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Ryan Gellis

Best of Summer – Our Friends, The Trees: How Trees Make Brooklyn Better (2018)

August 5, 2020 By Ryan Gellis Filed Under: Local Ecology, Outside Tagged With: ryan gellis

An allee of London Planes

We take for granted the beauty of these verdant towers, how we come to expect their shade and fail to acknowledge their constant toil as the city’s respiring lungs and filtering kidneys.

The first time I climbed a tree, in the summer of 2008, I was working a seasonal job for the Parks Department. My job was to muscle logs and stacked branches into a chipper, but a fringe benefit was working with the climbers and pruners. These professional arborists spend their days up in Brooklyn’s urban tree canopy inspecting, pruning and sometimes removing trees. For a young guy whose interest in comic books and environmental science never really seemed to intersect, here I had found my real-life superheroes. For several weeks in the swampy heat of July, I would finish my wood-chipping route at a feverish pace to ensure I could carve out time at the end of the day to meet up with a climber, throw a rope up over a high branch and use a technique called hip-thrusting to hump my way into the tree, exploring the otherworldly environment that exists within the sprawling space of a tree’s canopy and the views it affords to those who climb it.

London plane

Five years later I was back in a harness, standing on an upper limb of a London plane tree in the middle of Grand Army Plaza, holding a dead branch in one hand as I sawed it off with the other. Below me traffic was circumnavigating the plaza and above me squirrels were making similar circles around the tree in lusty chase of one another. I was taking a test to become the junior arborist for the Prospect Park Alliance. My new boss was right beside me, dangling comfortably in his harness. I’d passed, he said, in no rush to vacate our lofty perch with views straight down Flatbush Avenue. I realized, from the vantage point of the birds, what a large role trees play in our urban existence. How we take for granted the beauty of their verdant towers, how we come to expect their shade and fail to acknowledge their constant toil as the city’s respiring lungs and filtering kidneys.

By then I was hooked on trees, taking every opportunity to defend their place in our urban environment and teach people more about them. Here’s a fact: the London plane tree, unmistakable when it sloughs off its thin beige and green bark to reveal a slippery smooth new layer, is the most common street tree in the borough of Brooklyn. The ubiquity of this tree in the city is no accident. Street trees suffer from almost every arboreal insult possible, from drought and flood to storm damage, limited growing space and constant assault by speeding vehicles. Few trees are better at withstanding these stressors than the London plane. But they also indicate that the city has a long way to go in making our streets a more habitable environment. Where trees can’t grow neither can people or communities.

Looking up into a Red Oak

The  Mighty Oak 

If street trees are a civil engineer’s answer to mitigating intense weather, then our large parks and urban forests are a naturalist’s haven for maintaining biological diversity and environmental resilience. To say nothing of the way that parks can act as a tincture to calm the soul. Starving artists, disciplined runners, stray cats, role-playing camp kids, dogs pulling their humans, Baby Bjorn-bound mothers, hyperactive chipmunks, stony-faced little-leaguers; Everyone sought respite from their frantic lives in Prospect Park. With all those people it is hard to imagine there is room for between thirty and forty thousand trees in the park. The woodlands represent the only native forest in Brooklyn.  Two hundred years ago, as Brooklyn’s population was booming its ancient woods had mostly disappeared to make room for farms. In fact, when the park was constructed in the middle of the 19th century it was on top of nearly treeless pastureland.  

Now the park’s woodlands are lush with trees, shrubs, and wildlife. The keystone species in our neck of the woods is the oak tree. Oaks come in many sub-species, adapted to specific niches like the marsh-loving willow oak or the red oak which seeks out hilltops. In all cases, the oak is the beginning of a biological chain that stretches from the fungus feeding at its roots to the plants that bask in its diffused sunlight all the way up the chain to the squirrel glutted on acorns or the Redtail hawk feasting on a squirrel.

A perfectly shaped Linden Tree providing shade

American Linden

The balancing act for urban forestry is to harness the vast positive effects of nature’s most beneficial flora while limiting the negative factors a tree can produce. Since every tree has a different profile of benefits it takes a lot of consideration to get it right. A red maple can soak up plenty of water in flood prone areas but its roots can be invasive to nearby homes. The horse chestnut is one of the most efficient carbon dioxide absorbers but its weak wood can peel apart in heavy storms.

A few months back I had to stage a defense for an American linden tree. The Linden is a great shade tree as well as a reliable flower feast for native bees. This one was decades old and its roots were lifting the sidewalk around it. The construction crew wanted to remove it. The homeowners nearby also didn’t like the pollen which littered their stoop every year. I argued to keep it. It was healthy, it was mature enough to finally be making a net contribution to its environment. We ended up saving the tree and putting a ramped sidewalk over the roots. Days later I walked up to the site, sweating under the hot afternoon sun, watching the posse of homeowners and construction workers chatting. I was making a beeline for relief to the same area they were all standing in, under the shade of that very linden tree.

Sugar Maple

In the canopy of a sugar maple

Arboriculture, the cultivation and management of trees, is ever-evolving. Climate change plays its part. Many people know that the state tree of New York is the sugar maple. Not only because I guzzle maple syrup do I love this majestic tree with eye-popping fall foliage and mature bark that evokes the wise and grizzled visage of Dumbledore’s beard. The sugar maple is a foundational part of Northeastern American culture. Literally, sugar maple timber provides much of the framework and flooring for some of the oldest structures in this part of the country. In recent years local sugar maples have been in decline. Its natural defenses consist of growing in places where the winter is cold enough to kill off most of its pests without harming the cold-hardy tree. Brooklyn used to fall more reliably into that temperate zone, but now climate change is shifting the territory of New York’s state tree outside of New York City. 

As we introduce new non-native trees to our city blocks like the Korean mountain ash or the Siberian elm we are also in the process of losing many of our critical native species. American Elms once lined neighborhood blocks, providing shade with sprawling behemoth branches. Then Dutch elm disease decimated the population. The American chestnut used to hold a more important place in our forests than the oak until the chestnut blight changed that. Now invasive pests and fungi are posing serious threats to our maples, oaks, and pines. In a world of unfettered global trade our new normal for ecology is ceaseless change.

For now, Prospect Park still feels like home in my native, ever-changing Brooklyn. Its trees make up an indelible part of my story. Prospect Park just celebrated its 150th anniversary this past fall. Does that make it old by public park standards or young in comparison to the life of an oak tree? Lately, I make it out into the Park less often, mostly losing myself in its interior, finding locations I’ve known and yet still never really discovered. 

Filed Under: Local Ecology, Outside Tagged With: ryan gellis

Park Slope Nature: Spring In Park Slope

April 3, 2019 By Ryan Gellis Leave a Comment Filed Under: Outside, Park Slope Life Tagged With: festival, natural world, outside, park slope nature, ryan gellis

It isn’t hard to get the impression, reading into the signs of the natural world, that every flower, tree and squirrel is as excited for the coming of spring as we humans are.

Take a walk in Prospect Park to do as the horticulturalists do and monitor the first blooms of our common perennial flowers. Snowdrops, the hearty little white bells, pushed stubbornly through snow drifts as early as February this year. In March you can expect to see tight purple bouquets of crocus sneaking out of the ground, accenting the forest floor and giving us hope that the city’s windiest month will soon be blowing in the familiar waft of warm air.

What better way to usher in a new season than by eating like it’s spring. Help jumpstart the pulse of local green markets by picking up some early spring greens like lettuce, spinach or coveted garlic scapes and ramps. Colonial settlers and modern-day wildlife would agree that the charmingly chilly days of spring can be a tricky time to meet caloric requirements. Pair the old with the new and cook up some of the staples that have been long forgotten in your pantry then finish them with leaves of spring. A quick mosey on down to Grand Army Plaza on Saturday or Bartel Pritchard Square on Sunday can pay dividends in farm-to-table fresh greens. 

If you want to eat your way through more than one hundred local and regional food purveyors than find your way up to Breeze Hill in Prospect Park for the return of Smorgasburg. The lines are long but the inventive and tasty snacks on offer come with a view. You can take your meal to go and trek down the rustic trail at the back of the market to the quiet Lullwater where herons may also be searching for a meal. Just do everyone a favor and pack out your trash. The feast begins on April 7th and continues every Sunday from 11 AM to 6 PM. 

Spring really encompasses two seasons: the abatement of winter is marked by a sticky mud season and the thirsty joy for those first sips of warm, fragrant air; then summer is around the corner.

Maybe cooped-up kids are the priority, their energetic limbs itching for activity after a winter short on sledding opportunities. Little Leaguers won’t have to wait long to start lapping those bases. The opening day ceremony hosted by the Prospect Park Alliance and the Prospect Park Baseball Association arrives on Saturday, April 6th. Park Slopers might remember the opening day parade by the throng of children marching down 7th avenue in baseball regalia, outstripping the marching band and posse of civic leaders. Anyone can join the parade which works its way to the ballfields, (best accessed around 9th street, 11th street, or Bartel Pritchard Square,) to watch the first pitch get thrown out. The day coincides with the seasonal opening of the lawns for ball players, picnickers and frisbee enthusiasts alike. 

Those who are looking to ring in the spring with something a little more grueling can sign up for one of the near constant barrage of races that loop Prospect Park starting in the warmer weather. The Brooklyn Spring Half Marathon (http://www.citytri.com/brooklyn-spring-half-marathon ) is just one option to tour the park on four consecutive loops of its 3.35 mile track. For the less competitive runner our local tri-sport provider, JackRabbit, will continue to host community runs through the park for all paces. You can meet at their 7th Ave. location on Mondays and Fridays at 6:30 PM.

Spring really encompasses two seasons: the abatement of winter is marked by a sticky mud season and the thirsty joy for those first sips of warm, fragrant air; then summer is around the corner. April is a month of transition, manifest in the fleeting, show-stopping flower blooms. Daffodils dot woodland borders and blanket the 3rd street berms in sunny yellow. Tulips add a diverse color palette to the ground, their rainbow blooms sometimes surprising the gardener who planted them. The rotund buds of magnolia trees pop open and promptly the park is a pastel wonderland. Delicate little flower nubs run up the thin branches of the redbud, wide open dogwood flowers look up to the sky, lilacs perfume the air and a score of perennial flowers from hyacinths to bluebells join the floral fray. These and more are on display in Carmen’s Garden, just in front of the Litchfield Villa on 4th street and Prospect Park West. But nothing gets the casual flower enthusiast as excited as the sight of an allée of flowering cherry trees as they burst into fecund bloom, thick cotton-candy canopies of silky pink, purple and white petals. The display at the Grand Army Plaza entrance to the park is hard to top. A loop around the long meadow will offer a more complete collection of impressive blooming plants and trees.

By the time earth day rolls around on April 28th the bees will be buzzing and the park staff will have all hands on deck planting spring trees, shrubs and flowers. Engage with the environment by coming out to Prospect Park on that Sunday for citizen science exhibitions. The Prospect Park Alliance is making it easier than ever to get involved as a student of nature with their Audubon center educational programming. Earth day also starts off the park’s volunteer season. One of the most rewarding ways to give back to your community is by volunteering with the PPA’s volunteer corps (https://www.prospectpark.org/get-involved/volunteer/) and donating your time to repair trails, pick up trash and remove invasive weeds, among other ecologically-minded projects.

If you’re familiar with It’s My Park Day, a regular May occurrence, you may be surprised to find that this year the park has upped the ante. Spring Fling, encompassing the weekend of May 18th and 19th, is a celebration of the park and all the opportunities that come with nice weather. You can still volunteer in events sponsored by REI as in previous It’s My Park tradition, but now you can also expect a family fair with educational activities at the Audubon Center and the historic Lefferts house, ensuring the weekend has something for everyone. 

By late spring the park is in full leaf, busy soaking up the sun’s rays and growing dense with greenery and life. Parkgoers are busy playing sports, taking walks and enjoying the most beautiful weather of the year. Brooklyn’s back yard is rife with opportunities from taking a kayak out on the lake to rollerblading around the drive. My personal recommendation is to simply explore the grounds. I’ve lead locals on tours that left them saying there’s an entirely different park inside of the heavily trafficked loops and zones they were used to. Getting lost in the Midwood or trying to catch a view from the top of lookout hill make Prospect Park one of the last places in the city where you can forget, for a few peaceful moments, that you are in New York City.

Fishing by the lake house Earth Day Celebration Prospect Park Alliance at the Audubon Center for annual Earth Day celebration. Enjoy fun-filled activities for all ages from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), Urban Park Rangers and the Prospect Park Alliance Landscape Management team.

Filed Under: Outside, Park Slope Life Tagged With: festival, natural world, outside, park slope nature, ryan gellis

Our Friends, The Trees: How Trees Make Brooklyn Better

July 31, 2018 By Ryan Gellis Filed Under: The Natural Slope Tagged With: American Linden, Grand Army Plaza, London Plane, Prospect Park, ryan gellis, Sugar Maple, Trees

We take for granted the beauty of these verdant towers, how we come to expect their shade and fail to acknowledge their constant toil as the city’s respiring lungs and filtering kidneys.

The first time I climbed a tree, in the summer of 2008, I was working a seasonal job for the Parks Department. My job was to muscle logs and stacked branches into a chipper, but a fringe benefit was working with the climbers and pruners. These professional arborists spend their days up in Brooklyn’s urban tree canopy inspecting, pruning and sometimes removing trees. For a young guy whose interest in comic books and environmental science never really seemed to intersect, here I had found my real-life superheroes. For several weeks in the swampy heat of July I would finish my wood-chipping route at a feverish pace to ensure I could carve out time at the end of the day to meet up with a climber, throw a rope up over a high branch and use a technique called hip-thrusting to hump my way into the tree, exploring the otherworldly environment that exists within the sprawling space of a tree’s canopy and the views it affords to those who climb it.

 

London plane

Five years later I was back in a harness, standing on an upper limb of a London plane tree in the middle of Grand Army Plaza, holding a dead branch in one hand as I sawed it off with the other. Below me traffic was circumnavigating the plaza and above me squirrels were making similar circles around the tree in lusty chase of one another. I was taking a test to become the junior arborist for the Prospect Park Alliance. My new boss was right beside me, dangling comfortably in his harness. I’d passed, he said, in no rush to vacate our lofty perch with views straight down Flatbush Avenue. I realized, from the vantage point of the birds, what a large role trees play in our urban existence. How we take for granted the beauty of their verdant towers, how we come to expect their shade and fail to acknowledge their constant toil as the city’s respiring lungs and filtering kidneys.

By then I was hooked on trees, taking every opportunity to defend their place in our urban environment and teach people more about them. Here’s a fact: the London plane tree, unmistakable when it sloughs off its thin beige and green bark to reveal a slippery smooth new layer, is the most common street tree in the borough of Brooklyn. The ubiquity of this tree in the city is no accident. Street trees suffer from almost every arboreal insult possible, from drought and flood to storm damage, limited growing space and constant assault by speeding vehicles. Few trees are better at withstanding these stressors than the London plane. But they also indicate that the city has a long way to go in making our streets a more habitable environment. Where trees can’t grow neither can people or communities.

Looking up into a Red Oak 

The  Mighty Oak 

If street trees are a civil engineer’s answer to mitigating intense weather, then our large parks and urban forests are a naturalist’s haven for maintaining biological diversity and environmental resilience. To say nothing of the way that parks can act as a tincture to calm the soul. Starving artists, disciplined runners, stray cats, role-playing camp kids, dogs pulling their humans, Baby Bjorn-bound mothers, hyperactive chipmunks, stony-faced little-leaguers; Everyone sought respite from their frantic lives in Prospect Park. With all those people it is hard to imagine there is room for between thirty and forty thousand trees in the park. The woodlands represent the only native forest in Brooklyn.  Two hundred years ago, as Brooklyn’s population was booming its ancient woods had mostly disappeared to make room for farms. In fact, when the park was constructed in the middle of the 19th century it was on top of nearly treeless pastureland.  

 

Now the park’s woodlands are lush with trees, shrubs and wildlife. The keystone species in our neck of the woods is the oak tree. Oaks come in many sub-species, adapted to specific niches like the marsh-loving willow oak or the red oak which seeks out hilltops. In all cases the oak is the beginning of a biological chain that stretches from the fungus feeding at its roots to the plants that bask in its diffused sunlight all the way up the chain to the squirrel glutted on acorns or the Redtail hawk feasting on squirrel.

A perfectly shaped Linden Tree providing shade

American Linden

The balancing act for urban forestry is to harness the vast positive effects of nature’s most beneficial flora while limiting the negative factors a tree can produce. Since every tree has a different profile of benefits it takes a lot of consideration to get it right. A red maple can soak up plenty of water in flood prone areas but its roots can be invasive to nearby homes. The horse chestnut is one of the most efficient carbon dioxide absorbers but its weak wood can peel apart in heavy storms.

A few months back I had to stage a defense for an American linden tree. The Linden is a great shade tree as well as a reliable flower feast for native bees. This one was decades old and its roots were lifting the sidewalk around it. The construction crew wanted to remove it. The homeowners nearby also didn’t like the pollen which littered their stoop every year. I argued to keep it. It was healthy, it was mature enough to finally be making a net contribution to its environment. We ended up saving the tree and putting a ramped sidewalk over the roots. Days later I walked up to the site, sweating under the hot afternoon sun, watching the posse of homeowners and construction workers chatting. I was making a beeline for relief to the same area they were all standing in, under the shade of that very linden tree.

In the canopy of a sugar maple

Sugar Maple

Arboriculture, the cultivation and management of trees, is ever evolving. Climate change plays its part. Many people know that the state tree of New York is the sugar maple. Not only because I guzzle maple syrup do I love this majestic tree with eye-popping fall foliage and mature bark that evokes the wise and grizzled visage of Dumbledore’s beard. The sugar maple is a foundational part of Northeastern American culture. Literally, sugar maple timber provides much of the framework and flooring for some of the oldest structures in this part of the country. In recent years local sugar maples have been in decline. Its natural defenses consist of growing in places where the winter is cold enough to kill off most of its pests without harming the cold-hardy tree. Brooklyn used to fall more reliably into that temperate zone, but now climate change is shifting the territory of New York’s state tree outside of New York City. 

As we introduce new non-native trees to our city blocks like the Korean mountain ash or the Siberian elm we are also in the process of losing many of our critical native species. American Elms once lined neighborhood blocks, providing shade with sprawling behemoth branches. Then Dutch elm disease decimated the population. The American chestnut used to hold a more important place in our forests than the oak until the chestnut blight changed that. Now invasive pests and fungi are posing serious threats to our maples, oaks and pines. In a world of unfettered global trade our new normal for ecology is ceaseless change.

For now, Prospect Park still feels like home in my native, ever-changing Brooklyn. Its trees make up an indelible part of my story. Prospect Park just celebrated its 150th anniversary this past fall. Does that make it old by public park standards or young in comparison to the life of an oak tree? Lately, I make it out into the Park less often, mostly losing myself in its interior, finding locations I’ve known and yet still never really discovered. 

 

Filed Under: The Natural Slope Tagged With: American Linden, Grand Army Plaza, London Plane, Prospect Park, ryan gellis, Sugar Maple, Trees

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