Thursday, August 26, 2004
The flowering Stuyvesant Square needs gardeners
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
If the rains, cloudy days, warnings of storms and tornadoes have soured you on this summer, don't give up. Come to the Stuyvesant Square Park to enjoy the rich plantings that have thrived, despite the strange weather we are experiencing.
In the East park, facing Beth Israel, the circle around the fountain is overflowing in tall spiky fragrant cleomes, also called spider flowers, their reddish blooms lording it over the busy low growth. Below, what look like thick masses of whitish impatiens surprisingly thriving in full sunlight are actually vinca, a ground cover. Their blue blooming neighbors are ageratum, another low grower. Both flowering plants are surrounded by the ornate purplish-brown broad leaves of perilla. That is an Asian food plant, and the leaves serve to wrap food. Nearby grows catmint, a gray-green leafy plant that produced lavender blooms early in the season. The rich rose bushes that brought forth a bounty of red blossoms in the Spring are now quiescent, until September, when a new crop of blooms will appear. So assures us Parks and Recreation Department gardener Constance Casey, who has been responsible for this rebirth of the two parks (the floral pattern is repeated in the West park).
Another of her innovations, liriope or lilyturf, a agrasslike groundcover, the leaves longitudinally striped, light and dark, has been planted in individual tufts, all over the park. You can see the established tufts, merged in a solid groundcover, along the South fence of Gramercy Park, looked after for by another gardening enthusiast and a member of the Bronx Botanical Garden's board, Sharen Benenson.
But not all areas of the park are flourishing. I interviewed Mrs. Casey on the run, while she was digging and mulching the disaster area to the left of the east gate of the Park, facing Beth Israel Hospital. Nothing of value grows there, except weeds, she observed, gingerly lifting a dead rodent on her spade and stuffing it into a black garbage bag. Fortunately, these parks have no destructive animals, such as woodchuck, and the Parks Department's official exterminator looks after the rodents in a manner that does not affect the squirrels and visiting dogs. The whole subject makes this observer shudder, remembering the wars of Gramercy Park. Let us enjoy the peace, now that the law suit has been settled.
An ailing silk lilac to the left of the bad spot is Mrs. Casey's next project. On the good news side, we have tall hardy London plane trees, their smooth, newly peeled-looking skins giving them a youthful appearance, like dowagers after plastic surgery. A true city dweller, the plane tree withstands both weather- and human- inflicted hardships quite well. So does the flowering Callery pear and its cousin Bradford pear, the smaller trees planted on side streets throughout the neighborhood, whose white Spring blossoms fall in profusion on the sidewalks, much to the chagrin of the building service people. Inside the park, the blooming trees doing well are cherries, hawthorns and crabapples, concentrated along both sides of Second Avenue.
If you are pining for a gardening fix, to enrich your sedentary citified lifestyle, the gardener has a solution for you - come on any Wednesday, 5-7PM, to the Stuyvesant Square Park, to volunteer your services in weeding, spreading of mulch, improving the soil, uncoiling the hoses and watering the plants. Watering is still the most important function to keep the park alive. You may even do some planting if she succeeds in getting the funds to buy 3000 tulip bulbs for the fountain areas, 1500 for each park.
Mrs. Casey is responsible for six gardens in Parks and Recreation Department's District 6, which stretches from 14th to 59th Streets, and does her work with the aid of two women , members of the job training program started during the Giuliani years by Commissioner Henry Stern and continued by Commissioner Adrian Benepe, to provide job opportunities for people removed from the welfare rolls. The other top garden beautifiers in our area are Yamila Fournier, who cares for Union Square and is also responsible for the Washington Square Park, and Kim Wickers, who runs the large Madison Square Park with a staff of 12 and a grant of some $3 million, which includes the funds for the restoration of the playground..
Stuyvesant Square Park has also received the benefit of some donated monies, beyond those provided by the Stuyvesant Park Neighborhood Association and the Dvorak American Heritage Association. New plantings have been noted around Ivan Mestrovic's bust of Antonin Dvorak, in the East Park and the statue of Peter Stuyvesant by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in the West, courtesy of a grant from Greenacre, a Rockefeller foundation. Many thanks! But the park still needs major sums for the restoration of the historic East fence. Hint, hint.
Internet adepts can read a five-day diary of a Parks gardener by Costance Casey (who turns out to be a member of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden's board) in Slate. Interested parties can also view Looking Ahead columns of past months online. Enter the www.dobelis.net website and follow directions to the blog. Keep checking, more old columns are added to this website practically daily.
If the rains, cloudy days, warnings of storms and tornadoes have soured you on this summer, don't give up. Come to the Stuyvesant Square Park to enjoy the rich plantings that have thrived, despite the strange weather we are experiencing.
In the East park, facing Beth Israel, the circle around the fountain is overflowing in tall spiky fragrant cleomes, also called spider flowers, their reddish blooms lording it over the busy low growth. Below, what look like thick masses of whitish impatiens surprisingly thriving in full sunlight are actually vinca, a ground cover. Their blue blooming neighbors are ageratum, another low grower. Both flowering plants are surrounded by the ornate purplish-brown broad leaves of perilla. That is an Asian food plant, and the leaves serve to wrap food. Nearby grows catmint, a gray-green leafy plant that produced lavender blooms early in the season. The rich rose bushes that brought forth a bounty of red blossoms in the Spring are now quiescent, until September, when a new crop of blooms will appear. So assures us Parks and Recreation Department gardener Constance Casey, who has been responsible for this rebirth of the two parks (the floral pattern is repeated in the West park).
Another of her innovations, liriope or lilyturf, a agrasslike groundcover, the leaves longitudinally striped, light and dark, has been planted in individual tufts, all over the park. You can see the established tufts, merged in a solid groundcover, along the South fence of Gramercy Park, looked after for by another gardening enthusiast and a member of the Bronx Botanical Garden's board, Sharen Benenson.
But not all areas of the park are flourishing. I interviewed Mrs. Casey on the run, while she was digging and mulching the disaster area to the left of the east gate of the Park, facing Beth Israel Hospital. Nothing of value grows there, except weeds, she observed, gingerly lifting a dead rodent on her spade and stuffing it into a black garbage bag. Fortunately, these parks have no destructive animals, such as woodchuck, and the Parks Department's official exterminator looks after the rodents in a manner that does not affect the squirrels and visiting dogs. The whole subject makes this observer shudder, remembering the wars of Gramercy Park. Let us enjoy the peace, now that the law suit has been settled.
An ailing silk lilac to the left of the bad spot is Mrs. Casey's next project. On the good news side, we have tall hardy London plane trees, their smooth, newly peeled-looking skins giving them a youthful appearance, like dowagers after plastic surgery. A true city dweller, the plane tree withstands both weather- and human- inflicted hardships quite well. So does the flowering Callery pear and its cousin Bradford pear, the smaller trees planted on side streets throughout the neighborhood, whose white Spring blossoms fall in profusion on the sidewalks, much to the chagrin of the building service people. Inside the park, the blooming trees doing well are cherries, hawthorns and crabapples, concentrated along both sides of Second Avenue.
If you are pining for a gardening fix, to enrich your sedentary citified lifestyle, the gardener has a solution for you - come on any Wednesday, 5-7PM, to the Stuyvesant Square Park, to volunteer your services in weeding, spreading of mulch, improving the soil, uncoiling the hoses and watering the plants. Watering is still the most important function to keep the park alive. You may even do some planting if she succeeds in getting the funds to buy 3000 tulip bulbs for the fountain areas, 1500 for each park.
Mrs. Casey is responsible for six gardens in Parks and Recreation Department's District 6, which stretches from 14th to 59th Streets, and does her work with the aid of two women , members of the job training program started during the Giuliani years by Commissioner Henry Stern and continued by Commissioner Adrian Benepe, to provide job opportunities for people removed from the welfare rolls. The other top garden beautifiers in our area are Yamila Fournier, who cares for Union Square and is also responsible for the Washington Square Park, and Kim Wickers, who runs the large Madison Square Park with a staff of 12 and a grant of some $3 million, which includes the funds for the restoration of the playground..
Stuyvesant Square Park has also received the benefit of some donated monies, beyond those provided by the Stuyvesant Park Neighborhood Association and the Dvorak American Heritage Association. New plantings have been noted around Ivan Mestrovic's bust of Antonin Dvorak, in the East Park and the statue of Peter Stuyvesant by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in the West, courtesy of a grant from Greenacre, a Rockefeller foundation. Many thanks! But the park still needs major sums for the restoration of the historic East fence. Hint, hint.
Internet adepts can read a five-day diary of a Parks gardener by Costance Casey (who turns out to be a member of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden's board) in Slate. Interested parties can also view Looking Ahead columns of past months online. Enter the www.dobelis.net website and follow directions to the blog. Keep checking, more old columns are added to this website practically daily.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 2:47 PM 
