native brooklyn flora garden gratitude

yesterday i dragged my sick, sad butt over to the botanical gardens in the freezing cold sunshine. a few cherry blossom trees were in bloom, the bathroom line was crazy-long, and i was psyched to breeze past the entry line with my member card. but most exciting is that the native flower garden (not it’s real name, i forget exactly) is open!

i’ve been waiting all winter for those big wood doors to open. there are no actual flowers of any kind yet, mind. just grizzled little stumps and straw and tiny pokes of sturdy green. but there are the names! in white block type on little black plaques. oh, the names. they bloom all year round. they’re the names of flora that was indigenous to brooklyn long ago. how someone figured out that bit of plantly genetics i don’t know. but i am grateful to all the kooks who named them. they sound like people in a faulkner novel, or a texan cartoon from the 1940s, or like someone got really baked at a dead show in ’78 and started naming. that said, here is a sampling of native brooklyn plant species names i am grateful for:

1) wild bleeding-heart (my first thought–“oh, that’s me!”)
2) sweet fern (aw)
3) fire pink (yum)
4) common star-grass
5) starry campion
6) white wake-robin
7) little bluestem
8) wild oats (yeah, baby)
9) parlin’s pussytoes (yee-haw!)
10) coast violet
11) cinnamon fern
12) spotted joe-pye weed (duuude)
13) horsemint
14) butterfly weed
15) lizard’s tail
16) pink turtlehead
17) swamp dewberry
18) bristly aster (chaaarles, this tea is cold!)
19) poverty-push
20) black plum
21) cluster-leaf tick-trefoil (four times fast)
22) cow parsnip
23) dooryard violet
24) sensitive fern (also, me)
25) goat’s beard (that’s for you, l.t.)
26) false salomon’s seal (there’s a slim shady joke, but i will refrain)
27) deer tongue grass (aw)
28) confederate violet (“chinacat sunflower…”)
29) sweet pepperbush (if you know what i’m sayin’)
30) wing stem
31) new york iron weed (also, me)
32) pinxter bloom (“mr. bloom, we have your new horn-rimmed glasses right here. no, over here.”)
33) interrupted fern (fern, interrupted?)
34) curly-heads
35) sundrops
36) vase vine
37) licorice goldenrod (yum)
38) hay-scented fern (doesn’t it make you want to lie in it and breathe deeply with the sun all over you?)