1) I am a gardener without a garden. This is much like being an artist without a studio. You find inventive ways to continue your work, which, for me, means working in or with the public. Living in a dense metropolis like New York City, it might seem, at first, that access to gardening opportunities would be limited. However, when you decide to garden in the public sphere as a guerrilla gardener, as I have, a world of opportunities opens up—from community gardens, farms, and city parks to stewardship organizations overseeing the maintenance and management of over 20,000 acres of forests and wetlands in the city. Typically, guerilla gardening describes the often political act of growing plants on unused or abandoned land in urban areas without permission.

In the spirit of this practice, I have sought volunteer opportunities that give me a chance to garden, learn skills, and acquire plant identification knowledge. I joined the Ecozone Volunteer program administered by the Prospect Park Alliance in the fall of 2023. Prospect Park contains one of the remaining old-growth forests left in Brooklyn. Volunteer crew members sign up for a year-long commitment to steward a designated area within the park. Ecozone 4, the crew I joined, works largely in the forests and natural paths along Lullwater Cove. Around the same time, I also began volunteering at the Greenbelt Native Plant Center, now NYC Parks Plant and Ecology Center and Nursery (PECAN).¹ The two activities counterbalance each other, revealing complementary modes of caring for urban nature. While we spent some time planting and tending to native plant species in Prospect Park, we were mainly pulling out introduced, or “invasive,” plants such as multiflora rose, garlic mustard, burdock, or mugwort. At PECAN, I help grow native plants from seed and volunteer on native seed collecting trips around the New York area.

Patrick Over, the head seed collector at PECAN, spends most of the spring and autumn gathering seeds for the centre’s seed bank and nursery. He does so with official approval, since it’s illegal to collect seeds and plants on public lands. The centre holds permits for all sites and follows international seed collection standards, limiting quantities and timing to protect population and genetic diversity. Since PECAN focuses on preserving and cultivating local native plants, their collectors mostly work within a 75-mile radius of New York City.

2) During my first collecting trip after a few months of volunteering on-site at the nursery, Patrick took us to visit one of his favourite plants, a remarkable example of the Catawba rhododendron (rhododendron catawbiense). On a small hillside section of Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery, where Meadow Path meets Atlantic Avenue, an almost two-story-tall Catawba rhododendron bush overshadows the nearby tombstones and graves. Seen from the outside, the arborescent shrub appears as a densely woven, impenetrable wall of leaves and branches. However, there is small opening on the side of the rhododendron bush facing away from the walking path that is easy to miss if you only admire it from afar. A spacious green chamber opens behind the wall of leaves. I stood inside the bush, which is big enough for three to four people to occupy comfortably, and stared through the canopy of leaves at the light filtering in.

We were there in late May to gather seeds of the common violet (viola sororia) for the centre’s seed bank. Typically, the bright purple flower petals of the Viola sororia make it an easy plant to spot. The flowers, unfortunately for me—the novice collector—were gone by the time we were there. I found it challenging at first to identify the plant without the flowers. The green leaves of viola sororia blended into the green of the grasses. But as my eyes gradually adjusted to the green environment, I began to distinguish the distinct scalloped edges of the leaves from the other patterns in the grass. I realized violas grew in small patches, which I began to look for in the grassy expanses of the cemetery lawns.

Crouching low to the ground, Patrick showed us how to look for the almond-shaped seed pods rising from the leaves on slender stems. I noticed how some are already split open, like miniature claws. Those seeds were either dispersed by the wind or already embedded in the soil. I spotted my first pod and gently popped open the shell to reveal neat rows of tiny, round, dark seeds nestled in each segment. Carefully, I clipped off the entire pod using my fingernails and placed it gently into a paper envelope.

3) While looking for common violet seeds, I kept thinking about the rhododendron bush. My interest in rhododendrons had been kindled long before this encounter. It arose through my research into the colonial histories of western botanical explorations in Asia, and their impact on plant migration and transformation of Western landscape gardening. The hunt for rhododendrons, in particular, plant-collecting expeditions in the early twentieth century by botanists such as George Forrest and Joseph Rock into the Himalayan-Hengduan Mountains. Many descendants and hybrids of the plants they collected with their Nakhi guides still grow in our gardens and are sold in our nurseries, a living archive of this brief period of extensive and rapid botanical collecting. On my daily walks in Brooklyn, I spot rhododendrons growing out of planters next to brownstone doorsteps and wonder about their origins, if they derive from species collected in China.

I initially assumed the bush in Greenwood Cemetery was also one of these descendants. Using Greenwood Cemetery’s digital tree map, I discovered that the species is native to the southern Appalachian Mountains near present-day North Carolina. The species name catawbiense is derived from Catawba, the Indigenous people living there. I learned, upon further reading, that there are an estimated twenty-seven known native rhododendron species in North America. The earliest rhododendron fossils on record date back roughly fifty-five to sixty million years.¹ They have been found scattered across the northern hemisphere, from Alaska to Ireland. Based on this evidence, botanists and scientists speculate that, at one point, in a warmer climate, rhododendrons blanketed the world. With the increasing creep of glaciers, rhododendron populations became fragmented, retreating into mountainous areas. Today, the Himalayas and Malay Mountains host the most abundant populations and diversity among rhododendron species. However, pockets of rhododendrons native to their respective regions can be found in North America and on archipelagic islands like Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Their survival through Earth’s major climatic shifts could offer insights into how plants might adapt, migrate, and diversify in response to anthropogenic climate change.

4) Cemeteries, powerline corridors, and highway meridians are a few of the places where PECAN goes to collect seeds. These are all once-disturbed natural sites that, over time, become less touched by human activity. Powerline corridors, Patrick explained to me, are excellent places to collect native plant seeds, particularly the sedge seeds we were collecting at the Julian L. Capik Nature Preserve in Sayreville, New Jersey. This forested area has pockets that Patrick said reminded him of the Pine Barrens, a protected natural area that stretches across two counties in southeastern New Jersey, and one of the few remaining intact examples of this ecosystem on the Atlantic coast. The sandy, acidic soil of the site made it difficult for agricultural cultivation, so it was largely left alone by settlers, although prior to colonization, the Lenape made it their home. Also eschewed by developers, it has more recently been turned into a protected nature preserve. This soil, I thought, could be perfect for rhododendrons, which favor acidic earth.

5) When I am weeding, my hands are occupied. They move constantly, filled with dirt and plant matter. There is no room to hold a camera or a recorder. My muscles, unused to the activity, strain and contort. I dig my fingers through the top layer of soil, feeling out the interconnected web of roots, seeking an end. Most often, there isn’t one, and so you must make the executive decision to take your shovel or digging knife to chop through the dense tangle and pull up what you can, knowing that the area you’ve cleared will most likely need to be re-weeded again in a few months.

When I am doing my fieldwork, the camera or audio recorder emboldens me to observe and ask questions. Gardening labour, whether weeding, planting, cultivating plants, or collecting seeds, is an embodied encounter with the natural world. It offers a way of connecting, distinct from my audiovisual fieldwork, but which shapes my creative imagination in a similar way.¹

When I volunteer as an urban gardener, whether at a community farm or in the city park, I intentionally leave my fieldwork equipment behind to free myself from the burden of documenting. This allows me the freedom to become immersed in the task at hand, without the continuous voice in my head asking me how I could turn my work into a film or project. Recording equipment filters the world differently. Sometimes I welcome this ability. It can be a protective barrier, a security blanket. Technological devices filter the sensory data of the environment, which helps me focus and concentrate on particular aspects of the environment I might otherwise miss. However, it also means I overlook other, more embodied forms of sensory data and experience as well. For example, after months of repetitive labour identifying and removing “invasive” or introduced species in the park, I am quicker at spotting and identifying non-native plants. I’ve become intimately familiar with the interwoven, networked lines of the mugwort’s roots. I recognize its feathery, green serrated leaves and silvery fuzzy stems. My eyes have learned to differentiate the distinct carpets of mugwort crowding grassy pathways and leaning eagerly into the sun. I know now that for every root I pull, a deeper one remains. The ground may appear clear, but within weeks, new shoots will spring from the buried roots and repopulate the area.

6) The small observations acquired through my time spent weeding and my conversations with fellow volunteers, conservationists, and environmental stewards feed into my research on conservation efforts to protect regional plant species and ecologies in the face of global climactic shifts, ones which have transformed New York’s climate zone from coastal temperate to humid subtropical. I think of the plant hunters, who collected rhododendron seeds and other desired plant species in the Himalayas to make hardier breeds in Western gardens, and how these introduced species adapt to a new environment. Anthropogenic climate change, another human intervention, is again shaping the plants we see around us. As the planet warms, plants are on the move, growing without human intervention in places they previously wouldn’t have thrived. These shifts and migrations complicate conservation and stewardship, as regional species are replaced by other nearby regional species.

Taiwan, where my parents are from, is also a humid subtropical climate zone. Lately, my mom tells me, the weather patterns and climate are shifting. There are days in the summer, she says, that feel more like New Jersey summers—still warm but drier. The other day, I walked out into the humidity of New York summer and smelled the familiar damp, urban smell I associate with Taipei, from when I would visit as a child. I wonder, what climate zone will Taiwan shift into next? What will the plants do and where will they go? I think of the rhododendrons native to Taiwan, which are only present at higher altitudes in the more mountainous regions of the island. I’ve never seen them, but I think, perhaps, on my next trip, I will make the effort to visit the relatives of the Greenwood Cemetery rhododendron.