O2 - Issue 2 - (Page 55)

I N TH E FI ELD H OW D O E S YO U R GA R D E N G R OW ? THE NATURAL Tessa Huxley has a green green thumb BY DAV I D S O KO L T he Battery Park City Parks Conservancy (BPCPC) sponsors more events—garden tours, bird-watching walks, dance performances, storytelling, fishing lessons—than a person could possibly cram into his week. But one needn’t wait for formal programming to learn about the 36 acres of open space that elevates Battery Park City from neighborhood to destination. Tessa Huxley says that visitors regularly stop garden crews mid-shovel to inquire about this or that species. Huxley is the insightful, determined executive director of the BPCPC. This former director of the Green Guerillas and one-time Loeb Fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design was plucked from the community of garden activists to lead the new conservancy in 1988. “It was my opportunity to create a parks department in my own vision,” she recalls, adding, “it’s a pretty swell place to be.” It was also an opportunity to create parks, of course. While she admits that her job will change as Battery Park City fully realizes its master plan, “we’ve been designing parks since I got here.” Commissioned landscape architects shoulder the heavy design work, but don’t underestimate the power of horticulturists like Huxley. (The BPCPC has 16 horticulturists on staff year-round.) Besides having input into the kinds and numbers of plants selected initially, the BPCPC team members exercise their scientific and aesthetic judgement over time, switching out specimens to better accommodate maturing landscaping, changing activities, or new buildings going up. While the friendly conservancy employee or the biweekly “What’s in Bloom” handout identifies the leafy actors ultimately chosen for Battery Park City’s green scenes, how they bloom is less well known. These gardens comprise the only public space in New York to be allsustainable in maintenance and care. “There was no name for it then,” Huxley says of the move toward sustainable landscape management in the first years of her tenure, “I had been an organic gardener all my life—I built my first roof garden at age 12, and it’s always been very clear to me that you don’t have to pour chemicals on things. In fact, it’s not helpful.” Proving that on a large scale requires constant research. Avoiding toxic cleaning products, using drip irrigation, deploying friendly insects instead of pesticides, and obsessive mulching are time-honored givens. Meanwhile, Huxley and her colleagues only recently discovered a nontoxic grafitti remover. Another relatively new science has to do with maintaining separate piles of “hot” compost and worm-culture compost, which achieve different beneficial levels of fungus and bacteria. And if someone knows of a nontoxic paint that can withstand seawater, please find Huxley at your earliest convenience—you’ll recognize her blue shirt, chinos, blond hair, and clear blue eyes to match. Huxley’s sustainability mission doesn’t stop at the border of the garden bed. Besides reducing food and garden waste and preventing chemicals from spoiling the earth, she and the BPCPC are working to lessen their impact in big-picture ways, such as by charging their electric vehicles at night in order to avoid peak demand. The BPCPC’s striving to do better is an inspiration. When former Battery Park City Authority president Tim Carey was appointed to the post in 1999, Huxley says, “he asked, Why isn’t the authority doing this?” The following year the authority launched its residential environmental guidelines. “I think making all buildings green will have a major impact in a way that we can’t possibly have,” Huxley, ever practical, says of sustainable building. “Then the cost of building green goes down and more people will be doing it.” [ O 2 G R E E N M A G A Z I N E . C O M ] 55 http://O2GREENMAGAZINE.COM

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O2 - Issue 2

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