightus.

A maple, maybe red. Acer rubrum.

Dogwood (Cornus...I think kousa)

                                                          Crabapple

Serviceberry. Sarvisberry. Shad. Shadblow. Saskataoon. Juneberry, beloved.

(Amelanchier spp.)

Pine, white (Pinus strobus). Prone to snapping, on days like this. 

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Donate to Médicins Sans Frontiers/Doctors Without Borders

 

Is it spring?

An unusually warm day in March, and the daffodils at the West 81st Street entrance to Central Park were glorious...

The crocuses luxuriant.

And The Ramble resolutely tight-lipped about spring. The green spikes are field garlic, but not fat enough here for me to bother about.

But what is that, above? I'd like to know...

My red-tipped knotweed shoots. How many days before harvest? Million dollar question. Ive never seen them this young and don't know how long it takes for them to reach 12" from this stage, with fluctuating temperatures. Late this coming week, perhaps. It has dipped below freezing, since.

This very early azalea had suffered from frost-bite, I think. The blooms had wilted strangely on their slender branches. 

Cornelian cherry - actually a dogwood, Cornus mas.

And sweet, lemony, straggly winter honey suckle, Lonicera fragrantissima.

Above, at the West 69th Street entrance, a gorgeous witch hazel, and many hellebores.

Almost back down at Columbus Circle, a strangely deserted lawn on a day when the whole park was dotted with happy people soaking up the soft weather. It is still fenced off for rehabilitation (should we fence ourselves off, occasionally? I think so).

21'Celsius. 

I went home carrying  a picnic bought at Wholefoods at Columbus Circle to eat on the roof in Brooklyn (I had been looking for some copies Edible Manhattan so that I could read my knotweed story in print, but they don't carry it...?). It was a holiday. The weather so lovely that no one could possibly be expected to behave themselves in a sensible domestic manner.

And spring is not here, yet.

Bud break

 

Cloudy days, but on Saturday we went for a long walk in the park (Prospect Park). A milestone walk, because, at five miles, door to door, it was the longest stroll for me since early December, when I began to take some serious foot pain seriously and had to simply stop. Walking. I don't know what injured the plantar fascia muscles, but it's been a steep and then very long and dauntingly gradual learning curve and recovery process. I mean, I had to join a gym! For cardio exercise that didn't involve weight-bearing. 

Blablabla. So this walk, albeit not at my usual pace, which is fast, was a test. It seemed to go A-OK. No pain the day after. It's mending.

Plus, there were pre-spring blossoms. Prunus x subhirtella always startles everyone by flowering in early winter, and then again in very early spring (which is less alarming). It's the first cherry blossom of the year, always. The fat, frilly Kanzan's are still about six weeks away.

Cornelian cherry (Cornus mas) blossoms are about to erupt. In September their tart red fruits will be ripe.

Native spicebush  (Lindera benzoin) has fat round buds.

Hazel (species?) - the pollen-laden male catkins with the tiny red female flower above.

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Scratching the surface

I caught myself in the middle of a thought-sequence that struck me as pathological. I was walking up to Court Street, to the book store where I would order the next in my Aubrey/Maturin series, and I saw, suddenly, a forsythia in full bloom in a south-facing townhouse's garden. I was affronted. Even offended. I had not seen it in bud. I like buds. And I don't like forsythia (Betsy Smith's "spring barf"). But what struck me as unpleasant was something had happened without my noticing, without time to prepare. It's true I don't even walk up that particular street that often. I tend to have a route. So It was not on my radar. There it was in a blaze of bright yellow with no warning.

And I thought. Damn, it's almost all over.

Spring.

It's inherited. I know my mother is the same.

She says that when she picks me at the airport in Cape Town something still grips her heart - she knows that picking me up means dropping me off again at the end of my annual 6-8 week summer sojourn. She knows even as she is driving to fetch me, with joy in her heart, what driving to see me off feels like. Hollow, horrible.

I also see the endings in beginnings.

And summer in New York is terrible.

I like buds. I like anticipation. I like looking forward. Perhaps it's because it's almost unbearable when it really hits. I didn't have a blog a year ago. Perhaps I'm anxious because I want to photograph every blossom, every special tree I know. Perhaps it's just pressure. The linden trees for example. What happens when they blow? It will be white froth for a week.


The flowering quince on Congress has just broken bud. They stayed closed, slowly swelling, for a month, some kind of record. It confirms my poor opinion of this colour. Salmon-rose. Not good. The flower-form is lovely, though, as is the fretwork of branches.

And the Cornus mas in Cobble Hill Park has opened its funny knots of yellow flowers. Not the acid yellow of forsythia: better. From a distance, the tree does not make an impression, but close up the flowers are interesting, and the tart fruit that follows would be worth its growing, I guess, if I had a woodland garden. But most people don't look at flowers close up, and most are afraid of fruit borne by trees they can actually touch.

Hm. Summer project. Cornelian cherry jelly. I think their fruit ripens later than the amelanchiers'...

New York organic, here we come.

Edible Plant Walk, Central Park

Cornelian cherries

Central Park's North Woods

23 August 2014, 11am-1pm

The last summer walk!

In the shorter days of late summer stone fruit and edible weeds flourish in Central Park. If we look up, there are Cornelian cherries (actually Cornus mas, a Mediterranean dogwood), black cherries, and perhaps hackberries, too.

Weed, or herb?

In the North Woods, jumpseed, pokeweed and mature stands of Japanese knotweed carpet the woodland floor, while plantain and burnweed pop up opportunistically beside paths. Burdock and lambsquarters are in bloom, and the cooler season's dock might be beginning to show itself after our unusually mild August. 

American burnweed

As we walk, learn to spot these and many other wild edibles, and how to use them. And enjoy a brunch scone along the way, spiced with mahlab - the powdered kernels of wild cherries and stuffed with black cherry jam.

Mahlab and black cherry scones

We meet at 11am.

WALK COMPLETE

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Central Park Spring Walk

After a rooftop garden appointment on the Upper East Side (where espaliered peaches were blooming) I veered west into Central Park's early spring. This Saturday's forage walk and picnic will be my first here in 2019 and I wanted to see what was growing where - every spring is different. Right now, the season belongs to Cornus mas - cornelian cherry. It is an eastern European species of dogwood, and blooms in balls of yellow between the much earlier witch hazel and the imminent spicebush.

My walk took me from East 75th Street up to the top of the park - 35 blocks, three-and-a-half miles, with all the zigzagging. These weeks belong to city-cab yellow. Manhattan forsythia blooms a week before Brooklyn's.

In the North Woods invasive lesser celandine (Ficaria verna) blankets the ground in places, its tiny bulbs and leaves smothering the natives that might try to raise their shoots above ground.

And in sunny spots purple dead nettle (purple dead nettle) is in bloom.

The spicebush (Lindera benzoin) buds are opening (spicebush will feature in the picnic's dessert on Saturday - you will find the recipe for these delicious olive oil loaves on p386 of Forage Harvest Feast - and you can buy your dried spicebush berries from Integration Acres; it is the best spice you have never used).

And another notorious invader has just emerged: Japanese knotweed (Reynoutria japonica). As the shoots grow taller and green, they resemble asparagus but they taste like sorrel married rhubarb.

Central Park, late March

After some viola planting on the Upper West Side yesterday morning I walked into Central Park near West 81st Street, a familiar route, leading me into The Ramble. 

I was hoping to find some early spring flowers, but the woods were closed for business. Not at home to visitors. Birds hopped in the rustling leaf litter and  hammered the bark of tall trees and called from bare branches. Not a single violet leaf peeped out of the brown quilt thrown over the hills and stream beds of this wild part of the park. This will all change in April, and if you're thirsty for a Northeastern spring visit a previous post about April in the park.

Heading towards the Upper East Side I paralleled the 79th Street cut-through allowing traffic to cross the park. Recently in the Times Sarah Maslin Nir wrote about the snow flurries we received last week, ending by noting that along the walls of the 79th Street transverse  "sprays of perennially overeager pyracantha flounced down the stone walls, branch tips almost mingling with small snow drifts..."

Really? First, it's too early for pyracantha (firethorn) to bloom, and second...it's too early for pyracantha to bloom. I had thought the writer must mean winter honeysuckle, which is at least white in bloom, but now I wonder if she meant forsythia. It's only a little bit different from pyracantha. One is pure white and one is bright yellow, but they are both flowers. Just looking at article now (my last in my monthly allowance - I have discovered The Guardian) I see there is a correction in the piece - something about tulips.

The vestiges of witch hazel flowers hung over the road. These were beautiful old trees, their branches in horizontal layers, and I am sorry I missed them in full bloom.

Near the zoo, a large blue splash of glory-of-the-snow,  Chionodoxa lucilieae [4/1/11 - which earlier I identified as Siberian squill, or Scilla siberica - see Janet's comment]. Here I passed two girls on a bench, wearing sunglasses bigger than their heads and eating icecream,  flanked by eight small dogs, seated four on on either side of the girls, on the bench. Each one clad in a quilted orange coat. Upper East Side doggy daycare? I asked if I may take their picture. NO, said one expressionless girl, licking her icecream.

Flowers are easier.

A woman said, as I was photographing these tête-à-têtes and Siberian squill, Scilla siberica [see, similar but different, the squill nods], I just love that purple with that yellow! I actually looked around, thinking I had missed something else in bloom, but no. That just shows that my blue is not your blue.

These buds belong to a cherry, a beautiful, sprawling specimen growing near the yacht pond (properly known as Conservatory Water). I must go to check on its blossoms, soon.

Every lawn was speckled with robins.

And opposite The Plaza a cardinal posed in grey branches...

...before diving off.

In the end the March park belongs to the Cornelian cherries - Cornus mas. They are everywhere, and wonderful. Perhaps I will be brave enough to pick their berries for jelly in summer.

The forsythia, winter honeysuckle, Cornelian cherries, daffodils, scilla and hellebores will give way to the magnolia, cherry, crabapple, amelanchier, and later to azalea, rhododendron, hawthorn; to the woodland ephemerals - violets, bloodroot, shooting star, trillium, to the bedding tulips, to a dozen flowers I have not thought of. 

Perhaps even some pyracantha.