White snakeroot: A plant to show us what’s missing and help us mourn what’s gone

A few years ago, I gathered as many ceramic pots, fabric pots, and empty plastic buckets as I could find on Sunset Park’s Buy Nothing group and started a container garden behind my building. I soon learned that there were already two gardens there: a host of plants that had planted themselves in cracks in the cement, and an in-the-ground plot behind the co-op building next door. In early spring it was carpeted with violets, then later peonies blossomed, and eventually the roses.

I soon met the caretaker of this garden, Jody, a small older woman who still had a lot of pep in her step. She had lived in the co-op for decades. She didn’t know who started the plot — only that someone needed to take care of it.

I saw Jody a lot that growing season. We exchanged seeds and tried to identify mystery plants. She showed me what morning glory looks like when it first sprouts, and we griped about the spotted lanternflies that lived in the grapevines slithering over our fence from a neighboring yard. Their droppings left a sticky sheen that coated our plants and eventually turned their green leaves to black mold.

We also talked about our families. Eventually she shared that her daughter was expecting, and after that many of our conversations were about how much she loved caring for her granddaughter while her daughter was at work.

While Jody nurtured her garden she also helped nurture me. When I first started the garden, I had very few tools, and she would lend me hers. When she saw me hauling around milk jugs full of water that I had filled in my apartment, she pointed to a small fleet of watering cans by her plot and then to the hose that snaked out of a window in the basement of her building. It was easy for her to get water from her basement, she told me. From then on, whenever I went down to water, there was at least one jug already full of water for me to use.

There was one plant that never needed it. It was one of the plants that planted themselves. Back then it was just another anonymous green thing until iNaturalist told me it was Ageratina altissima, white snakeroot. It was still July, and there would be nothing white about it until closer to the fall, when it started to bloom. But like many a snake, it can kill you. The leaves, the flowers, the roots are all poisonous. Its leaves are serrated, and partway up each plant it branches out and has clusters of snowflake-like blossoms at the terminus of each stem. Eventually the flower heads go to seed and fluff up like tiny tawny chicks. When it gets cold, the fluff allows the tiny black seeds to set sail on the wind.

Last year I went on a fall hike upstate in a mature-growth forest. There were so many white snakeroots in bloom that the trees looked like they were rising out of a mist. I have been in my fair share of forests, but too often I see a forest floor covered in invasive multiflora rose, garlic mustard, or even mugwort. It was nice to see maple and oak trees with white snakeroot growing at their feet, as they have for eons — even in Sunset Park, before the forest was razed.

The presence of white snakeroot growing in cracks behind my building tells me what’s absent, and the garden that Jody tended now does the same.

On the first weekend of October, she was walking across Seventh Avenue at 41st Street with the family dog, as she often did, but she never made it to the other side. A driver went through a red light, hit her, and fled. Jody later died at Maimonides.

The next day, a memorial sprouted on the corner. There were many candles and bouquets — some included flowers from Jody’s garden, and of course, white snakeroot from the back.