There are few places in Amer­ica where you can you lose your­self in a shaded for­est teem­ing with hun­dreds of diverse species, take a twenty-minute break to enjoy chicharos and empanadas at a Mex­i­can bodega, and then return to the wilder­ness to fin­ish your hike. That is exactly what we did on a Thurs­day after­noon last fall with urban ecol­o­gist Mariellé Anzelone.

Mariellé walked us through Inwood Hill Park at the north­ern tip of Man­hat­tan. Along the way we touched white wood aster, witch-hazel, and shade-tolerant species of gold­en­rod as she iden­ti­fied the plants. Inwood Hill Park is decid­edly urban – over­head, planes momen­tar­ily drowned out Mariellé’s expla­na­tion of earth­worms’ neg­a­tive impact on for­est soils and the sound of fall leaves crunch­ing under­foot, while trusses of the Henry Hud­son Bridge just became vis­i­ble through the shed­ding branches of oak trees. How­ever, after hik­ing ten min­utes into the woods, it really felt like a depar­ture from the city. This is a feel­ing that Mariellé is attempt­ing to bring to a wider pop­u­la­tion of New York­ers, a feel­ing she hopes will encour­age peo­ple to rethink the way we aim to ‘green’ NYC.

What exactly does con­ser­va­tion mean in an urban envi­ron­ment like New York City’s?

Peo­ple imag­ine that urban ecol­ogy is start­ing with a clean slate. They think nature must be “designed in” because no pre­ex­ist­ing part of a city’s land­scape still exists. That’s not true; one-eighth of New York City is com­prised of nat­ural areas. The issue is that nature is com­plex — the def­i­n­i­tion of “nat­ural” and the meth­ods for mea­sur­ing it are less than explicit. It’s much eas­ier to pro­tect things in situ than it is to restore or cre­ate nat­ural spaces from scratch.

Money is abun­dant for restora­tion and inter­ven­tion projects, for bring­ing land­scap­ing into urban sites. There are great “before and after” pic­tures. Peo­ple love the High Line, and I do as well. It’s nature in the city. But, it’s a gussied-up nature for peo­ple to imbibe and digest. It takes people’s atten­tion away from the nat­ural spaces. When a land­scape is designed, it is always dumbed down and sim­pli­fied nature — you get nowhere near the com­plex­ity of a nat­ural sys­tem in a built park.  It’s com­pletely dif­fer­ent from a genetic standpoint.

It’s much eas­ier to pro­tect nature than it is to re-create nat­ural spaces from scratch.

To many peo­ple, nature in NYC is usu­ally about build­ing more parks. For you, what is the dif­fer­ence between build­ing more parks and pro­tect­ing exist­ing nat­ural spaces?

It may not make a dif­fer­ence from an “admi­ra­tion stand­point,” but you don’t see this rich­ness of flora in con­trived land­scapes. I’m really pas­sion­ate about plant con­ser­va­tion and I want to know what we’re los­ing and what’s rare. To me, that’s inform­ing man­age­ment: How we are fail­ing these plants and how can we redress that?

See­ing cer­tain plants also speaks to some­thing. For exam­ple, see­ing that low bush blue­berry ear­lier told me that the soil is low pH and mostly undis­turbed. There are myc­or­rhizae that grow with blue­berry, which is this inti­mate fun­gal rela­tion­ship that they have along their roots and it helps them to uptake more nutri­ents from the soil.

And that level of com­plex­ity is what’s lack­ing in a man­i­cured park or green space?

Yes. A long-term, sus­tained, man­i­cured land­scape relies on con­stant human input. Soils are so com­plex. When you see a place being devel­oped and you see all that native top­soil that has evolved here over 20,000 years being removed… it’s heart­break­ing, if only to me.

 Other peo­ple may be sat­is­fied walk­ing through spaces like the High Line. The High Line is won­der­ful, but to not have sort of unknown places like Inwood Hill Park where we can dis­cover and explore would be really unfortunate.

Let’s say we lose these places that have been rel­a­tively untouched, we lose the com­plex­ity found in these places. What’s the impact?

Remem­ber the Red Admi­ral but­ter­fly that we saw while we were walk­ing around? It’s a migra­tory species, and pulses of them flock through here. The same with a lot of bird species.

Large nat­ural spaces pro­vide many dif­fer­ent lev­els of habi­tat for a vari­ety of species. Poi­son ivy, for exam­ple, is one of the first plants to turn bright red in the fall — the thought is that these plants have really valu­able fruit, and they want to adver­tise their fruit to the birds that are pass­ing en masse.

So that they will eat the berries and spread the seeds?

Exactly, and since birds can’t see the dark blue of the berries, but they can see red, it’s a way to adver­tise that there is some­thing of inter­est down here. So these high-fat berries for­tify the birds for their migra­tory flight, and since they dis­perse the berry seeds by eat­ing them, the plants also win. Who designs for that? When you lose spaces like this, you just lose all of that.

What do you do as an urban ecol­o­gist in New York City?

My work varies depend­ing on which projects I’m engaged in, and the time of year. I teach a class called “Sus­tain­able Gar­den­ing with Natives” at the New School. I’ve been writ­ing op-eds for the New York Times. I founded NYC Wild­flower Week, which I orga­nize every year. I also spent many years work­ing as a plant ecol­o­gist for the New York City Parks Department–most of my work there was in conservation.

I need to share my love for these things with other people —

Is the bat­tle for pro­tect­ing bio­di­ver­sity more of a bat­tle for preser­va­tion than it is for smarter design in green spaces?

We can do both simul­ta­ne­ously, and they feed into each other. But, while there’s not a lot of dis­cus­sion around preser­va­tion, there is a lot of talk about design. Design is sexy, and archi­tects are really excited and ready to jump on the band­wagon for design­ing green spaces. But the most basic level is sav­ing the huge tracts of nat­ural land that we have. PlaNYC, which is a won­der­ful doc­u­ment, iron­i­cally talks about bio­di­ver­sity and about plant­ing trees, but at the same time it is talk­ing about build­ing huge des­ti­na­tion parks in all the boroughs.

Like Freshkills Park on Staten Island? 

Freshkills is one of them, but there are places like Ocean Breeze, also in Staten Island, and Ridge­wood Reser­voir on the Queens/Brooklyn bor­der.  There are sig­nif­i­cant nat­ural areas there already that they want to pave over and make into recre­ational park facil­i­ties. To me, there is a sense of irony there. They are work­ing really hard to plant a mil­lion trees, which is a won­der­ful goal, but why aren’t we pre­serv­ing what we have?

What has to hap­pen to change the way we look at green space so that PlaNYC is talk­ing about con­ser­va­tion, bio­di­ver­sity, and con­tigu­ous nat­ural spaces instead of just recre­ational parks or street trees?

Writ­ing my piece on the Tor­rey moun­tain mint for the New York Times was so utterly dev­as­tat­ing for me, and after it was pub­lished I got a ton of peo­ple email­ing me say­ing, “Your arti­cle made me cry,” and I thought “…good.” It’s not to be mean, it’s that I want peo­ple to feel that dev­as­ta­tion so that maybe down the road they want to be vested in a local land­scape near them, too. In any case, at that point I real­ized I can’t pre­serve the things I love in a vacuum.

I need to share my love for these things with other peo­ple who are going to help me fight the fight. I started giv­ing talks at nature cen­ters around the city on plants–and it would always be about rare plants — rare plants of Marine Park, rare plants of Pel­ham Bay Park, etc, because no one cares about a plant unless it’s rare or a wild­flower. It’s sneaky but this is how you get peo­ple to care.

Once I left the Parks Depart­ment I started some­thing called NYC Wild­flower Week, which, quite hon­estly, is meant to build a con­stituency for these nat­ural areas. I have no hid­den agenda — I want an army of plant peo­ple like me, so that next time some­one wants to develop a salt marsh, there are 100 peo­ple hold­ing signs that say “LEAVE MY SPARTINA ALONE” and “SALT MARSH GRASS FOR EVERYONE.” That would be like a dream.

I want peo­ple to come with me — it’s lonely out there by myself. I try to show peo­ple places that have these won­der­ful plants and make them love them. And it’s a basic edu­ca­tion, but my hope is that over time it gets peo­ple to care to the point where they are also vested in this future, and speak­ing for the trees.

Now, if peo­ple are speak­ing for the trees it’s for street trees. If I hear one more per­son talk about street trees as an urban for­est, I’m going to lose my mind. I mean, street trees are great, but if that’s an urban for­est then what is Inwood Hill Park?

Some­thing that advo­cates in all walks of envi­ron­men­tal­ism face is that the gen­eral pub­lic becomes fix­ated on, or inter­ested in, some ele­ment of the move­ment and it takes all of their atten­tion from what might be more sig­nif­i­cant. Is there a solution?

It’s about mak­ing informed choices. For exam­ple, the east­ern ridge of Inwood Hill is pretty eco­log­i­cally intact but the west­ern ridge has a his­tory of devel­op­ment, so it has a lot more inva­sives and exotics. If you’re going to put bike paths through Inwood Hill Park, that’s the place to do it.

Bik­ers may not know the dif­fer­ence between an inva­sive like mug­wort and a native aster, so put them through areas that are already degraded.  But choices like that take time and sen­si­tiv­ity, and these choices often come down to eco­log­i­cal sense or polit­i­cal expediency.

For a lot of peo­ple, hav­ing a place to go moun­tain bik­ing in nature is part of hav­ing a liv­able city. What makes a city liv­able to you?

Oh, boy… Well, I love the idea being able to walk places; I walk around a lot with my kids. We live really close to Prospect Park, and we love that. To me, Prospect Park is not the place that I’m going to go and get really excited, or weepy, about plants that I see. But it’s good enough and it’s good enough for my kids. There’s a play­ground, they can, you know, get their ya-yas out. And hav­ing that kind of blend of recre­ation and nature is really good. Hon­estly, that is going to sat­isfy most peo­ple in terms of being out in nature. The ques­tion then is why do we need to be delv­ing into nat­ural areas for moun­tain bike trails?

What do you say to peo­ple who agree with PlaNYC that we should be build­ing parks for peo­ple to play in, even if it means paving over a more nat­ural space to make room?

Why can’t we have des­ti­na­tion around nature instead of ten­nis courts or other recre­ational facil­i­ties? There is a lack of vision and lack of under­stand­ing about what these exist­ing spaces are doing for us. That under­stand­ing isn’t rep­re­sented when deci­sions are being made, and I think that is huge prob­lem. The last time I saw the pro­posal for Ocean Breeze Park, they knew that there are at least twelve, state-listed, rare plant species grow­ing wild there that haven’t been taken into account. That’s cause for concern.

At City Atlas, we’re also pas­sion­ate about the issues you are fight­ing for, but we’re not ecol­o­gists — we aren’t trained in the details of species and their habi­tats.  What can peo­ple like us do?

Doing this kind of thing–talking to ecologists–is really impor­tant in get­ting that mes­sage out. Another thing is bring­ing peo­ple who make deci­sions, who design spaces, and work in green build­ing together with peo­ple who know about ecology.

Design­ers and archi­tects do have a lot of input on how these spaces ulti­mately end up.

They do, and ecol­o­gists really don’t.

This might get me in trou­ble, but I’ve met with a lot of design­ers and mostly I’ve found them to be really con­fi­dent in their lack of deep knowl­edge. They say, “Oh, we don’t need to work with ecol­o­gists because we have in– house exper­tise.” And I’m think­ing: On local native flora? I promise that you don’t.  It’s just a fact — I mean, how do you define nativ­ity? And how do you under­stand what’s rare and what isn’t? 

Design­ers have so much power and there’s a lot of pat­ting on your own back, as in, “Wasn’t I bril­liant to think of adding native grasses to the green­roof instead of sedum?” Kudos for try­ing to think out­side the box, but there’s this really expan­sive con­ver­sa­tion going on in the ecol­ogy world and you’re not hear­ing it.

There could be a really rich dia­logue between those two worlds. How do you make these peo­ple lis­ten to some­one who has this knowl­edge? That’s why I keep cir­cling back to pol­icy, which I think is so impor­tant. I mean, I can’t make these peo­ple do it, but I’m like, “by God, someone’s got to.”

About Mariellé Anzelone

As a botanist and urban con­ser­va­tion biol­o­gist, Mariellé Anzelone pre­serves and restores the floris­tic diver­sity of the five bor­oughs. Her cur­rent research includes the NYC Native Plant Con­ser­va­tion Ini­tia­tive in part­ner­ship with the Brook­lyn Botanic Gar­den and NYC Depart­ment of Parks & Recre­ation; she also lec­tures exten­sively in the NYC-metro area. Her gar­den and land­scape design work is inspired by the beauty of regional plant communities.

She is a fre­quent con­trib­u­tor to The New York Times, includ­ing writ­ing a botan­i­cal op-art piece on the extinct flora of NYC, “When New York City Bloomed,” and a 14-week series, Autumn Unfolds, report­ing on the changes in a for­est in upper Man­hat­tan. Anzelone is the exec­u­tive direc­tor of  NYC Wild­flower Week, which will hold over 30 events across all of the five bor­oughs, from May 11 – 19, 2013.

A bill that Anzelone helped develop, to sup­port native bio­di­ver­sity in pub­lic land­scapes, was approved by the City Coun­cil and signed into law by Mayor Bloomberg in Feb­ru­ary, 2013.

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Pho­tographs by Mau­reen Drennan

Inset photo, top: blue stemmed gold­en­rod (Sol­idago caesia)

Inset photo, bot­tom: red maple (Acer rubrum)