Hike up a hill, get biscuits!

You may have heard that it has rained a lot in New York.  Bad for people. Good for plants.

Come and meet some of those plants during a series of new botanical walks, beginning on Labor Day, with a Lookout Hill Hike in Prospect Park. Yep, Monday. Tomorrow! There will be a minimalist but delicious picnic of fresh biscuits with toppings of butter, pawpaw, and lilac honey. And iced spicebush coffee.

On Saturday, September 11th, we will commemorate the 20th anniversary of that terrible day in a very positive way: walking among the trees and flowers and diversity - human and botanical - of Central Park's North Woods. Our Woods and Water walk will be followed by a picnic on a hill.

Finally, I am very happy to be returning to the New York Botanical Garden's Adult Education fall program with two walks, on October 8th and 17th.

See you there!

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Book for Forage Walks and Classes

Winter, with wings

          Photos: Vincent Mounier

I give you: gratuitous bird-feeding pictures. A February pleasure, apparently. It has been over a decade since I fed North American birds from my hands. And that was in Stanley Park, Vancouver. (There was a weaver, in South Africa, inbetween.)

Titmice and chickadees in Brooklyn. (Why not the song sparrows, hopping at my feet? Or the bold cardinals?)

It is precious, the minute pressure of tiny bird feet on your skin.

And it feels for a while as though this is the only thing.

The pictures above were taken in Green-Wood Cemetery. The monarch butterfly mask is from Society 6. The artist who makes this one is  Eclectic at Heart and I like their other masks, too. They are all double-layered, with space for a filter-insert. But they do get loose after a lot of wearing and washing. So (after six months of daily wear) I will order some more. (For grocery shopping we now wear double masks: a surgical mask under the cloth. Yay.)

Pensive chickadee. These pictures (different jacket! Maskless!) were taken up in Pelham Bay a couple of weeks ago, in the Bronx. Then, as now, we walked into the city wilds to enjoy the snow. There were very few people, so I was relieved to de-mask. (Although, an hour into our walk, post-picnic, we bumped right into our friends Stephen and Chad on a narrow, snowy path. Which seemed surreal and perfectly normal, at the same time. We re-masked to greet one another with sounds of muffled effusion.)

I want my own chickadee.

Look at the two birds. It doesn't seem real. Very fast shutter speed on that long-lensed Canon of the Frenchman's.

We saw a family of deer in these woods, sitting in the snow, and chewing whatever deer chew in snowy February. Their coats looked thick and warm. 

Mostly, there was silence. We are becoming connoisseurs of where to find it.

Tomorrow, we will look for some more.

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Find me on Instagram @66squarefeet

Beautiful Fall Forage Classes at the NYBG

October is around the corner, and that means autumn, for real. 

In an unreal year.

I visited the New York Botanical Garden recently because I will be teaching there again in a few weeks: Two outdoor classes, on October 15th and October 29th. [Update: these classes are fully booked but there is one in WINTER! January 21st] The classes are really walks, and we will be visiting the Native Garden (above) and the Thain Family Forest. And probably meandering  a bit more if the mood strikes us. 

Come and learn to identify edible plants in their fall clothes, and understand how they fit into the bigger ecological picture. We will breathe in the good, fresh air of the mainland (hey, I live on an island; the Bronx is exciting to a Brooklynite!). 

Masks are mandatory - so our fresh air will be filtered - and attendance is limited for social distancing reasons. So book, soon.

I spotted a sweet hummer in the jewelweed patch. Planting annual Impatiens capensisis is a sure-fire way to attract and support the vulnerable little birds on their way south in early fall. Jewelweed self seeds very readily (and its seeds are edible!) so once you have it, it will be there forever. It likes dappled shade and a lot of moisture. Low-lying areas that don't drain well are perfect. But I have grown it successfully in pots and planters, too.

Still boggy, here is pickerel weed. Its young leaves, buds, flowers, and seeds are good to eat.

No, don't eat the pitcher plants. But it's fun to see carnivorous plants flourishing.

These are ostrich ferns. In spring their fiddleheads are delicious. Plant one and in a couple of years you will have a dozen. Perfect for a deep shade spot.

Golden rods (Solidago species) are often blamed for seasonal allergies, but they are innocent: their pollen is too fat to affect our sinuses. In fact, showy flowers whose job it is to attract pollinators are usually never allergen-culprits. Rather, it is the inconspicuous flower of wind-pollinated plants (like ragweed, and I suspect, mugwort) that is an irritant, because it is so fine and light, designed to be dispersed by the puff of a breeze. 

And yes, some golden rods are delicious...

The extreme climate of the Northeast is also home to a native prickly pear, Opuntia humifusa. Muggy summers and freezing winters do not rattle it.

 

Fragrant Pycnanthemum species love full sun and pollinators love them. Their leaves, flowers and seeds make refreshing drinks.

Imposter! Not native. But very closely related to our indigenous prickly ash (which can be used in the same way). This is Chinese pepper, or Sichuan, Zanthoxylum simulans: citric, cooling, numbing, unique.

Yes, the elusive pawpaw (Asimina triloba) lives at the NYBG. The fruit ripens under its green umbrella-ed leaves in mid to late September. This still-underplanted tree deserves a spot in every garden. This year I enjoyed wonderful pawpaws picked from a tree in Brooklyn's Park Slope.

And the delicious - or terribly stinky, like-sweaty-socks-that-a-cat-peed-on? - cranberry viburnum. The smell is in the details. How to tell the difference between the native and European species? We will learn! 

Use the links below to book.

October 15th

October 29th

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Wild Foods Cookbook

NYBG - forage class

I am delighted to be returning to the New York Botanical Garden on April 19th to teach a class about edible native plants.

We begin at 11AM with an image-heavy classroom presentation followed by a ramble in the beautiful Native Garden and Thane Family Forest, ending around 2PM with a shared, wild-inspired snack in the company of delectable early spring spicebush (shown above).

Booking is via the NYBG. For non members tickets are $85, for members, $79.

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Spring Forage Walks and Picnics

Gone, almost forgotten

In the middle of May, here is a quick look at April. Otherwise I will forget.

Above, 7 April - Bush Terminal, Brooklyn. Where urban nature and old industry meet beside the water in Brooklyn. It is a New York City-designated park, now, and is an interesting mixture of old buildings, feral cats, private security, weeds, new ballfields, a pristine public bathroom, waterside paths, and utter neglect. As always, with the Parks' Department in the city, there is money for capital improvement but never any for maintenance.

The secret in life is maintenance (which is really just paying attention). Gardens. Parks. Engines. Marriages. Friendships. Cuticles...

Quick digression: One of the many new things that 2018 brought into our lives - and by far the best - has been our first car. Really the Frenchman's car, because he bought it. We had resisted for good reasons: the obvious expense, and then the real New York hassle: parked cars must be moved twice a week for street cleaning, and there is the relentless traffic generated by a massive population. Plus the real worry about leaving such a shiny new thing on the street (undercover, off-street parking would cost as much as our rent), vulnerable to humans, weather, and bad drivers.

But. Flipside? Freedom. In our own clean machine. No more sticky and grubby ZipCars and Car2Go's, no more worry about how long we'd be, and spending $100 just for a day's outing. No more knowing we can't sleep over somewhere because of the heinous cost involved in hiring a car for so long. So we have a car. We are finally real Americans. (Don't worry. There will never be guns.) To make us feel better about car payments we figured out where to cut costs and the easy answer was our daily wine quota with dinner. So instead of sharing a bottle a night we share a bottle every two nights. Healthier, too. And oddly, we don't miss it.

So we have been exercising our car wings. And the Frenchman is beaming. She has a name, in our household tradition (see Mogashagasha): Ntiniwe (n-TEE-nee-weh). Diminutive of the word "otter", in Xhosa and Zulu. We love her. We have been Going Places.

8 April, Breezy Point, Queens

This gloriously empty beach is at the tip of the Rockaway peninsula. Still very much part of the city, it is empty.

The beach is adjacent to what has been described as the whitest neighborhood in New York City. That part is plain weird, and, from the outside, slightly sinister. Breezy Point (flattened by Hurricane Sandy and still being rebuilt) is a gated community with its own security force, and you are not allowed in at all unless you are an approved visitor. You are not allowed to buy unless you have three letters of reference from existing home owners. But you are allowed on the beach, if you park at the end and walk. One of Vince's first excursions in Ntiniwe was to drive out, park, and run here for miles on the deserted beach, inhaling the sea air and uninterrupted sky and water, a tonic for a man who works longer and harder than anyone I know (can you tell I like him?).

He loved it. And on one of his runs he saw and filmed dozens of sand pipers and American oyster catchers, more than either of us had ever seen; spring migration for the sand pipers, and a regular breeding ground for the oyster catchers. Because of this dogs are not allowed on the beach (although we saw one romping in the distance). So we came out together one bright cold day, and walked for miles.

Walking back again in the familiar dunes behind Fort Tilden (previously reached by a combination of subway and bus), an early shoreline spring was visible only in the pussy willows.

On our way home we stopped at the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, hoping for a glimpse of a late-season snowy owl. No owls, but we did see snow geese and warblers, as well as a bumper crop of juniper pollen from the eastern red cedars (Juniperus virgiana). Atchoo. But an interesting ingredient if you have the patience to collect it. I included the fine dust in a batch of madeleines.

16 April, Prospect Park, Brooklyn

Fifteen minutes from home, this time on my bicycle, and the Cornelian cherries, one of the first trees to flower, were in full bloom. Thanks to them I have been exploring the food of Georgia and Eastern Europe - specifically via the books of Darra Goldstein's The Georgian Feast and Olia Hercules's Kaukasis and Mamushka. Cornus mas is native to that region and is used in local recipes. While it may be the first to flower it is also among the last to fruit: you will spot the crimson, plum-like (but cherry-sized) fruits in late summer. They begin tart and crisp, and turn sourly plummy as they darken.

Spotted in the woods, my friend the white throated sparrow, whose call is painfully sweet, is often scratching about in the leaf litter of woodlands and gardens from winter through May.

14 April, Caumsett State Park, Long Island

Formerly the estate of Marshall Field III, on the North Shore of Long Island, this park was new to us. Near the small town of Oyster Bay (where I could live very happily), it has wide vistas, serious trees, and a long empty shoreline. While hundreds of cars waited to be admitted to the vast parking areas around deserted former milking barns, we were able to escape the crowds. They made for the main manor house. As usual, we headed in the opposite direction.

And there we found clean water and a pebbly beach that reminded us a lot of the North Fork. It was very chilly, but the blue sky and water breathed relief into us at a time when we were both stressed to breaking point. For a few hours we shut everything out, and listened, and watched, and absorbed.

Along the shore I found healthy colonies of periwinkles, and collected some in our now-empty lunch box. I cooked them very simply, later - boiled, and then dipped into an aioli - it brought back memories of expensive shellfish platters at the Café du Centre in Geneva, in my singing days, and at Balthazar in SoHo, where I have not eaten in many years. The seaweed is bladder wrack (on account of its built in bladders) and I dried it - it made a wonderful, chip-like snack, and is also a very good seed cracker ingredient. As we turn to eating fewer carbohydrates (a new thing) I have been making a lot of seed crackers. Everyone wants the recipe.

20 April, Prospect Parks Woods

Dead logs are a good place to look for mushrooms like wood ears and pheasant backs, and on this trip my bag was filled with the former. A month later that nascent green carpet of goutweed/ground elder is 18 inches tall, a sea of invasive green.

26 April, Prospect Park

The magnolias were in full bloom on this trip, and a sign that spring, after a very bumpy start, had arrived.

No going back.

28 April, Pelham Bay's Hunter Island, Bronx

It is a real mission to reach by public transport, but at least half the group of intrepid walkers who joined me on a plant identification and invasive species forage managed, despite the MTA testing them to breaking point. I have known this large park on the Long Island Sound in every season, and love returning.

The skunk cabbages that we had seen in March were now lush and the frozen ground their buds had broken through in March (the plants are thermogenic) thoroughly thawed.

So there it was. Not shown, the oodles of forages collected, sorted and preserved (mostly). The meals cooked, the seeds planted. The plants changing daily in the garden. The gardens designed. And it is already beyond the middle of May, the busiest month for foragers and gardeners.

I have some mushrooms to pickle...

My next walk is in the early evening of May 30th - we have lots of light, and the largesse of late spring. See the link below for booking.

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Book a Forage Walk

Pink and green

Ubiquitous bougainvillea used to be invisible to me, but after living in a cold winter climate for so long, now it pops. This one makes me long for the Jacques Torres strawberry and basil sorbet in a cone that I loved so much in Dumbo, two summers ago.

This beautiful courtyard planting is at The Cellars-Hohenhort, a Relais en Châteaux hotel around the corner from m parents' house in Constantia. Today I'll be walking and talking in the gardens. Nice day at the office...

The wild woods - an excursion to Pelham Bay

To Pelham Bay Bay Park we went, on the 6. It takes a lot less time from Harlem than it did from Cobble Hill. Spring beauties were out in drifts of white. I have never seen so many.

We pointed long lenses at tree stumps but did not see the owlet that is in alleged residence.

There were woodland anemones on their "stems like threads" (perfectly on cue, as I write about them in the April chapter of my book.)

There was cutleaf toothwort.

There were deer! (I have never seen deer, here.)

There were thousands of trout lilies.

And forests of Japanese knotweed, below. It is really out of hand. I have never seen as much. This is a problem, because this part of the city is also home to a wonderful diversity of  indigenous wildflowers and spring ephemerals which are outcompeted by the weedy thugs. I was also struck by the green sheets of day lilies also invasive) and the presence of masses of garlic mustard. 

The good news? Well, you know what it is. Primo kitchen ingredient. But it needs to be harvested NOW. 

Why can't we host a knotweed festival? A famous April feast. Have foragers and cooks and chefs and writers and gardeners and botanists and park custodians all make friends and play catch the knotweed for a couple of days.

And then eat it, together. This is a spring treat.

After stops for photos and knotweed collection, we headed to our favourite island where someone once planted garden flowers - lily of the valley (which make the Frenchman homesick for his childhood in Antibes, where there was a festival honouring them), grape hyacinth and shasta daisies, all around some stone ruins - and had our picnic.

Stellaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. Marlon Brando. Such a good looking young man. So very odd, later.

Prosciutto and arugula with home made mayonnaise and mustard, on brioche buns, and some field garlic bread left over from Saturday's Central Park wild edibles walk. We put cheese on that, naturally, with a schmear of Mrs Ball's hot chutney.

Spiky, with yellow buds, growing from a crack in the rock. No idea.

And a butterfly.*

Then a detour for winter cress, a walk to the bus, making our trip a good  5.5 mile round trip, and south, on the 6 train back to Harlem.

The butterfly reminds me: I have a book about homegrown herbal teas to give away. I loved the butterfly giveaway I did a couple of years ago, where everyone described their first local sightings. It made the most evocative poem. Perhaps it's time to do that again...