Green Metropolis by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers

Author:Elizabeth Barlow Rogers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

Golden ragwort (Packera aurea)

Such was the condition of the Ramble when the Central Park Conservancy was created in 1980. With more Olmstedian passion for re-creating the original sight lines to the Belvedere than sensitivity to constituency politics, in the early days of its existence the Conservancy removed a handful of spindly, self-seeded black cherry trees, creating a furor among the Ramble’s bird-watchers, for whom this section of the park is still proprietary turf. Because of their vociferous outrage, the Conservancy was forced to prioritize projects elsewhere in the park and allow knotweed and other volunteer species in the Ramble to follow nature’s indiscriminate course for the next fifteen years.

By the mid-1990s, however, the Conservancy had developed a community outreach program and was in an ongoing dialogue with the park’s multiple constituencies. Its formation of the Woodland Management Committee at that time marked the beginning of a new relationship between birders and the Conservancy. Gradually, as trust grew, the restoration of the Ramble through a small-project-by-small-project approach began as staff horticulturists replaced patches of knotweed with wildflowers, ferns, and other native woodland plants.

The principles underlying the Ramble’s new botanical era, however, were far different than in the period when it was a picturesque wildwood. Nor were the Central Park Conservancy horticulturists interested in returning to the paradigm formed in the days when the entire park, including the Ramble, served as something of a botanical showcase for a large diversity of plant species, both exotic and native. Indeed, it is hard to imagine what Olmsted, Parsons, or Peet would think of the appearance of the place today if they saw the dead branches, standing tree stumps, and mud flats along the shorelines of the Gill and coves of the Lake. This, however, can be considered an enlightened type of park management in an ecologically aware age. To learn more about this seemingly novel kind of horticultural practice, I made a date to walk through the Ramble with Neil Calvanese, the Central Park Conservancy’s recently retired director of horticulture, whose thirty-three-year career spanned almost the entire period of the organization’s existence.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.