I Killed a Tree Today (for Elizabeth)

Ever since we saw that yellow magnolia last year, Rich has been obsessed. Unlike our neighbors across the street with a big, gorgeous, flowering tree, we had a honey locust in front of the house (until today). It was a spindly, sad little tree. Some of the branches were broken, giving it a funny odd shape and it didn't provide much shade to the street. I suppose some accident or disease had killed off the earlier tree that would have been an equal companion to the other big trees that give our block its special old-time small-town quality.

So you-know-who couldn't resist picking up a yellow magnolia at Manza Family Farm in Middletown, New York, a few miles from the sprawling malls and fast food joints along Route 17. They've got everything you need, all the basics and then some. The place is huge and the selection is irresistible. We just had to have that yellow magnolia for the front yard.

Our spindly little honey locust turned out not to be so small once we started digging. It had a dense, tough root system, part of what makes it a good street tree, I suppose. We dug and we clipped the roots and we dug some more. The damn thing wouldn't budge. Rich had the bright idea of using the car to push the tree over. He had some crazy Rube Goldberg contraption of old logs and bits of styrofoam that he insisted would not harm the front fender of our hybrid SUV as we would give the tree that final push needed to break the roots. I was able to drag him from the car just in time to prevent this potentially expensive bit of fender bending. So we used the logs to create a giant lever to pop the tree roots free. That didn't work and my seesaw, not the tree, popped from the ground and I went flying. Two bruised wrists and a scraped butt later and the ugly little tree was still standing. We found a bigger log lever and pushed and grunted some more. Our neighbor was on her porch cheering us on. Others walking down the street to work gave us dirty looks when mudballs and branches went flying. A perfectly good tree was breathing its last; they didn't get it. Finally I got the idea of twisting the tree and breaking the roots that way. We started pulling and turning and, yes, our maneuver was finally working. The tree was tipping over and breaking loose. But that, of course, happened just as a police car drove by. The tree crashed to the ground just inches from the passing patrol car. It swerved and continued on down the street, in search of crimes more serious than arborcide.

We dragged the root ball up the driveway and trimmed and collected the branches. Where once was a homely little tree just coming into spring bud was now a six-foot-wide hole and a huge mound of dirt. What were we thinking??? What's the expression, you can't make an omelette without breaking an egg? So we had to kill a tree to make a home for our new yellow magnolia. I have to say that the newcomer is sweet. Rich tells me it's a Magnolia Elizabeth, named for Elizabeth Scholz, the former director of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden where it was developed in the late '70s. The yellow buds are just breaking into bloom and it makes you smile just to look at our new tree. The hole has been filled in and Rich will plant around it so our little corner of Jersey City will get a bit more special. Thanks for the tree, Elizabeth. And don't forget this weekend is Sakura Matsuri, the cherry blossom festival at the Garden, where over 220 cherry trees will be in bloom. The sight of the massed pink cherry blossoms is unforgettable. I'd kill to be there but can't make it this year.

It is Better to Give and Receive

The lots on our side of the street are quite large, with good-sized front yards and nice, deep backyards. I have never understood the disparity, why ours are so much bigger than those across the street. Was it a slip of the draftsman's pen when the street was being laid out, a toss of the dice to decide who gets the big lots, or a bit of graft that gave us the property advantage? In any case we have a big city garden to fill.
The owners of our house for the past 34 years were great gardeners and bequeathed to us a formal garden in the backyard. But in our case it's not boxwood and gravel paths; hey it's Jersey City. We've got a garden grid that is laid out with anodized aluminum frames and old bluestone sidewalk pavers. The side beds are trimmed with cobblestones, probably saved from some of the old city streets that now lie beneath the paved Gold Coast development along the Hudson River. Our formal garden is therefore a curious mix of '70s mod and historic urban fabric. (The previous owners had a metalwork company, hence the slightly weird in-ground aluminum frames) The neglected gardens we acquired were a tangle of irises with huge patches of hostas of various colors. Spiderwort, an invasive plant to say the least, was poking up everywhere. The irises needed thinning so they would bloom again and, in my book, a little hosta goes a long way. So how to rework the garden and not spend too much money?

The answer lay to the south of us in Monmouth County at the annual spring plant swap. It's a quirky local event held each spring and fall at Deep Cut, a historic garden located in Middletown, New Jersey. The 54-acre garden is a lovely spot now dedicated to the home gardener. In the 1930s it was briefly owned by mob boss Vito Genovese. At Deep Cut, Genovese created an elaborate garden reminiscent of Naples, his Italian birthplace. Work suddenly stopped when Genovese had to leave the country...hmm...Italy beckoned. A suspicious...hmm...fire burned down the mansion the next year.

Last Saturday at Deep Cut this turbulent past was not immediately evident. Here's how the plant swap works: Gardeners pull up with their surplus plant stock, carefully potted in quart, one-gallon, or two-gallon containers. This is a great way to reuse those plastic garden pots that collect in the backyard or down in the basement. The plants are labeled and plant providers are handed colored-coded tickets, one for each one of each size plant they bring. We had a fistful of tickets because our home sellers had bequeathed us the aforementioned overgrown irises and hostas, and that pesky spiderwort. Here's where it can get just a little bit ugly (remember the place is called Deep Cut and it was owned by a mob boss)! Many of the arriving plants are common stuff, yes, lots of irises and hostas, but some gems appear as well. But the unusual plants go fast and there's a bit of pushing and elbowing to get the rare gems. A few frowns appear on those who lost out and wide grins form on those who snagged a choice echinacea or an unusual ground cover. All in all the mood is jolly and the people leave with carloads of plants. And not a penny is exchanged for the goods in question. This a nice retail model for the new recession economy where money is in such short supply these days.

I confess that we were feeling so proud of ourselves for getting a carload of free plants that we couldn't resist a quick stop at nearby RareFind Nursery in Jackson, NJ. Inspired by a beautiful specimen we saw last week in the botanical garden in Copenhagen, Rich and I were on the hunt for a fragrant white rhododendron with a pink blush in the center. (If I hadn't told you already, there are two gay men in charge of this Jersey City garden, that's us.) Right on the edge of the Pine Barrens, Princeton business man Henry "Hank" Shannen has created a monument to his passion for rhododendrons. Set on eleven acres, it has rows of greenhouses and a display garden with over 2,000 hardy rhododendron hybrids and species, one of the largest such collections in the United States. Hank gave us a special tour of the gardens and also a brief history of Rhododendron Fortunei, the beautiful and sweetly fragrant plant that we didn't know we were looking for. They don't call this the Garden State for nothing. Hank told us that the RareFind gardens are spectacular in mid May when the rhododendrons are all in bloom. Plan a visit and get a rare find for your garden.

The Easter Parade

It's a gorgeous sunny Easter Sunday, and I want to get some vegetables started in the backyard garden. I just heard about a great stock of lettuce seedlings at a nearby store, so I jumped in the car and ran down to 440 Farms, a fruit and vegetable market nearby on Route 440 in Jersey City. Friends had told me about the nice fresh fruits and vegetables you can find there, and about the fish they have on Fridays. (More on that in a later post.)

I parked in the gravel lot and headed toward the large plastic greenhouse. Near the entrance were flats of violas, sunny yellow alongside deep purple, a dazzling Easter display. Farther in I found the Easter flower pots filled with tulips and hyacinths and other seasonal blooms. Plastic markers in each pot shouted Happy Easter!

But inside, in the heart of the greenhouse, I hit pay dirt. There I surveyed the vegetables, row upon row of bright green seedlings, beautifully arranged to make a sea of greens, a feast for the eyes, some light, some dark, some with a purple cast, others almost yellow. I scanned the rows and found what I wanted to get my garden started—lettuce, beets, arugula, onions, broccoli raab, and Swiss chard. These would give me an early start. I can follow up later and direct sow more vegetables so I can have fresh produce throughout the season. The triple packs of good big seedlings were $1.89, not a bad price considering there were 6 to 10 plants in each pack.

The plants are in the ground and the Easter Parade is now marching through my backyard. I can almost taste the fresh greens and vegetables that I'll start to harvest in late May.

By the way, I looked over the other plants at 440 Farms and found some great azaleas, white or salmon. At $12.50 for a nice big plant, I couldn't resist. I got one to put in a shady corner at the entrance to the garden.

The season is just getting started and there's still loads of time to get that backyard vegetable garden going. Michelle Obama is gardening at the White House and you can do the same at your place—eat healthy, save money, and go green(s). Start small, just get started. And remember that 440 Farms is your partner in this endeavor. By the way, the vegetable seedlings are local, Jersey born and bred.

440 Farms Inc.
Route 440 and Clarke Avenue
Jersey City, NJ 07304
201 451-6207

Observing the Jersey City Streetscape

It has been a little over a year since we moved to Jersey City from the West Village in Manhattan. The move across the Hudson was a remarkable shift for me, a twenty-five year resident of the same gorgeous Greek Revival townhouse on a beautiful block in one of New York's most desirable neighborhoods. As my partner Rich and I scanned the metro New York real estate landscape, our attention was quickly drawn to Jersey City. The so-called sixth borough offered a convenient location, not far from our respective workplaces in New York City and an easy no-bridge-and-tunnel connection to our upstate farmhouse. As we searched the listings and toured available houses in Jersey City, the McGinley Square area along Kennedy Boulevard and adjacent to Lincoln Park presented some great options. The home search ended at a lovely Colonial Revival house on a pretty tree-lined block.

Fifteen months, several renovations, a lot of plastering and painting, and some serious gardening later, it's now time for me to know Jersey City better. The queries of New Yorker friends looking to cross the Hudson in search of good, affordable housing and my own search for good, convenient, interesting shopping has prompted me to begin this observation of Jersey City.

This blog will contain my observations of life in Jersey City. This is a maddening and fascinating city. It sprawls in all directions with no easily discernible overall street grid. It took me a while to figure out the lay of the land. The layout is remarkable enough that Kevin Lynch in his landmark book, The Image of the City, used Jersey City as a case study for his ideas about a process he named way-finding. I just wrote a book on the topic called The Wayfinding Handbook: Information Design for Public Places, published by Princeton Architectural Press.

The different neighborhoods of this city vary in scale and character and are home to diverse ethnic communities from all over the world. The mix is rich, the images, tastes, and textures make for a lavish buffet of experiences. Jersey City's location along the Hudson River and near New York City makes it a great place to live and also a good base for exploring the region.

I travel a lot these days, so I may occasionally share my thoughts about some other places I have visited. Perhaps these reflections on people and places abroad will inform my view of Jersey City, its assets, and its liabilities and help me dream about how my hometown can grow and develop.

The words and pictures that I post here will be the notebook of my observations. In the process, I hope to get to know Jersey City better. Likewise I hope readers will share their own observations and together we can build a scrapbook of the great, the interesting, the quirky, the unusual, and the desirable aspects of life in Jersey City.

Gotta go, time to walk the streets, make notes, and snap some pix. Welcome to the Jersey City Observer.