Posted On: March 3, 2019
Meet Gardener Dan
What is your role at Madison Square Park Conservancy?
I’m one of the horticulturalists.
What’s your day-to-day look like?
Every morning I start with [cleaning up] litter for at least an hour, if not two hours, running around with one of the grabbers, getting it in the bag. That’s one of my favorite parts of the day.
Why’s that?
It’s quiet, I wake up, I get to work, then I just have alone time for a while. And you can also quantify it and feel productive at the end of it because it’s like, “oh yeah, there was a mess here, there was trash here before, and now it’s clean. Now when you look at it you’re not distracted,” so you get that immediate gratification, which is nice.
After litter, then it really depends on the season. It’s very seasonal work. Right now we’re focusing on pruning a bunch of stuff back. Since a lot of stuff is dormant right now, you can prune it without interrupting its growing time.
Then of course there’s a bunch of planting–there’s always planting. And then it’s maintenance too: keeping stuff down when it starts growing into the pathways, or when the lawn needs to be cut, or deadheading, where you take the tips of the flowers off. The best example is with the roses. When the roses are spent and they’re just dead flowers, you cut off the flower because it encourages growth; it encourages more flowers. So you’re incentivizing it. You’re saying, “I’m not going to let you reproduce,” so it keeps trying to reproduce, and through that it makes more flowers. That’s deadheading.
And leaf-raking, tons and tons and tons of bags of leaves. We have a calendar month-by-month of what needs to get done, so that’s sort of like the guide, and right now we’re doing bags.
What’s your favorite part of the Park?
I like the really old trees, and I like the fact there are trees in the ground in Manhattan, because I think it’s easy for us to think that the built environment is very permanent. But when humans stop paying attention to the built environment… plants start growing all over. I think it’s a good reminder that when you walk through [the Park] you’re like, “Oh, we live in a natural space.” It’s a nice head-break when you walk through the Park; it’s hard to keep your same state of mind–it’s possible to keep your same state of mind–but it’s hard to when you walk through the Park.
Do you have a favorite of our Perennial collection?
I haven’t seen most of them in bloom yet, but I like the witch hazels. I’ve been taking pictures of them when they’re blooming and trying to write down when they’re blooming, which has been fun. I thought it was going to be colder. But the witch hazels are doing fine, they like this temperature.
What is one thing coming up in the spring that you’re really excited about?
Well, I’ll be doing some Kid’s Tours; I’m very excited for that.
How do you envision your Kid’s Hort Tours?
I think we’ve got to invigorate the youth. I was never told until a few years ago that there were professional careers in plants, so having that message when you’re young, “Do you like math? Do you like science? Do you like spending time outside? Go into plants. There are careers there; this is something that you can do.” I think that’s important; I wish I had heard that. And I really want to talk about the history of the earth because people don’t understand the long term, how these buildings have come up in milliseconds of time [in terms of] the earth’s history, and I could go on about that…
What is one thing you would like Park goers to know about the park?
The first thing that comes to mind is throw your stuff in the trash can, put your cigarette butts away. Another thing is that I like talking to people. I’m generally okay with being interrupted. People like talking about plants. In my experience, I have good conversations when people are talking with me. Because people are like, “You know, I was trying to grow this at home, but it wasn’t working,” and then we can talk about that or we can talk about the hawk. I like that too.
What’s one collection coming up in the spring you would like to see in the Park?
I really want to see the hydrangeas mostly. I haven’t grown hydrangeas much before. As far as the collections go, I’m weaker on that one, so I’m excited for the hydrangeas so I can learn about them.