Budding Naturalists

                From a single sweetgum ball, a love of nature was spawned for Ned Barnard and passed along to Ken Chaya, and to us, a dozen naturalists and geographers on a fall tree walk in Central Park (just a short train ride away from Queens College). A sweetgum ball falls into the ground and dies, it abides alone: but if it dies, it brings forth much fruit. I first met Ken while I was practicing Taiji on doggy-hill. He was photographing the cone of a spruce tree and had a big sheath of hardwood bark sticking out of his backpack, “for an experiment.” Ken has drawn an awesome, legible (!) five foot long map of the 20,000 Central Park Trees, identified by species. Ned has written the best handbook on the natural history and identification of trees in New England and New York City.

 

Ken puts together art and ecology. He told me during the nature walk that the Park is “a painting where you could not see the brush strokes because it looks so natural.” Speaking of hawthorns,  he said that “trees are like people, some species have different shades.” When we were observing one of the Park’s largest mature cottonwood trees,  he remarked that “it’s only when a tree approaches maturity that it’s character comes out.” 

The Map

                Ken, a graphic artist, has mapped the all the different species of trees in Central Park. No good records have been kept of the tree plantings in the Park, and so Ken’s work is novel and the Park is beginning to work with Ken to help in his editions of the map. The map includes almost all the trees of in the Park that have diameters of over six inches. The map is five feet long, and below is a little segment depicting the Ramble, the largest natural segment of the park at 38 acres, out of a total of about 850 acres.

Natural History of Central Park

                 Central Park history is key to understanding its trees. Many people mistakenly think that its forests and landscapes at the present time are representative of its natural state. At the time the park was built it was a very rocky and desolate swamp with pigs, slaughter houses, and glue factories.  The oldest trees were planted in the 1830s, and a few are still around. In 1858, Frederick Olmstead, the greatest park designer of his time who also designed Prospect Park in Brooklyn, won a competition for the design of Central Park, and from 1858 to 1874 he planted approximately 50,000 trees. It was said that he could see the trees in his mind’s eye two or three decades after planting. Because most of the trees in the Park were planted at the same time, they will also reach maturity and die at the same time. These days a practice of foresighted forestry is being followed once again. Ken gave the example of a red maple sapling being planted next to an old red maple that was beginning to die.

At the end of the day we had a feast (catered from Zabar’s) to celebrate our rediscovery of the amazing marvels of Central, and afterwards Ken showed us his map at a geographer’s meeting at a New York public library. I wish you could have been at the feast and sampled the ham, cheese, pate, and Bloody Mary’s (naturally, I abstained from the bloody Mary’s, or at least I think I did).