Native Plants: The matriarch of Sunset Park

The matriarch of Sunset Park is hard to miss. In summer she is a giant green cumulus cloud resting on the hillside. In winter her bare, twisting limbs and interconnecting branches look like a map of a river delta against the gray sky. In early spring her branches have a reddish glow if they catch the sunlight. That is because her tiny red flowers have opened before her leaves even emerge, offering an essential meal for pollinators at the beginning of the season.

Her limbs have offerings for humans too. We rest under them and place babies beneath them on hot days. They seem content to study the mass of wood, water, cellulose and chlorophyll above them. Her limbs have carried bouncing children, whose exuberance shook her whole being until recently, when her largest limbs were cut off. Known to many as the Grandmother Tree, she is an Ulmus americana, or American elm.

She is as much a landmark as the Statue of Liberty, and possibly the same age. Eymund Diegel, a local expert on the lost and hidden freshwater bodies of Brooklyn and a historian of Sunset Park’s topography, thinks the tree germinated around 1876, 10 years before the Statue of Liberty was dedicated, on land that had been an estate and, before that, a primeval forest. Native to this area, perhaps her own grandmother was part of a forest on a slope overlooking New York Harbor. Maybe they all watched the sunset together.

Now it is uncommon to see an American elm. The Grandmother Tree and a few others nearby are survivors. For whatever reason, they dodged the Dutch elm disease that took so many elms across the country in the last century.

At any rate, the Grandmother Tree was growing in the park before it became a park. She would have seen many of the freshwater streams and ponds that were topped with infill when tunnels for the subway were excavated. According to Diegel, there had been a little valley carved by a stream that flowed adjacent to the soccer field from the flagpole to the playground, where it terminated in a pond. Other streams meandered nearby and maybe tickled her roots, but those were buried too.

From her vantage point she probably saw the waterfront salt marshes covered, erased out of existence by the same infill and transformed into Bush Terminal, which dumped untold amounts of waste where the Lenape once waded into the water to pull out oysters for dinner.

She saw the people who worked in the factories by the waterfront come home to their brownstones and co-ops, and maybe sit under her for respite. Across the water, the base of the Statue of Liberty said, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

Under a tree like the Grandmother Tree, the tired and poor could actually breathe fresh air.

She gives others a rest as well. On the day of the spring equinox, a red-tailed hawk swooped in and sat on one of her branches after trying and failing to catch some squirrels, who probably call the tree home. If you are lucky, as my family and I were during a picnic last year, you may see a bald eagle incoming from the harbor clutching a fish, then find a seat beneath the Grandmother Tree.

As an elm, though, the matriarch of Sunset Park is far more than a seat and a lovely sight. Elms in general have been revered across the globe. In some cultures they were seen as protectors. Others believed their roots were connected to unseen realms. American elms have been used by Native American tribes as places for important gatherings. Like other trees, their most important power to the fauna of the world is that they harness energy from the sun and give us food and breath.

Is that why babies gaze so intently up at trees from their spot on the picnic blanket? Is it because, having recently emerged from the womb, they haven’t yet forgotten the old gods? We can’t see it happening, but the Grandmother Tree tickles these babies with filtered rays of sun and hopes that enough of them remember: Without me, you would not be here.