Wooden Door With Decorative Panels at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Nov. 2006

Native Flora Garden

With more than two acres divided into eight geographical zones, this wildflower garden exhibits native plants growing in the New York Metropolitan Area, a region known for its natural diversity.

Dating back to 1911, the Native Flora Garden isn't just another wildflower display. In 1931, this wild retreat was ecologically designed to support nine distinct plant communities found within a 100-mile radius of New York City: serpentine rock, dry meadow, kettle pond, bog, pine barrens, wet meadow and stream, deciduous woodland, and limestone ledge, as well as a border mound with several representatives of the region's coniferous forests.

All plants in this garden are appropriate for their particular ecological niches, determined by environmental factors such as topography, geology, soil acidity or alkalinity, moisture, drainage, and light.

The Native Flora Garden complements Brooklyn Botanic Garden's long-standing efforts to research and document the region's plant life. While most of the botanical community focuses on tracking the devastation in the tropics, scientists at BBG are working on the most comprehensive study ever undertaken to identify and catalog the plant biodiversity of the New York Metropolitan Area. The region's rich diversity of natural habitats has been transformed by human settlement in the past 400 years. Understanding the resulting new urban landscape is critical in our rapidly urbanizing world. For more on this important research, including an encyclopedia of all woody plants growing in the area, see Metropolitan Plants.

Serpentine Rock Area
When you enter the Native Flora Garden, the serpentine rock area is just beyond the gate, to your left. In the New York region, serpentine, a streaked greenish rock, is found primarily on Staten Island, where outcroppings cover some 35 square miles. Other sites occur in Hoboken, New Jersey, along the Cross-Westchester Expressway between White Plains and Rye, and in some western parts of midtown Manhattan.

A high magnesium content gives serpentine rock its greenish tint, but it may range in color from yellowish to dark green or even be reddish in hue when intruded by iron oxide. Although dense in weight, serpentine is soft and crumbly to the touch.

Serpentine habitat is extremely arid, nutrient-poor, and prone to fire. Toxic levels of elements such as chromium in the soil inhibit the growth of many plants. The result is a somewhat stunted forest-and-savannah-like plant community. It's a globally rare habitat, containing several endangered endemic plant species.

Certain species are better adapted than others to serpentine habitat. Of the trees commonly associated with this habitat, staghorn sumac and sassafras are represented in the Native Flora Garden. Pinxterbloom or pink azalea, a shrubby member of the heath family, also found in this section of the garden, is prominent in the serpentine outcroppings on Staten Island.

The regal fronds of cinnamon fern and interrupted fern, both members of the royal fern family, as well as hay-scented fern, are all here as well. Cinnamon fern derives its name from the tall, orange-brown fertile fronds that appear in the spring. The interrupted fern is so named because the leaflets in the center part of each fertile frond ripen and wither in early summer, leaving a space.

In spring, the serpentine rock area is filled with the tiny flowers of moss phlox or moss pink, blue-eyed grass (actually not a grass at all but a member of the iris family), and common wood sorrel. The tall, asterlike yellow clusters of roundleaf ragwort are in bloom from April to June, while the many species of goldenrod flower in late summer or early fall.

Dry Meadow
Just inside the entrance to the Native Flora Garden, to the right, is the dry meadow, an open area where herbaceous plants, rather than trees and shrubs, predominate. Meadows are one stage in the succession from cleared land, such as farmland, back to forest.

The thin, somewhat sandy soil of most dry meadows tends to be infertile. However, grasses thrive here, and their