Sidewalk Greenspace on New York's Upper West Side
Thanks to our neighbor Anne who donated a pint of seeds harvested in her own garden last season from pollinator-friendly flowering plants: yarrow, coreopsis, echinacea, joe pye weed, black eyed susan, and sage.
These have been scattered into planters and tree beds throughout the garden and I expect to see some of them later this summer, with others remaining dormant and cropping up in subsequent years.
Thanks again, Anne!
My favorite variety of morning glories continues to be the Bavarian “Grandpa Ott” with its deep purple blooms.
They do a great job of climbing the fence — or bamboo rods, or tall plants, or anything else they can find for support — and although their flowers don’t stay open for long, there are so many of them that they provide a constant stream of color for months throughout the late summer and into the fall.
Most of the flowers are gone from the garden, but the cockscombs (Celosia) are still vibrant.
Much of the garden’s catnip is now in full flower.
All of this catnip stems from a single small flowerpot I brought home and placed on my windowsill a decade ago — it’s a prolific self-seeder, and has spread itself to multiple nearby containers and treebeds.
The sidewalk planters we added this spring have provided some lovely additional space for these new strawflowers (Bracteantha) to catch the sun.
These wild-strain sunflowers top out at three feet tall, so they aren’t as impressive as the giant forms, but they’re lovely nonetheless, and later in the season the seeds should provide some good eating for the birbs.
This looks like it could be some kind of scary monster, but it’s just the growth tip of a flower emerging in one of my planters.
We took a trip to Metropolitan Plant & Flower Exchange in Fort Lee and picked up a bunch of bedding flowers to be added to the garden planters and the treebeds here and around the neighborhood, including the following:
I love the intense colors of the morning glory assortment outside my office.
This plant blew into the garden from somewhere a few years ago and is now well established. It appears to be a member of the Persicaria family, probably P. maculosa, “Lady’s Thumb,” a member of the knotweed family.
Some sources report that P. maculosa produces a yellow/green dye (with an alum mordant), although one source says red/brown.
