Sunday, May 22: Habitat Gardening Workshop for NYC Wildflower Week

2022-05-13 UPDATE: A second session is now available for Sunday, May 22, 12 noon to 2pm! Registration links below now point to the new event.
2022-05-09 UPDATE: Due to the rainy, windy, cold weather yesterday, we will be scheduling another session of this workshop for later this week, most likely for the afternoon of Friday, May 13th. Will update here when confirmed!

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Sunday, May 22nd 6th, I will be hosting and facilitating a workshop on gardening for habitat with native plants in my home garden. The workshop is from 12noon to 2pm. Space is limited, so please register at the Eventbrite link below.

Learn how to garden with native plants to create wildlife habitat, even in small urban gardens. In this interactive garden tour and workshop, Chris will use his garden to highlight the importance of native plants for sustaining urban wildlife, and how to create and maintain a garden for its ecological value. With nearly 200 NYC-native plant species, and over 400 documented insect visitors, you are sure to learn something new and find inspiration for improving habitat wherever you garden.

Presented by Chris Kreussling. Chris is an urban naturalist and advocate for urban habitat gardening with native plants. He has led numerous native plant and pollinator walks and workshops, for NYC Wildflower Week, Wave Hill, the High Line, and others. His garden is a registered habitat with the National Wildlife Federation, Xerces Pollinator Society, and other organizations. He’s documented this ongoing transformation on his gardening blog, Flatbush Gardener and on Twitter as @xrisfg.

- Eventbrite

Related Content

Insect Year in Review 2021, 2022-01-03
Hot Sheets Habitat, 2021-11-19
Documenting Insect-Plant Interactions, 2021-10-29
Presentation: Creating Urban Habitat, 2021-02-04
Home of the Wild, 2020-05-13
Pollinator Safari: Urban Insect Gardening with Native Plants, 2019-06-08
Charismatic Mesofauna, 2019-02-12
Pollinator Gardens, for Schools and Others, 2015-02-20
NYCWW Pollinator Safari of my Gardens, 2014-06-14

Links

Eventbrite registration page
NYC Wildflower Week

Sunday 6/23: Pollinator Safari: Urban Insect Gardening with Native Plants

I'm pleased to announce that I'll be hosting a pollinator-focused garden tour and citizen science workshop in my garden for Pollinator Week, in association with NYC Wildflower Week.

Event Details

Date: Sunday, June 23, 2019
Time: 1-4pm
Location: Brooklyn, NY, corner of Stratford Road and Matthews Place
Cost: FREE!
RSVP: Eventbrite

1-2pm: I'll be focusing in using iNaturalist to observe and identify insects in the garden. Create a free account on iNaturalist, and install the app on your smart phone. I'll show you how to make observations in the garden with your phone!
2-4pm: We'll explore the garden, see examples of how to garden for insects and pollinators, look at insect-plant associations happening in the garden, and, optionally, make observations with iNaturalist.

These times are a rough guide. You can drop by any time.

Event: Sunday 5/15 NYCWW Tour of my Gardens

The Gardener's Nook this weekend

10 years ago, on May 16, 2006, I wrote the first post for this blog. To celebrate my 10th Blogiversary, on Sunday, May 15, I'm opening my garden for a tour with NYC Wildflower Week. The event is free, but registration is requested, as space is limited.

Native New Yorkers: My Garden's NYC-Native Plant Checklist

This is a checklist of just the plant species native to New York City I'm growing in my garden. I'm posting this for the benefit of anyone attending the NYC Wildflower Week tour of my garden, Friday, May 15, from 1-3pm. It may also be of interest to those who attended Tuesday night's meeting of the Long Island Botanical Society. I only had time during that talk - Place, Purpose, Plants: Urban Gardening with Native Plants - to highlight a handful of plants I'm growing.

Visitors are also going to get to witness a rare treat: "My little bees", Colletes thoracicus, are actively nest-building in the garden right now. Most years, they would be finished by now, not to be seen until April of the next year. If we're lucky, we will also get to see the Nomada sp. cuckoo bees I just noticed in my garden for the first time this year.

Place, Purpose, Plants: Urban Gardening with Native Plants

At last night's meeting of the Long Island Botanical Society, I spoke about my experiences gardening with native plants in an urban setting. These slides accompanied my talk.

Related Content

All my blog posts about My Garden

Other Native Plants blog posts, resources, and references

My insect photography on Flickr

Links

Long Island Botanical Society

NYC Wildflower Week

Bennington, J Bret, 2003. New Observations on the Glacial Geomorphology of Long Island from a digital elevation model (DEM) (PDF). Long Island Geologists Conference, Stony Brook, New York, April 2003.

Event: Saturday 6/21 NYCWW Pollinator Safari of my Gardens

On Saturday, June 21, in partnership with NYC Wildflower Week, in observation of Pollinator Week, I'm opening my gardens for a guided tour, what I'm calling a "Pollinator Safari." This is only the third time, and the first time in three years, I've opened my gardens for a tour.

This Hylaeus modestus, Modest Masked Bee, 1/4" long, was visiting the blooms of Viburnum dentatum, Arrowwood, in my garden just two weeks ago. I've documented scores of insect pollinators in my gardens over the years, including bees, wasps, butterflies, moths, flies, and beetles.


Here's the information from the Evite page, with a couple of extra links thrown in:

NYC Wildflower Week: Pollinator Week in Flatbush, Brooklyn

Date & Time: Saturday, June 21 from 11:00 am - 12:30 pm (rain date Sunday, June 22)
Location: Stratford Road at Matthews Court in Flatbush, Brooklyn

Guides:

• Chris Kreussling, aka Flatbush Gardener
• and a NYC bee naturalist

Event Description:

• Since 2005, Chris has transformed a dusty, weedy backyard into a garden oasis. His gardens now incorporate over 80 species of native trees, shrubs, ferns, grasses and wildflowers. He's documented the process on his gardening blog, Flatbush Gardener. In honor of National Pollinator Week, Chris will give us a behind-the-scenes tour!
• Our bee expert will help us identify some of the gardens' winged visitors, and review tips for creating an insect-friendly sustainable garden in urban settings.

A view of my urban backyard native plant garden, as it looked in 2011, six years in.

The same view as above, when we bought the house, in May 2005

Related Content

On the blog

• Native Plants

My Photography on Flickr

• Native Plants
• Hymenoptera, Bees (11 species so far in my gardens)
• Hymenoptera, Wasps (13 species so far in my gardens)
• Diptera, Flies, including some remarkable bee and wasp mimics
• Lepidoptera: Butterflies, Moths, and Skippers
• Coleoptera, Beetles

Links

NYC Wildflower Week
Pollinator Week

Greenbelt Native Plant Center, Staten Island

Tim Chambers, Greenbelt Native Plant Center Nursery Manager, and our guide for the tour, explains GNPC's history and mission at the start of the tour.


Monday, May 3, I visited the Greenbelt Native Plant Center (GNPC) for the first time. This tour was one of over 45 events scheduled for NYC Wildflower Week. From the event description:

The Greenbelt Native Plant Center is the only municipal native plant nursery in the country. It is a 13-acre greenhouse, nursery, founder seed and seed bank complex owned and operated by NYC Parks & Recreations Dept. Over the past fifteen years, the center has grown hundreds of thousands of specimens from locally collected seed of the city's indigenous flora for use in restoration, and replanting projects and is currently developing bulk seed mixes for the city. The GNPC is a partner in the establishment of the first national native seed bank called Seeds of Success.

GNPC operates as a wholesale nursery serving primarily, but not exclusively, restoration projects around the NYC area. GNPC partners with other growers around the region. Not all their efforts go to NYC wild areas and parks; some go to other, nearby restorations, and they also receive plants of specific species when they don't have the stock to meet the demand.

There are over 2,000 plant species native to the NYC area. GNPC currently propagates about 350, a remarkable proportion. That range is important; GNPC is not just in the business of species preservation, but also restoration of plant communities. That work requires sourcing of many different species, and the plant "palette" required depends on the goals of each project.

Collection

It all starts with the collection of seed from the wild. Collections are done throughout the region; NYC itself has over 8,700 acres in 51 nature preserves under its Forever Wild program. Wherever it comes from, the seed collection protocol links back to the mission of GNPC. As Tim Chambers, our guide for the tour, and GNPC's Nursery Manager, explained to us, non-selection is the goal.

NYC Wildflower Week, 5/1-5/9

The Native Flora Garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, May 2009. This was the first garden constructed after BBG was established on the site of a municipal ash dump 100 years ago, and the first public garden devoted to native plants. Next Wednesday's tour of this garden with Uli Lorimer, curator of BBG's Native Flora Garden and an instructor in their Certificate in Horticulture program, is one of over 45 FREE events in all - available during NYC Wildflower Week.


NYC Wildflower Week kicks off Saturday 5/1. This is the third year for the event, and it's bigger and better than ever. There are events all over the city, including tours of locations otherwise closed to the public. I'm looking forward to visiting, for the first time, the Greenbelt Native Plant Center on Staten Island, "the only municipal native plant nursery in the country."

You can get all the details at the official, extensive, NYCWW Web site, or at the Parks Department event page:

From Friday, May 1, to Saturday, May 9, we're celebrating the hundreds of native flowers, trees, shrubs and grasses in the Big Apple. Take advantage of the spring weather, and come out for a week of environmental learning, with free activities, walks, and talks galore.

I'm proud that this year, for the first time, I've been invited to participate in an official capacity. This Saturday morning, May 1, I'll be on-hand at the information booth at Union Square to help answer questions and provide information about native plants.