Park Scene (ca. 1915–18)| Maurice Prendergast / Smithsonian American Art Museum Collection / CC0
A few weeks into my time here in NYC back in the fall of 2021, I volunteered at an urban farm in East Harlem. The crew of volunteers was diverse—some of us had experience growing food and others didn’t. At the time, I had worked on farms and market gardens for years and even managed my own garden veggie box subscription the previous season.
I worked mostly with John and Shelby. Shelby was middle-aged, with reddish box braids. She had just come back to the city after finishing her degree in social work. As we worked, I told her about my best friend in a similar program. John was a lean white man of about 40 years old. He worked in tech, and was mostly quiet, but he told us that he had lived in New York his whole life. His dad and grandfather had as well. I couldn’t conceive of that kind of longevity. Coming from an immigrant family, for whom mobility wasn’t just social, but survival, I had no frame of reference for that kind of rootedness. Never once, even as a child, had I considered the possibility of staying in the place where I was born. That was not what my great-grandparents had done. Nor my grandparents. Certainly not my mom and dad.
Towards the end of the morning, one of the supervisors asked if they could get another person to bring over a load of leaves to the compost.
“I’ll do it!” John volunteered. He turned towards the wheelbarrow and put his hands on his hips. “I’ve never used one of these before,” he said, sizing it up.
Unbidden, my jaw dropped. Wheelbarrows feature prominently in my childhood memories of getting grubby in the garden. I wasn’t able to pull it back off the wood chips before John noticed. Shelby burst out laughing.
“If you’ve lived in a city your whole life—” she began.
“Yeah, yeah.” I waved her away, laughing, pretending I understood.
John found the wheelbarrow pretty user-friendly.
At the end of the program, I followed Shelby and John out to the street. John’s bike was chained to a nearby ginkgo tree. To my eye, all the trees on the sunny block looked the same, but John was able to identify six or seven different species. He remarked on which species were native and which were introduced and why. He talked about their different properties and respective roles in the urban canopy. Shelby asked how he knew so much about trees—had he studied them? Did he work with them?
“Just a hobby,” he said.
We said goodbyes and parted ways. I walked home feeling chastened and oddly wistful. I called my mom, and as I walked back towards Morningside Heights, I tracked the thinning-and-then-thickening-again tree canopy. I repeated their names to myself: Norway maple, pin oak, green ash, ginkgo. Though I’d like to think myself above treating this city like a playground as so many transplants do, in this moment, I’d also failed to recognize it as a pre-extant being with legacies I was not privy to.
A couple weeks ago, a lovely person I knew in high school and college described her move to a small west coast island as driven by her dream to “leave the city and connect with nature”—a completely quotidian statement, especially where we’re from. We grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and there it’s sort of taken as a given that people and nature are perpetually at odds. Nature is something you structure your weekend adventures around. Nature is solitary. Nature is out there. Nature is pursued with a deeply sincere (and often tiresome) religiosity. I think this reverence has its place, but I also think, like many forms of zealotry, it’s extremely—sometimes dangerously—myopic. The idea that connection with nature is irreconcilable with city life is the byproduct of several modern delusions, specifically that human civilization is so wholly distinct from the so-called natural order that it is separate from nature, and that we, the apparently civilized, are therefore also separate from nature. As a result, New York City is itself not an ecosystem with its own wildness and wildernesses (despite the herring gulls that roost on the roof of the Javits Center every spring and the two coyotes regularly roam the Public Theater), but rather a spiritual signal jammer, emitting a Lynchian hum that perpetually scrambles any attempt to achieve oneness with nature. This is all, of course, false.
If you want to connect with nature while still enjoying urban life, I have some advice. The first piece is fairly obvious: Don’t be an asshole and assume that other New Yorkers (especially native New Yorkers) lack connection to the land. You will be schooled with firm dignity, as I was.
My second recommendation is similarly straightforward: Seek out opportunities to learn about the land. For me, this was attending foraging classes with Marie Viljoen and gaining a basic familiarity with local ecology. Foraging taught me a lot about the land—and, to my surprise, my fellow city dwellers and their historic migration patterns. Some other ideas to get you started: You could study botany or Eastern plant medicine at the Bronx Botanical Garden and maybe even pursue their “Urban Naturalist” certification. You could join the Mycological Society, or a bird walk at the Ridgewood Reservoir. You could get a map of “important” NYC trees from McNally Jackson. You could get an almanac from the Locavore store. Book Culture in Morningside Heights has a great selection of titles on New York City’s natural history.
After that, I suggest you find some land to tend. Put your knowledge to work. Pull weeds in Tompkins Square Garden. Volunteer on a rooftop farm (like mine!). Remove invasive species on the High Line. Join the Bronx River Alliance for some species monitoring. And finally: Let your land tending lead you to unexpected political conclusions. Not all green space is inherently virtuous. Not all gardens are meant to last forever. Neither are all ecosystems, for that matter. Sometimes the land requires new kinds of care and tending. Become aware of the ways green spaces and other approximations of nature can be used to manipulate political outcomes. Think deeply about the needs of your community and remember that healthy land begets and necessitates healthy land tenders, with roofs over their heads and access to plenty of healthy food.
This essay was first published in the author’s newsletter, The Knife Bloc, on August 27, 2025.
