The word “recruit” in French literally means the sprout that comes back after pollarding or coppicing. When trees and their sprouts appear in a place, unbidden and persistent, I think of them not as recruits, but as volunteers. They insist upon occupying the land, and little by little they transform it. Even where we forget or neglect the woods—particularly in urban areas—they do not abandon us. My most and least favorite woodlands in New York are places where the power of sprouting reaches out to scratch you.
The first is at Gerritsen Beach. I feel that if I stayed the night, I might wake up covered in creeping twigs. I try not to go there on weekends, since then I am liable to be run down by a speeding dirt biker on one of the sand paths. And if I go near sundown, I try to make sure I get through while the light lasts. I always go to the fire circle, where I have found everyone from groups of teenagers to the apparently homeless gathered around on benches made of logs and of discarded guardrails from old roads. I hunt up the outcrops of concrete and count the carcasses of burned-out cars. I check to see what new is growing in the open meadows, what seeds are most plentiful in autumn and winter and how their fruits can be broken open, and who is winning the battle where phragmites, sumac, and mugwort meet.
One hundred years ago, this place wasn’t a woodland. In fact, it wasn’t there. The forest here grows on made land. Until 1934, most New York City garbage—the solid waste from trash cans, the building and road debris, the sand dredged to open or deepen channels—was barged out to sea and dumped in the New York Bight.
Then, the city’s wise men had a bright idea. Population pressure was growing. That meant lots more garbage and not enough lebensraum. Why waste all that trash in the open ocean? Why not use it to make land? “The city’s lowlands . . . form an almost unlimited supply of dumping ground,” wrote the predecessors to New York’s Sanitation Department, and they made the smart connection: “The possibilities of land reclamation are almost boundless.”
The edges of New York are thick with fill. Once, Coney Island was indeed an island. The water in between was filled. La Guardia and Kennedy Airports were built on landfill. So was the World’s Fair site in Flushing, Queens. (It had been an early dump dedicated largely to coal ash. In Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, the hero calls the landscape “the Valley of Ashes.”) Battery Park is dredge fill. Borings find old ships’ timber and wharf pilings at thirty-foot depth. And all of the land in Brooklyn south of Avenue U from Sheepshead Bay to Kennedy Airport is made out of about 1 trillion yards of fill: 23,000 acres, or 36 square miles, of the stuff. Soil scientists have named a soil class to describe these places, the Big Apple Series, which is officially described as “anthrotransported”—in other words, brought there by us. In the early days, before landfill engineering, the stuff was not sealed or capped, just dumped.
The land at this, my favorite woods has been woven mainly out of three kinds of trash. One is the sand dredge, spewed up to clear passageways for ships and at the same time to make new land. A layer of solid waste—household trash and municipal leavings—enough to cover the whole area to eight feet deep, is the second thread. The third is the debris from excavation, construction, and demolition.
Some city fathers apparently decided that they had not done enough to make real soil for the real estate developments they planned. In a few spots, they thoroughly mixed sand and sewage sludge, topping it with alfalfa plowed into the new soil annually for three years. They left off when they realized how expensive the work was, and when they saw that plants were coming up all over anyway. They had no idea of the slow, relentless, healing power of woodlands, or that they heal not by means of wealth but through poverty and time.
When Hurricane Sandy struck in 2012, only about seventy-eight years after the dumping had begun, it rolled right over the woods, across the avenue and into the flatland, fill-based neighborhood beyond. Cars floated up and down the street, coming to rest in flocks, nose to nose, like herds of deer at salt licks. The power was out. Every house and business in the neighborhood was damaged. The London plane street trees were defoliated, their bark changed to the color of rusty pipes, and the white pine needles had turned a brittle dead bronze. But on the other side of the street, the wild forest shrugged off the storm. A few trees were down. That was it.
East of the avenue and east of the rough ballfields—their lawns so corrugated that any ground ball stands fair to be a base hit—the motley forest waves, a strip of greens and yellows and purples and more brownish yellows and bronzes and waxy pale blues between the neighborhood and what is left of a tidal creek. It is a mutt woods. Groves of ailanthus and black locust stand beside outcrops of concrete blocks, the understory thick with waving mugwort. Along the shore, the waves expose the shore dirt and the evil plans of phragmites, whose matrix of tangled rhizomes can grow thirty feet in a season through the black nutrient-rich soil and whose stolons run over the surface almost as fast as flowing rivulets, expanding the front of the giant reeds. Among the groves stand meadows on pure sand, dotted with emerging black cherry and sumacs, and edged with banks of balsam-smelling bayberry. Switchgrass, little and big bluestem, and Pennsylvania sedge rise from the billows of sand. Crustose and foliose lichens splotch bare patches.
Without the aid of tilling, of alfalfa, of any care at all, Great Nature is bringing forth a triple soil on the three kinds of spoil she is given. You could call these leavings “waste,” but as the compost man Clark Gregory once put it, “It isn’t waste until it’s wasted.” Great Nature will not waste it.
The dirt based on rubble and excavation debris is well drained, but full of concrete and mortar, which contain high-pH calcium oxides. The plants this stuff attracts—ailanthus, black locust, hackberry, mugwort—like just such limy dirt. Where the soil is black with decaying solid waste—very high in organic matter—the nitrogen-loving phragmites sprawl over everything, driving out most other plants. Where the buff tan soils are little more than pure sand dredged out of the water, the dirt is very low in pH, very low in organic matter. It is downright poverty stricken. On this poor soil, the native coastal plants are directly emerging: the switchgrass, the black cherry, the sumacs, the bluestems, the lichens, the bayberry. In some places, you will even see black tupelo.
Because the dirts are woven together one with another—according to what barge dumped which spoil where—you can find a lens of one soil woven into the matrix of another. In a field of switchgrass and sumac—whose leaves flash white beneath when the wind overturns them, like a field of oblong mirrors—grows an emerging grove of ailanthus. If you search at the base of the ailanthus, you will find chunks of rubble and other construction debris.
One path leads to a rough rectangle of pavement whose origin and use are unknown. At first glance, it seems that the center and the south edge of this opening are fringed with twin sumac groves. Their typical staghorn multistem look—caused since their flowers occupy the ends of stems, forcing new growth to emerge like branching horns beneath the tips—gives them away. But as you come closer, you see that one is indeed a grove of sumac, with its rust red obelisks of terminal fruit, but the other is a clonal grove of multistem ailanthus. One is on sand, the other on broken concrete, and both are spreading in the same ground-covering plural-trunked way.
That this landscape is less diverse than the salt marsh that preceded it is unquestionable. But so much was happening here! A bird’s nest in a black cherry was armored with a white plastic frame, apparently from a six-pack of beer. A dense colony of night herons, their droppings festooning an ailanthus grove, screamed at me as I passed, making a sound like snow shovels skip-skidding over pavement.
Here, the poorest substrate gave the strongest results. We think from our vegetable gardens that a good soil is full of nutrients, but at Gerritsen Beach that “good soil” bred only the bullying phragmites. The dredge sand blossomed, slowly it is true, with lichens, grasses, shrubs, and trees, although it started with almost nothing. The dirt made of concrete was likewise a slow starter, but it could only accept those species that would tolerate the very high pH.
Perhaps not in a human lifetime, but over time, the calcium compounds will leach through the dirt and be gone. The concrete will melt and disappear. The organic garbage will break down, part going to the air and part flowing into the groundwater and away. With patience, the life-giving poverty of this sandy seashore landscape will return, the sandy soil slowly enriched by the life and death of its native flora.
It is amazing to me that this will be accomplished not only by our earnest efforts at restoration, but by neglect. Nobody except walkers, kids, or homeless wanting to be left alone, or a wild place to wander, to sit around the fire or to ride their dirt bikes, come here. But in this wilderness a triple dirt is building. The dirt restores. The branches restore. We only help or hinder.
About twenty miles from this woodland is another. It cannot be called beautiful for how it looks, but only for what it does. Fresh Kills is the largest manmade structure on Earth. Until it closed in 2001, it had been New York City’s principal dump. Every kind of leavings that an industrial society can make had landed up there. Hills and mountains rose where there had been wetlands. Methane vented through cracks in the dirt. It was the opposite of the mutual respect that people and trees showed for each other in a coppice woodland. It was a place in which to hide the unspeakable, so the bright, shining city could continue to polish its windows, to attend its operas and symphony concerts, and to dine out in peace.
We had been asked to assess about two thousand trees in a small section of the place. In a late winter blow with heavy snow, a lot of trees had come down. It was not surprising, since they had been planted atop big gray riprap gravel, red clay, piles of varicolored bottles, and plastic shards. This was a modern landfill—not just fill, but a place that had been sealed beneath and capped above to keep the detritus and its leachate from escaping. There was hardly any dirt to speak of, but the trees had come up anyway. There were ailanthus, black cherry, royal paulownia, mulberry, black locust, red maple, box elder . . . weed trees every one, and none taller than about thirty-five or forty feet. Many were completely wrapped in choking vines: oriental bittersweet, poison ivy, grapes, and porcelain berry. One fallen black cherry had turned up a root plate about six feet in diameter. Roots had wound in and out of the rough surface, like the filigree in some Tiffany brooch, trying to get a hold in the strange dirt. Packed among the exposed rootlets were green, clear, and brown bottles of a dozen sizes, half a child’s red plastic dump truck, fragments of plates, cups, and dishes, red and yellow labels that for some reason were slow to decay. Stretched taut in one corner was a beige nylon stocking, one end of which adhered to the top of the root plate while the other end clung stubbornly to the ground.
It was neither a healthy nor a pretty place, except perhaps when the paulownia was flowering. In fact, it was the ugliest woodland I had ever walked. Many trees were dead or dying. The vines had covered some trees and taken them down. The branches and the vines together made impenetrable thickets of fallen wood, like the chaotic scribblings of an enormous, troubled child. There were many fungi: Ganoderma shelves at the base of many trees, the reflexed, bone-colored tongues of Dryad’s Saddle in cracks on the stems, turkey tails all up and down the dying trunks. Even the fungi seemed unhappy, many stained a yellow-green by something saprophytic.
The just fallen trees looked like Mathew Brady’s pictures of the Civil War dead, sodden and crumpled, but those that had collapsed in previous years had not been slow to rise again. One big three-stem black cherry—it had certainly come from the stump of a previous specimen there—had split at the base, each trunk falling to the ground. One was dead, but a second had turned one of its lateral branches into a rising tree, and the third had three branches that were in the process of becoming trees. None would likely ever make its own roots, so all would eventually perish. Nearby, another cherry had been luckier. Its branch had rested on a smaller stem that did not arch but reached the ground. The trunk had already decayed, but the former branch was putting down its own roots. By hook or by crook, the woodland said, I will grow over and into this place.
It was a cold day, and I was tired. There were many more trees in the area than our client had at first told us. My supposedly waterproof boots were stained dirty brown where I had been standing in the slush. It seemed an endless and a thankless task. On a slope in Section 9, I came upon a tangle of greenbrier that covered the ground like barbed wire. There were indeed trees among them, so I had to go in. The prickly miasma covered at least an acre of ground.
I tried to follow what looked like paths, but they led nowhere. When I finally had to step into the briars, they caught at my boots, my shoelaces, my pant legs. Turn one way to escape one tendril, and the act caused another, opposite-facing spiral to wind me up into its coils. In one place—I think it was near Tree 9889—I couldn’t get away. I wound tight in one direction, then spun in the other. I could go neither forward nor back. I felt like a corkscrew, and I wondered as I whirligigged back and forth whether I would eventually disappear underground. It took a quarter of an hour to escape from there.
When I did, I felt grateful to be walking on nothing more noxious than broken bottles and old shoe soles. The thick, capping gravel appeared again. I slid down a slope on the riprap and almost into a creek full of dead green filaments of slime. What the #$@%)%8*, I remarked. When I turned, I slipped. I unintentionally went down on my knees. I was looking out over the floor of the forest, littered with unsightly piles of dead trunks, fallen branches, and collapsed serpentine vines. Right in front of me rose the ripped-out roots at the base of a fallen black locust. On the top of one root—five feet high in the air—a new black locust had sprouted.
My god, I breathed. And despite the fear that my knees might get infected, I did not want to get right up. It was suddenly, momentarily beautiful. From a coyote’s eye view, you could see what the trees were up to. Decay, repose, and the drip of acid water through the gravel were mixing a dirt out of the detritus. This hideous forest, I suddenly realized, was there to repair the damage done, and not at our bidding. Its intent was not to look good. Its intent was to stay alive, year by year, century by century, until at last it had cleaned and renewed even the nylon stocking. Stems failed. They decayed. Branches fell. They decayed. Vines covered whole groves in a mass of thick stems until all of them together collapsed. They decayed. Organic acids came from the rotting mass. The rain and snow did their work. The dump was slowly changing.
On posts in the industrial harbor of Pasaia near San Sebastián in Spain, the administration has put up a wonderful sign to discourage people from dumping into the water. It tells how long it takes most kinds of leavings to return to the earth. Organic material goes quickly: cardboard in three months, wood in one to three years, a pair of wool socks in one to five years, an apple core in two. From there, the time mounts up. A cigarette butt may take a decade, a plastic shopping bag ten to twenty years, a plastic cup fifty. All of these are at least within the range of a human lifetime. Not so the major industrial materials. An aluminum can is with us for two hundred years, a glass bottle for five hundred, a plastic bottle for seven hundred, and a Styrofoam container for a millennium. The sign is written in Basque and Spanish. Its legend reads “Ez daukagu B Planetarik,” “No hay planeta B.” (“There is no Planet B.”)
The forest does not think this. It just acts as though it were so. Because it is so good at sprouting, resprouting, repeating, reseeding, it can keep up the living and dying for as long as it takes, even if that is a thousand years. It would require the whole time that Bradfield Wood has operated in Sussex to break down one Styrofoam tray, but as both Bradfield and Fresh Kills show, the trees, the vines, and the fungi are up to it. The trees are not conscious. They are something better. They are present.
My colleague Laura found the genie of Fresh Kills landfill lying in the dirt. It was not the only pale plastic doll’s head that we had seen among the trash, but this one was different. The gray fettuccine of its plastic hair had become the matrix for a puke green crew cut of living moss. Well beyond the imagination of its makers, the doll was coming to life.