Plan Your Weekend: Glimpse New York of 400 Years Ago

Posted in Programs and Events on June 5 2009, by Plant Talk

Mannahatta Author Tells of Uncovering the Natural History of the City

Eric Sanderson, Ph.D., is a landscape ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society. His acclaimed book Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City reconstructs through words and images what the island of Manhattan looked like in 1609 when Henry Hudson arrived. He will discuss his project in a presentation tomorrow, June 6, at 2 p.m. in the Arthur and Janet Ross Lecture Hall at The New York Botanical Garden and lead a walk through the Native Forest en route to viewing the wigwam in the Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden. This weekend is also the last chance to see the Garden’s spring exhibition The Glory of Dutch Bulbs: A Legacy of 400 Years.

In 1998 I moved to the Bronx from out West, and the following year my wife, Han-Yu Hung, took a job at The New York Botanical Garden, working with kids in the Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden. Our son was born in 2000 and shortly after that, early every Saturday morning we would drive to the Garden together: my wife to work, my son to dig for worms, and me to wander in the woods. I never thought moving back East that I would find a forest (the 50-acre NYBG Forest) with a river running through it (the Bronx River, the only freshwater river left in the city) in the heart of the Bronx.

During the week I worked as an ecologist for the Wildlife Conservation Society, at the Bronx Zoo across the street, but in the evenings and weekends my mind was increasingly turning to what New York was like before it was a city, to a time 400 years ago when the Lenape, the local Native Americans, called Manhattan Mannahatta—or island of many hills—and the Bronx Wanaqua, after the river that ran through it. I spent my time in the library looking at old maps and in the Botanical Garden looking at old trees.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, ultimately the Mannahatta Project would take me nearly a decade to complete and teach me things about nature and the city that I never thought I would know. But in the meantime, I was doing another kind of research right here at the Garden, finding out for myself how the Lenape might have used the natural resources of the area.

In 2002 I asked Ellen McCarthy, the ebullient former manager of the Family Garden, if she would let me use a corner of the garden for an experiment: I wanted to grow a three-sisters garden like the Lenape once did. My son and I pushed the soil into six-foot-wide mounds in April and then in May planted corn, oriented to the four directions, in the rich, organically composted soil. A few weeks later we planted climbing beans, whose roots would fertilize the lengthening corn stalks and whose tendrils would later climb up the corn to reach the sun. We planted pumpkins and summer squash between the mounds of beans and corn, to cloak the soil in thick green leaves, to keep the weeds down, and to hold in the rain water.

Over the years since, we’ve experienced flooding from the Chinese Garden (one of the Global Gardens in the Family Garden) up the hill, fought off squirrels in a modern day “human-wildlife conflict,” and watched kids and adults delight in the simple wisdom of the Lenape way of gardening. We even built a wigwam, with the encouragement of the current Family Garden manager, Toby Adams. One year, my friend, Eric Wright, and I used canvas and tubing to build a prototype-wigwam, which proved so popular that we downloaded instructions from NativeTech.org to learn how to make a better one, and the following year built what is now the present wigwam from saplings and bark. Although our structure is not entirely authentic—the Garden would have frowned on us de-barking some of the ancient trees of the Forest, so we live with micro-shingles from the compost area—we think it has a charm all its own.

Now a decade out since moving to New York, I like to rest in the shade of the wigwam and still enjoy wandering in the Forest or sitting beside the river—all of which seem as familiar to me as the rooms of my own house—while meditating about nature in the city: the natural cultural mishmash of our New York place, of the past, in the present, and into the future.

Dr. Sanderson’s book, Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, is available at the Shop in the Garden. An exhibition of the same title is on view at the Museum of the City of New York through October 12. To find out more about the plants and animals of any block on Mannahatta, check out the Mannahatta Project Web site.

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