Sidewalk Greenspace on New York's Upper West Side
My thanks to NY Times photographer Jeenah Moon for sharing this lovely picture she took of me in front of the azaleas on our sidewalk.
With all of the chaos surrounding us, it’s nice to have this little oasis of calm to pass through every day.
There are a handful of these paper wasps visiting the garden this week; they’re hunting through the leaf litter for insects to massacre and bring back to the hive, where they will be shared with the queen and brood.
These tiny carnivores will help keep other insects from multiplying out of control, and both will in turn provide food for birds. It’s part of the natural cycle, so I’m happy to have it playing out here on our sidewalk.
I spent more than an hour last week, rearranging all of the planters on our sidewalk, dragging them back and forth to create a pleasing arrangement for the season ahead — then looked out my window the next morning and discovered that the facade-repair project next door was extending their scaffolding twenty feet further to cover part of our building, blocking the sunlight to that end of the garden.
And they say the scaffolding will likely remain in place for a full year!
I’ve now managed shift most of the planters down the block, but still need to tackle the espaliered tree that has its branches woven inextricably into the iron fence… moving it will require cutting off a significant number of branches, but if I leave it in place, it will probably die due to lack of light.
It’s very frustrating.
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!
Our violets are not shrinking — in fact, they’ve fully established themselves in one corner of our sidewalk treebeds and come back in full force every year — although admittedly you do have to slow down and look in order to notice their blooms.
The daffodils I planted in the giant barrel on the corner of 105th Street have made a small but decent showing this spring.
After cleaning out some litter, I spent a few minutes digging in a couple dozen sunflower seeds in the open spaces in hopes of having another big display later in the summer.
With our weather pattern shifting from daytime high temperatures in the 40s a few weeks ago to now 50s and even 60s, the perennials in our sidewalk garden have woken up and kicked into gear. The crocuses were the first to bloom, followed a week or so later by the daffodils and now hyacinths.
The myriad benefits and occasional conflicts over the city’s sidewalk tree beds were the subject of an article in the New York Times this week:
In the Fight Over N.Y.C. Sidewalks, Tree Beds Are the Smallest Frontier
In a city with little private green space, tree beds on public streets have become coveted territory. But who gets to decide how they’re used?
Over 660,000 trees line the streets of New York City, and the beds around them take up more than 400 acres, according to a city estimate. While many people just walk by the rectangular openings in the sidewalk from which the trees spring — or, worse, use the spaces as trash cans and doggy litter boxes — others lay claim, unofficially, to these pocket-size patches of land.
As the weather warms, these caretakers swing into action…
Mr. Resler said neighbors have praised his miniature garden, but that he has also had to fish out beer cans and once felt compelled to speak to someone who was letting his pit bull jump over the tree guard and kick up dirt after it had relieved itself.
“This kind of thing lets you meet your neighbors, good and bad,” he said.
This six-foot-tall mini-thicket of late-blooming asters is providing another lovely spot of color in our garden despite the recent cold snap — I almost cut them back in November and I’m so glad I waited!
I don’t know which variety of asters this is, but I have my fingers crossed that it’s one of the rhizomatous perennial species and will return again next year.
Just as all of the other plants in our sidewalk garden are starting to die back, the mums are flowering.
