Still Here: Trailing Woolly Beans

Each patch of sidewalk in Brooklyn has layers of history stacked on top of each other, like a cake. Some layers of history are less appetizing than others. There are rocks and minerals heaved up by glaciers and deposited when the ice retreated north. On top of that, there are hidden waterways still gurgling underneath fill from subway tunnels. At Bush Terminal, the layers include fill that smothered the salt marshes that were once there, industrial waste and, in the past decade, layers of toxic landfill that were removed, capped and replaced with clean soil.

One of the most common herbaceous perennials growing on top of that soil is mugwort. Brought over by colonists, mugwort is public enemy number one for volunteer gardeners at the pollinator garden at Bush Terminal, who are trying to rewild a postindustrial landscape with plants that were the infrastructure and building blocks of the precolonial neighborhood of fauna and flora.

Stand in front of a thicket of native plants—ones that would have been here before colonization—and you’ll see that they are teeming with life, so teeming as to be loud with the buzzing and thrumming sounds of life, especially this time of year. There’s an impossible variety of bees, moths, butterflies and sleek wasps with long, metallic blue bodies that dance with each other in flight. Different kinds of flowers blooming at different times keep these masses fed.

A colony of mugwort is still and silent. That’s because a food desert cannot sustain life—unless that life is a trailing woolly bean, and by sustain I mean prop up. Two years ago, I encountered my first-ever trailing woolly bean, Strophostyles helvola, draping itself over mugwort, which it had repurposed into a trellis. The trailing woolly bean was growing just beside the sidewalk adjacent to the soccer field nearest the bathroom at Bush Terminal. Probably the only reason I saw it is that I had been glaring at the mugwort and noticed that one plant was uncharacteristically topped with cute, tri-lobed leaves.

I discovered the leaves were attached to a vine, and the vine had climbed the whole mugwort plant. It seemed to simply rest on top of it rather than snake around and strangle it. I would have liked for it to do the latter, but that’s just not in this polite opportunist’s nature.

After I met the trailing woolly bean, I would come by to check its progress whenever I was at Bush Terminal. Every week, I expected it to be swallowed up by mugwort, but every week I was surprised to find it had spread itself over even more mugwort. In late July, it finally had little purplish-pink symmetrical flowers the size of a fingertip. Each side of the flower looked like the opening of a conch, and in the middle was a hook that was dark at the tip. It looked like a good place for a fairy to hang a hat.

I was excited to see it flower, and even more excited when it started growing beans—the exact color and shape of green beans, but smaller. Native Americans ate trailing woolly beans and may have cultivated them for food. Unlike green-bean seeds, trailing woolly bean seeds are relatively hirsute, so the name is no lie. When the beans are fully mature and desiccated, the pods will blast open at the slightest touch and scatter the seeds like confetti.

Trailing woolly beans are annuals, and the next year I did not spot any growing along the fence. Instead, some had taken up residence on the jetty, a place basically bereft of soil. But the trailing woolly bean, while not aggressive or overbearing, is a survivor and can grow in sand dunes and other places where most plants would balk.

This year, the trailing woolly beans growing at Bush Terminal are not plants that I happily stumbled upon growing in whatever margins they could find. They have their own designated space in the pollinator garden. They grew from seeds of trailing woolly beans I found in a salt marsh upstate along the Hudson River. They are politely making friends with the bee balm and coral honeysuckle, which don’t mind being draped on or leaned over. Perhaps this is how they lived in community all those years ago, when a salt marsh was the top layer of the cake.