Native Flora Garden Expansion Opens June 12
It's been called an experiment in habitat re-creation that will unfold over time: the new, one-acre addition to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's 100-year old Native Flora Garden. A mature tree canopy in the original garden shaded out plants that require more sun, necessitating the garden's expansion.
The new garden, designed by landscape architect Darrel Morrison, features a meadow, upland and lowland pine barrens, a pond, a serpentine outcrop and woodland edge, representing ecosystems nearly wiped out by a centuries of urban development.
Horticulturists gathered specimens from the wild in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and on Long Island to populate the area with 15 thousand plants (plus grasses grown from 16 lb. of seed) of 150 species, including rare plants that are of special conservation concern like the pixie-moss (Pyxidanthera barbulata), pictured here, sandmyrtle (Leiophyllum buxifolium) and the swamp pink (Helonias bullata).
Designer Darrell Morrison said the project will allow visitors to see recreations of transitions that occur in nature. "As you move from the existing, wooded area, you'll pass through a grove of birches that will act as a woodland edge, and the light continuum and the moisture continuum will change and give way. You will really see and feel it open onto the sunloving garden area," he said. The garden includes a curving central boardwalk, a circular overlook, and a series of winding footpaths through pine barrens and bogs, meadows and woodland edges.
The garden includes North America's only representation of the unique pine barrens of southern New Jersey and a coastal plain meadow that is modeled after the Hempstead Plains on Long Island. It'll be a rarefied experience for nature lovers for decades to come.
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