A Wreathy Business: Take 20 Mugwort Sticks...

There is snow on the ground in Brooklyn and it is wreath season.

For the last couple of years I have made our own wreath, attaching the pretty bits to a circlet of bent mugwort stems. Here is the most recent version.

 More about how to make this wreath in my story for Gardenista.

Signs and wonders

Invasive, delicious, and it perseveres, nay, thrives!...in winter. Field garlic. Allium vineale. Right now relishing the snow.

Tonight it will add welcome green pungency to a chicken pot pie.

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 Book a Winter Walk and Picnic

May Day

On May Day, when the spoiled citizens of France took to their streets to protest their president's decree that they should retire at the age of 64, and not 62, I walked in the woods at the northwestern tip of Manhattan. 

It had rained all weekend, and in the old hills, untouched by the grid that flattened so much of the island, water was running, everywhere.

I visited a vast nettle patch and collected a bagful to blanch and freeze, for tarts and breads and biscuits and as-yet-uncreated mid-spring stews. Field garlic was at its fattest, too, and easy to pull from the sodden soil.

On logs obscured by fallen branches, in swathes of Japanese knotweed and emergent jewelweed, wood ears proliferated.

I saw a small handful of other people, mostly women, jogging, and walking, and the sounds that surrounded us for two hours were running water and singing birds. 

As I left a man placed his large backpack on a rock in the forest and unpacked it, possibly to spend the day in contemplation of the million shades of spring green. But as I walked down my last hill I heard from his rock the fatal sound of flat bleating. The peace was shattered by his sack of bagpipes, playing a penetrating flaccid scale, each ascending note more defeated than the last. 

My timing had been perfect.

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@marie_viljoen

Choose field garlic

It's field garlic season, where we live, and perhaps where you are, too. This chive-like wild onion (Allium vineale) is a winter-through-spring weed in North America, but a very tasty one. And infinitely more sustainable than ramps (Allium tricoccum).

Eggs deviled, and destined for a picnic. Their yolky stuffing is laced with fresh field garlic, mustard, and mayonnaise.

And a deeply soothing soup. You'll find its recipe in my story about field garlic for Gardenista (and yes, you can substitute chives, or scallion greens).

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Classes:

4 March, Winter Foraging at the NYBG

11 March, Sugar Moon in Inwood Hill Park

20 March, Vernal Equinox Social, Prospect Park

25 March, Bud-Break at Historic Green-Wood

On the edges in October

On a gale-force day we visited Fort Tilden. The autumn olives are still heavy with fruit, their season now in its fifth week. For some reason some trees ripen much, much later than others. Their juicy, sweetly-tart and slightly tannic fruit is delicious. Birds agree, which is why these trees - very invasive, locally - spread so quickly.

The tide was high and foamy and dry sand from the dunes was blasting across the wet beach.

Many people discovered this refuge during the worst days of the pandemic, and summer saw the sand crowded. But today there was no one on the beach, and just one (extremely proficient) kite boarder in the strong waves.

Back in the shelter of the dunes where native bayberry, black cherry and juniper formed a shoreline windbreak, a man with a strong accent told us that the path ahead was blocked by high water. "Do not be deceived," he said, "You cannot pass." He was right. 

So we picnicked, instead. Tomato soup so hot it burned out tongues. But the heat melted the cheese into pleasing strings.

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2 November:

Chrysanthemum Pop-Up Walk, Central Park

Kahili ginger - botanical mugger in disguise

Late fireworks on the terrace. This beautiful flowering ginger-cousin is a species of Hedychium, and was a very kind and unexpected gift earlier this year from a garden design client, who knew how excited I was to hear that his ginger relative had actually bloomed.

When the giant plant was delivered to our door in early September, beautifully wrapped in burlap, I hefted it up and out to the terrace and then did some reading. 

Don't judge a plant by its spectacular cover. Hedychiums, native to Asia, are known collectively as flowering gingers. They are apparently popular in the nursery trade. (I had no idea.) Bought and planted by loving plant owners the gingers have escaped, and this has led their becoming some of the most invasive plants on the planet. In mild parts of the world where they are not native they take over. Even in Cape Town I have seen a similar ginger clogging a stream near my mother's house. In Hawaii Kahili ginger - as this species (H. gardenerianum) is known, there - has a price on its head. In Florida it is running rampant. 

In New York's cold winter climate it doesn't stand much chance of becoming a thug, of course. If left out doors it would succumb. But in Hawaii my friend Sunny Savage is devising ways of dealing with the habitat-altering invasive creatively: by eating it. (You can download her Savage Kitchen app to learn more.)

We will talk more about native and invasive edible plants this Saturday, October 31st, at the New York Botanical Garden; and there are now some tickets available! Click on the date links to book. My second fall class was shifted from Thursday because of predicted torrential rain, and not every student could make the rain date. (Apologies if you are one of them.)

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NYBG Class, 31 October 2020