First Saturday

of summer in Brooklyn. Some things that nobody planted, but are here nonetheless.

The first is a volunteer coneflower in my own garden plot at Floyd Bennett Field. The rest are pioneer weeds of disturbed places (Western Salsify, which looks like a giant dandelion to me and Old Field Clover, which I think is fabulous) passed along the way. I've been weeding like mad in the vegetable garden, but still it seems that I can't keep pace with the voracious growers, the weeds, so don't get me wrong. I don't take them likely. But I have to have some respect and some awe for the things that grow untended and that fill in the cracks all over.

If you own property or are planning a garden, you have to know that wherever you don't plant something or cover the ground with mulch, it's likely that something will grow and it isn't often that you luck out and end up with a fabulous plant that you wanted anyway, like Echinacea (Purple Coneflower). This is incredibly frustrating if you're trying to maintain a really manicured aesthetic for your property or raise vegetables or farm, but it's still a pretty aweseome display of the power of plants and seeds and rhizomes and life. I'm probably just like any other gardener in the fact that sometimes I just enjoy watching what comes up in the places that aren't wild exactly, the cracks that aren't tended or fall by the wayside, even if I spend a good portion of my time in my own garden destroying these survivors.

Western Salsify, Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn