The heirloom apples of the Rose Kennedy Greenway

Image: Malus 'Golden Russet', Wharf District Parks, Rose Kennedy Greenway

One of the things I like about Boston is the maturing Rose Kennedy Greenway that replaced the elevated "Central Artery" highway in Boston.  Growing on the greenway is a pair of heirloom Malus 'Golden Russet' apples planted by the Boston Tree Party project.  Each participating community in the project "has committed to planting and caring for a pair of heirloom apple trees. Together, these trees form a decentralized public urban orchard that symbolizes a commitment to the environmental health of our city, the vitality and interconnectedness of our communities, and the wellbeing of the next generation (emphasis in the original)."

Boston neighborhoods like Dorchester, Roxbury, and even Beacon Hill historically supported orchards.  However, I was struck by the choice of heirloom apple trees   I am reading Ina Lipkowitz's Word to Eat By about the social history of five food words (apple, leek, milk, meat and bread) and why we call some foods by their Germanic names and others by their French and Latin names.  She argues that our comfort, at-home, folk, mythological and religious foods tend to retain their Germanic names while we apply Latin and French names to foods we eat outside the home and to food science and technology.

Among Lipkowitz's thought-provoking observations is one about the naturalness of heirloom apples. Here I quote her at length:

... [A] grassroots movement has arisen that's been winning more and more adherents who seek to overthrow the pomological tyranny of our supermarkets and return to the way things used to be, when an almost inconceivable variety of apples were harvested by hand after long lazy days in the sun--rather than exposure to ethylene gas--had brought them to the perfect pitch of ripeness....And yet the irony is that no matter how heirloom they are, such old-fashioned apples are nonetheless still the engineered products that have resulted from the grafting that dates back to the Romans, the Greeks, and ultimately, the Chinese.  If all human intervention were suddenly to come to and end and our carefully tended orchards left to fend for themselves, apples we have know them since the days of antiquity would gradually revert to their natural state and become wild Malus sieversii once more, the sour little things indigenous to the Eurasian steppes where those ancient Proto-Indo-European peoples once called them abel....However much we may claim today to prefer "all-natural" foods, as no Roman ever would have, we still want the sweetness that ancient horticultural expertise bequeathed to us.  In short, we want our apples but, contradictory creatures that we are, we want to eat them too.

If The Boston Tree Party is seeking environmental and social improvement, the heirloom apple, which emerged via careful and consistent human intervention, seems an apt symbol.  What do think? And what do you eat: heirloom apples or the usual Macs and Granny Smiths? 

By the way, stay tuned for a post about five things I like about Boston.

Types of tree fruit

Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) "fruit" is a naked seed covered by sarcotesta (aka Cycad seed coat)

Lately we have been noticing tree fruits: Ginkgo, London planetree, crabapple, and dogwood are among the ones we have photographed.  In addition to trees, we are enjoying sightings of rose hips and juniper berries.

Image: Dogwood (Cornus) fruit (a drupe)

The juniper berry is not a berry but rather is a fleshy cone of "merged scales".  Despite its fleshy appearance, the juniper's berry has a naked seed typical of gymnosperms.  Peter Thomas in Trees: Their Natural History defines the naked seed of the conifer as follows: "The scales of conifer cones can be bent apart to reveal the seeds without physically breaking anything apart".  This is not the case for angiosperms (also referred to as hardwoods by Thomas) where "the seed is completely enclosed by the fruit and cannot be seen without breaking into the fruit, whether it is dry nut or a fleshy plum" (Thomas).

Image: London planetree (Platanus acerifolia) seed ball (a capsule)

Thomas groups hardwood tree fruit into four categories: (1) dehiscent dry fruit; (2) indehiscent dry fruit; (3) succulent fruit; and (4) false fruits.  It should be noted that not all fruit are fleshy and some fruit have been falsely classified as seeds in doing so (H. D. Harrington in How to Identify Plants).  Dehiscent fruit "opens naturally to release the enclosed seed or seeds" while indehiscent fruit "does not open to release the seed or seeds" (Harrington).  Some examples of dehiscent fruit are Acacia (legume); magnolia (follicle); and horse chestnut (capsule).  Example of inhediscent fruit include cashew (acene); oak, beech (nut); maple, ash, linden (samara).

Within the succulent fruit category are three major sub-classes: simple, aggregate, and multiple.  Berries (ex: blackcurrant, banana, date), drupes (ex: plum, cherry; walnuts, almonds), hesperidium (ex: orange), pepos (ex: watermelon), and pomes (ex: apple) are simple succulent fruit; raspberries, blackberries, and rose hips are examples of aggregate succulent fruit; and mulberry is an example of a multiple succulent fruit (Harrington; Thomas; botanical-online.com)

Harrington classifies the apple, rose hip, and fig as false fruits because these fruits are "supplemented with other structures".  Stamens and petals grow "up and around the true fruit" of the apple (a pome), the rose hip (an achene), and the fig (contains a drupe).

What tree fruits are you seeing?

Une promenade dans le parc du Mont-Royal

I completed a short walk through the park but it felt more like une randonnée or a hike because I was climbing a rather steep set of steps.  I hiked up from from Ave de Pins Ouest to the Chalet du Mont-Royal.  This is a very small portion of the 190-acre park whose plans were developed by Frederick Law Olmsted but not fully implemented when the park was inaugurated in 1876.  (Several websites including that of the park's nonprofit administrator Les Amis de la Montagne mention that the park was not designed completely to Olmsted's specifications.)

At the intersection of the Ave de Pins Ouest (and Peel) and the park you can see the beginning of the steps.  The steps are beautifully designed with wooden treads and black metal railings.  Several materials are used to signal the transitions between steps, drainage cover, path, and active roadway (bicycles and park vehicles mostly).  Most of the people I saw on the climb were using the steps and the pebbled incline as an exercise route, either walking briskly or jogging.  I even saw a man bicycle down a portion of the steps - audacieux!

In addition to people, I observed the vegetation along the incline.  At the base I saw a grove of black walnuts and a woman collecting many of the fallen fruit.  Bronwyn Chester of the blog Les promenades dans la Forêt Montréal says the black walnut is the symbolic tree of Quebec’s Le mois de l’arbre et des forêts which is celebrated on May 1.

Further up I saw a beautiful herbaceous perennial (actually, I noticed the flower on my descent).  I do not know the species (pictured above).  Do you?  The flower looks like an orchid. 

The overstory is populated with sugar maple, red oak, and birch under which grow hawthorn and dogwood.  I learned from Bronwyn Chester's blog that the park's historic vegetation is a sugar maple-bitternut hickory forest.  Therefore, in addition to the trees I saw, the summits and slopes of the park are populated by bitternut hickory and possibly other species typical of a Northern Mixed Hardwood forest such as butternut, ash, basswood, beech.  I also learned that volunteers with Les Amis de la Montagne plant serviceberry. 

Image: Looking towards Reservoir McTavish from Chalet du Mont-Royal

The view from two lookouts is impressive but limited in scope. The best view is from the plaza of the Chalet du Mont-Royal. It was an overcast, cool morning and the only camera I had was the one on my phone but I think the photographs above convey the amazing skyline view of downtown Montreal from this point in the park.

Another thing I noticed on the descent, about midway, was an uprooted tree adjacent to the steps. Two men and a boy wondered which came first: the upended tree or the steps.

Heading back to Ave de Pins Ouest and Peel, I followed the cascade which was less than exuberant in late August.  I do not know the origin of the cascade but it ends in a concrete culvert.  The Under Montreal blog provides a sewer map of the city denoting former creeks, collector sewers, and interceptor sewers.  While it does not show a creek running though the park, there was a creek running east of the park off Ave de Pins Ouest. 

Limited time and poor shoe choice prevented me from walking Chemin Olmsted, but before descending I glanced up the road, one of the elements from the park's original plan.  I can imagine a  horse-drawn carriage gradually ascending the slope.   

Do you have an Olmsted-designed park where you live?

Colorful sitting space, but is it convival?

Image: 200 Water Street chairs ((note the Rudolph de Harak digital clock in the background)

We spotted these colorful chairs on a trip to South Street Seaport last weekend and recalled that when we lived in Berkeley, we blogged about sitting spaces available in many of the city's neighborhoods.  There we discovered a tree guard that doubled as a bench, and wrote a post about an adobe bench at San Felipe de Neri in Albuquerque.  

Image: Chairs on Fulton Street

Although the Water and Fulton Streets seating is fixed, it is arranged in pairs and, here, seems to encourage interaction.  A close-up of a pair can be seen on the Alliance for Downtown New York Flickr page.

Here is what William H. Whyte had to say about fixed individual seats in The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980):

Fixed individual seats are not good.  They are a design conceit.   Brightly painted and artfully grouped, they can make fine decorative elements....But they are set pieces.  That is the trouble with them.  Social distance is a subtle measure, ever changing, and the distances of fixed seats do not change, which is why they are rarely quite right for anybody.  Loveseats may be all right for lovers, but they're too close for acquaintances, and much too close for strangers.  Loners tend to take them over, placing their feet squarely on the other seat lest someone else sit on it.

How do you sit in public? What type of sitting space do you prefer?

Where in NYC? (Subway Series No. 6)

In this subwayana, we offer a hint: The people depicted in the mural pictured in the first photograph are engaged in a rebellion. Can you name the station and line?

More subwayana (thank you Bonnie Hull) at
Where in NYC? (Subway Series, No. 5)
Where in NYC? (Subway Series, No. 4)
Where in NYC? (Subway Series, No. 3)
Where in NYC? (Subway Series, No. 2)
Where in NYC? (Subway Series, No. 1)

Stay tuned for Series No. 7.

Update, 10/8/2011: The ceramic and mosaic murals shown above are part of a series of depictions of Rebels, Founders, and Providers of Greenwich Village.  The works were created by Lee Brozgold and the students of P.S. 41 in 1994.  Photographs of all the murals can be seen at subwaynut.com as well as our Flickr page.  Please note that the series is being discontinued on the website.

Gardening is a form of land management

In his introduction to Mathew Tekulsky's The Butterfly Garden (1985), Robert Michael Pyle urges butterfly gardeners "to realize that gardening is a form of land management" (emphasis in the original).  Conversely, is gardening the umbrella term for managing different types of landscapes? 

Natural areas managers might not consider themselves gardeners but they perform tasks such as planting and vegetation suppression and removal associated with the common garden.  Of course, the ecology and scale of natural areas are different from the common garden and thus require additional management strategies (example: "regeneration cutting") as well as different site assessment and planning.

Although Pyle is writing about the butterfly garden, his observations are applicable to more traditional garden spaces like yards, street tree gardens, and neighborhood parks.  More from Pyle:

We might like to manage the bits of land that are "ours" to care for them through benign neglect: a bit of butterfly weed here, a carrot patch over there, a milkweed pod crushed and cast to the wind--and the rest all left to time, rain, and nature.  If I did that, my old Swedish homestead with its century-old oaks and odd hybrid ecosystem would be so quickly engulfed in brambles and coarse grasses that scarcely a path could be walked or a butterfly spotted.  The parnasians' bleeding heart would wither from competition, the heath and wild pea-patch where I hope to establish Silvery Blues and Brown Elfins would disappear.  The least possible interference may well be the best, in some cases and places.  But for most gardens, management decisions make them what they are, or are capable of becoming....If you are lucky enough to own a piece of undisturbed wildland, by all means keep it that way.  The native species will not benefit from your ministrations to any great extent.*  But most of us occupy city lots, suburban plats, or rural realms of weeds and wildflowers mixed so as to resemble the native landscape little or not at all.  To all these brands of cultivated countryside, we can bring a measure of butterfly numbers and kinds that would not otherwise exist--through appropriate garden management, aimed at the specific needs of these delicate visitors.

Many large, contiguous patches are rare within the boundaries of most cities, while smaller patches are more common.  Therefore, you are likely to find more gardeners than conventional land managers.  We know from research that "even urban agglomerations with gardens have nowadays become biodiversity hot spots" (Jakub Horák 2011 in Urban Forestry & Urban Greening 10, 3 (2011) so let's follow Pyle's advice and garden for wildlife and other environmental services.

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* If your undisturbed wildland is surrounded by city, suburb, country, you might have to interfere to keep it "wild".