What Are You Going to Plant in New York?

Posted in Learning Experiences on June 30 2010, by Plant Talk

SOPH Student Finds Plenty to Garden Here, Even a Farm in Brooklyn

Luis Marmol is a first-year student in the Botanical Garden’s School of Professional Horticulture.

Many of us have heard of secret gardens, but how about a secret farm? Especially one that’s hiding in plain sight?

Recently, I visited a rooftop farm in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Yes, the farm was in Brooklyn. And yes, because of the lack of space, it was on a roof.

I was there on a field trip with other students from the Botanical Garden’s School of Professional Horticulture. From the street you could see nothing other than the industrial buildings and the Gowanus Canal (one of the most polluted waterways in the United States).

To get to the farm, we took a gray concrete staircase up three flights. On the roof there was—honest-to-goodness—a farm. It was sort of like looking at a field in Iowa or Indiana, but with views of the Manhattan skyline. Your eye first settles on the buildings across the East River, but you quickly look away from that spectacular photo-op to see crops—tomatoes, lettuces and other greens, herbs, carrots, radishes, and more—growing in just a few inches of soil across 6,000 square feet. There’s a chicken coop (those layers enjoy the best views of any chickens this side of Switzerland). And there are three beehives, whose inhabitants pollinate the plants. (The farm is so secret that even many insects and birds have yet to discover it.)

The Eagle Street Rooftop Farm is the brainchild of co-founder Annie Novak in partnership with Goode Green and Broadway Stages. Annie has become a real celebrity in the urban gardening scene. She travels the world to learn from farmers everywhere, including a recent trip to my native Peru to learn about potatoes. She’s also coordinator of the Children’s Gardening Program in the Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden at the Botanical Garden.

It’s that last association that proved to be my ticket to the farm. I’m studying botany, horticulture, and landscape design through the School of Professional Horticulture. It’s one of the few hands-on horticulture training programs in the world, and in my opinion, the best. What sets the Garden’s two-year program apart from colleges and universities that offer a horticulture major is that it allows students to work alongside horticulture staff to gain real-world experience.

We go on plant identification walks with curators and botanists, learning over 1,000 plants in the first year. Plus, there are lectures and meetings with world-renowned plant experts, and internships to hone our skills. Ultimately, my 11 classmates and I expect to work in public or private gardens, at urban farms, or as landscape designers.

When I applied for the program last summer, my colleagues at the garden in Holland where I was working (the Peace Palace in The Hague) would rib me about my choice of school: “What, are you going to plant in New York, a garden in a flower pot?” Some would tell me I’d be little more than a garden tourist in Central Park, or that I was “going to the jungle—an urban jungle, with no trees.”

As it turns out, there are plenty of gardening opportunities in and around New York City. Of course, there’s the 250-acre New York Botanical Garden itself in the Bronx, one of the biggest botanical gardens in the United States, and Eagle Street Rooftop Farm in Brooklyn. But we’ve been to many other interesting sites in and around New York City as well: Wave Hill on the Hudson riverfront, the ecologically interesting New Jersey Pine Barrens, various estates in Westchester and Rockland Counties, Longwood near Philadelphia. My classmates even canoed down the Bronx River!

And in case any of my old buddies in Holland read this, yes I’ve even checked out Central Park. Guess what: It’s one of the most amazing public parks I’ve ever seen. And that jungle? Sure. There are 50 acres of untouched forest right outside my classroom at The New York Botanical Garden.

Interested in attending the School of Professional Horticulture? Application deadline is August 15.