The Call of the Wild

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Mariellé Anzelone believes that “plants need a publicist. They’re not charismatic like vertebrates that can stare at you with their eyes,” she says. “If we had had an army of angry plant people, the way we have an army of angry animal people, things might have turned out differently.”

Photography: 

Jennifer Pottsheiser

The seventh annual NYC Wildflower Week, held recently in May, has a mission of showcasing New York City’s 53,000 acres of open space and 778 native plant species. Its founder, urban conservation biologist and alumna Mariellé Anzelone, is pretty sure the program never would have gotten off the ground if it weren’t for an early 1990s discussion of pine cones, led by David Ehrenfeld, a professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources at the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences.

“I know it sounds kind of cartoonish,” says Anzelone CC’93, GSNB’00, who earned degrees in environmental science and, later, ecology and evolution, “but learning about those pinecones was a really formative experience for me.”

They weren’t just any pinecones. They were serotinous pinecones, a variety that opens only after being exposed to a forest fire. “That’s amazing, right? Only heat above a certain temperature melts the resin on the cone, so it opens and the mature seeds can be distributed. I thought, ‘That’s the coolest thing I’ve ever heard. I need to know more about this,’” says Anzelone, who lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and two sons.  

Anzelone, who grew up in suburban Westfield, New Jersey, says nature was “something that wasn’t part of my parents’ lives. It really was my time at Rutgers that made me say, ‘Oh, wait a minute. This is something new and interesting.’ Those serotinous cones were like a lightbulb going on.”

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It may be hard to fathom, but New York City’s 53,000 acres of open space are home to 778 native plant species, according to alumna Mariellé Anzelone. “There are really rich, amazing natural areas in the city that have native species that need to be preserved,” she says. From the top, pasture rose, a wood poppy, and a common elderberry.

A much broader kind of illumination is her goal now. NYC Wildflower Week, which has volunteers leading botanical walks and garden tours in all five boroughs, is meant to “get people to understand that there are really rich, amazing natural areas in the city that have native species that need to be preserved,” says Anzelone, who has championed wildflowers in her contributions for nytimes.com and huffingtonpost.com, among other websites. “I know it’s hard for people to grasp that concept when they have a view out their apartment window that looks like mine,” with a lonely looking tree growing against the side of her building.

Before Anzelone launched NYC Wildflower Week (nycwildflowerweek.org), she worked for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. In 2004, she became very involved in a preservation battle on Staten Island over a rare native plant called Torrey’s mountain mint, whose existence was being threatened by a planned shopping center. The plant’s advocates, including Anzelone, were ultimately defeated in their efforts to protect it. That got Anzelone to thinking in subsequent years that “plants need a publicist. They’re not charismatic like vertebrates that can stare at you with their eyes. If we had had an army of angry plant people, the way we have an army of angry animal people, things might have turned out differently.”

The lessons learned from the Staten Island fracas fed her determination to get urbanites more tuned in to the natural wonders that surround them. And to that end, she has taken on a new project recently approved by city officials: in September 2015, Anzelone will erect a pop-up forest in Times Square. She’s not sure of its exact placement yet or how big it will be, but she is sure it will win urban nature some much-needed publicity. “If a forest can make it in Times Square, it can make it anywhere, right?”