It was good. Thanks for the dirt, Brooklyn Dirt.

For more usefulness, check out the links below.  The evening started out with a presentation by Marielle Anzelone, who said she worked as a botanist for New York City until about three years ago, and the position hasn’t been filled since.  She gave very useful answers to why native plants are important, though I think the second part of the night, led by Chris Kreussling may have been more pertinent to my purposes, essentially concerning what I can put in my front yard without feeling like an ecocriminal.  I think for my yard/garden, I may hunt down the highbush blueberry and maybe some wild geraniums.  One take-away, though, is that you can’t rely on Home Depot or Lowe’s or even a local garden spot to know what’s native and what’s wise to grow in your garden.  Luckily, Chris promises that his site has a link to retailers who know their native plants.  Overall, it was a one greenthumbs up for the one part of the evening I caught, and I’m sure it would have been two had I stuck around for more.  As it was, I had to get home to a sick kid, and my friend’s kid had to get home to bed.

Sycamore, a flowershop/bar on Cortelyou was good enough to let the kid come along, even though the announcement said 21+.  By the end of the first part of the evening, though, we were all ready to go.  We had a good walk home in the rain.  We kicked around the question whether trying to save our ecosystem with native plants in a little plot of land makes any difference in light of the bigger destruction going on around us.  My neighbor’s son asked if I had a car (I thought maybe he was getting tired of riding on his scooter in the rain).  “No,” I said.  “Well, okay.”  He said it so definitively, like I was on the right track to saving the earth.  Just like that.  He may be right.  Maybe it’s all way simpler than we know.  We also considered whether it might not be better to just throw up our hands, recognize there’s no turning back the clock on the damage that’s done and simply try to find a better way to work with it rather than lament its loss.  It was a pretty quick walk. Only 15 minutes or so … another few minutes more and I’m certain we’d have the answer.

QUESTION(S): what are you doing to make your little difference – in your garden or elsewhere? What do you wish you would be doing? What do you wish other people would be doing? If we could save the world and our little ecosystems by having every person do one thing, what would it be? Should we just throw up our hands and plant kudzu in the concrete? What’s your take? Go ahead…gimme the dirt.

LINKS:  sustainableflatbush.org & flatbushgardener.blogspot.com & marielleanzelone.squarespace.com