You’ve no doubt heard about the large brood of 17-year cicadas that will soon emerge in New York City and beyond. If you garden, you’ve probably wondered what these gigantic insects might do to your plants. The good news is that adult cicadas (Magicicada species), though large and noisy, do not tend to do much damage. The primary reason for their emergence is to mate! That deafening song is a mating call. Eating plants is probably one of the last things on a cicada’s mind.

Cicada grubs do eat plant roots and are a common underground pest, but they’re not too serious, and any harm that this brood has done was done in previous years. The only damage adult cicadas are likely to cause plants, even during a heavy emergence, is from ovipositing. The females cut small V-shaped slits into tree bark or plant stems to deposit their eggs. This can cause branches or stems to flag, but it’s generally not a major concern for healthy plants and trees. Cicadas can’t bite or sting people, and they are not poisonous. They are mostly pesky only because of their loud singing, imposing presence, and conspicuous numbers. Please do not think about using pesticides on them. It’s unnecessary and not at all justified.

Overall, the emergence of the 17-year cicadas should be an amazing phenomenon to observe. They are quite beautiful in their own right, and their song is among the loudest in the insect world. They are also one of the longest-lived insects on earth and are a symbol of good fortune and immortality in various cultures around the world. So instead of likening cicadas to a plague of locusts, try to enjoy their short visit and appreciate them in all their noisy glory. You can check out Radiolab’s citizen science–produced cicada-prediction map and read more about this Magicicada brood online at EarthSky.org.

The four cherry trees along the pond just south of the torii in the Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden look similar—all have a weeping habit and pink flowers that blossom at the same time. They are clearly of different ages, but everyone thought they were the same cultivar—Prunus subhirtella ‘Pendula,’ which is how they were labeled when they arrived from the nursery. But a recent examination reveals that one young tree’s flowers have a double layer of petals, indicating that it is actually a completely different cultivar: P. pendula ‘Yae-Beni-Shidare’.

Names matter at a botanic garden. So this spring, Brooklyn Botanic Garden enlisted Tony Aiello, a horticulturist from Morris Arboretum in Philadelphia with special expertise in cherry trees, to help confirm the identifications of the flowering cherries in BBG’s collection.

The term cultivar is contracted from “cultivated variety,” meaning a subset of a plant species that has been selected for certain desirable characteristics—color, flower size or shape, or fragrance, for example. The cultivar name that identifies this subgroup follows the species’ Latin name and is set in single quotes. Breeders often come up with metaphorical descriptors (like Tulipa ‘Red Riding Hood’) or celebrity tributes (like Rosa ‘Lady Diana’) to distinguish their plants. When a cultivar is accessioned into BBG’s collection, the specimen is tagged with the full name, which is also recorded in the Garden’s plant records database.

In the case of Japanese cherry trees, cultivar naming can be an imprecise science. Japanese horticulturists tend not to use Latin binomials, and cultivar information can be lost in transliteration from kanji to English. Further compounding the confusion is the fact that the first major account of cherry cultivars was published in German, opening the door for more translation variations. Once a specimen has been misidentified, it takes an expert eye and close observation at the right time of year to discover the error.

Aiello has been working to help ensure that different collections around the country are using a common set of names—he tries to visit a few each spring. This year he’s also been to Washington, DC, to examine the National Arboretum's cherry trees. (Being a traveling cherry cultivar expert is a pretty sweet gig, he admits.) He’s planning one more visit to BBG this week, now that the late-flowering cultivars have blossomed. So far, he’s found the collection to be in pretty good order, but some updates will likely be made to the Garden’s records, plant labels, and Cherry Watch.

Traditional Japanese confections, or wagashi, are beautiful to look at, texturally complex, and subtly flavored. They are often made with ingredients Americans are surprised to see in a dessert. Rice is used to make mochi, azuki beans are the basis of the red bean paste filling in many sweets, and red algae is processed into kanten, or agar-agar, and used to make fruity gel treats that are similar to Jell-o molds, but much lovelier.

Most Americans probably don’t realize that marine plants are commonly used in processed foods—they have great stabilizing properties. If you read the ingredient labels for some ice creams, beverages, or sauces, for instance, you might see carrageenan, which is made from seaweed, or algin, an algae-based product, listed.

Agar-agar, a similar substance made from red algae, is available to home cooks and deserves to be more popular. It’s vegan and kosher and contains fewer calories than animal-based gelatin, and it’s just as easy to use. It’s also high in fiber and helps you feel full. (It’s the main ingredient in a fad diet in Asia and has received some press in the U.S. as an antidote to obesity.) Plus, it’s a good source of iron, phosphorus, calcium, and vitamins A, B1, B6, C, and D. It comes in powder form or as flakes and is found in health-food stores, Japanese specialty shops, and the health-food or Asian sections of good grocery stores.

Use agar-agar to make this refreshing dessert with strawberries or any other fruit. Traditionally, anmitsu, a variation in which the kanten is cut into cubes, is topped with a molasses-like syrup called kuromitsu. I think a dark caramel sauce would be a nice substitute, but you could also just garnish it with mint or serve it without any accompaniment at all. Give this delicate, delicious Japanese dessert a try to celebrate cherry blossom season and the slow but steady arrival of spring!

Strawberry Kanten

• 2 tablespoons agar-agar flakes
• 2 cups water, room temperature
• ¾ cup sugar (any kind you like)
• 1–2 cups sliced strawberries (or other fruit)

1. Clean and slice the strawberries.
2. Add the agar-agar flakes to a small pan containing the 2 cups of water. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring constantly to keep the flakes from settling to the bottom. Reduce the heat to a simmer and stir for 2 minutes. After the agar-agar has dissolved, add the sugar and continue simmering until the sugar has blended completely.
3. Remove the mixture from the heat and transfer to a heat-proof container that is easy to pour from.
4. Prepare 8 small molds (bowls, ramekins, teacups, or other small containers with nicely shaped bottoms) by wetting the inside with water to prevent sticking. Pour 1 tablespoon of warm kanten mixture into each. After it has begun to solidify (about 10 minutes), add some fruit. Try to avoid letting the fruit touch the sides. Add another tablespoon of kanten, then the rest of the fruit. Top off with the remaining kanten mixture.
5. Let the kanten cool at room temperature until relatively firm, then chill in the refrigerator until it sets (about an hour). When serving, use a toothpick or sharp skewer to separate the top rim of the jelly from the mold, then turn out onto a serving plate; it should pull away cleanly once you get it started.

It’s peak ramp-picking time in the neck of the Catskills where I spend my weekends, and my neighbor, a logger, recently took us to his favorite spot for our annual foraging spree. Ramps (Allium tricoccum), also called wild leeks, grow on damp slopes in deciduous woods before spring leaf-out, which perfectly describes the western Catskills in April. Green plants are still scarce there this time of year, so patches of this spring ephemeral are easy to spot among the deep leaf litter and fallen logs of the woodland floor.

The rampant popularity of wild leeks among foodies in recent years has brought concern about over-harvesting in some regions, but the plant appears to be abundant in western New York. Nevertheless, we usually pick only the leaves and stems and try to leave the small white bulbs in the ground to grow again for another year. The broad, lily-like leaves are wonderful sautéed with a little olive oil or butter and salt and pepper, tossed in with scrambled eggs, or as a pizza topping.

As demand at farmers’ markets and fancy restaurants for this sweet, delicate, garlicky-tasting green has grown, a few native plant purveyors, such as Prairie Moon Nursery, have begun offering seeds and bulb sets for sale. By most accounts the plant is a finicky germinator, which is probably why it has not been cultivated commercially. North Carolina State University has been researching ways to produce ramps efficiently and sustainably and offers a very thorough online information sheet about growing wild leeks. Like trillium, bloodroot, and other woodland ephemerals, ramps require rich, consistently moist but well-draining soil high in organic matter. Site them in a spot that gets dappled sunlight in the spring and full shade in warmer months. You may have to wait for up to three years for harvestable ramps, but they’re worth it! In the meantime, keep an eye out for them in farmers’ markets—or in your own neck of the woods.

Around this time of year, inevitably I’ll be out in the Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden and someone will ask, “When will the cherry trees blossom?” and I’ll have to point out, “Well, you’re standing under a really beautiful flowering cherry tree right now.” That’s because most people, when they come to see BBG’s cherry blossoms, are only picturing the straight rows of deep pink, multiflowered ‘Kanzan’ cherries (Prunus ‘Kanzan’) on Cherry Esplanade. Understandably so—‘Kanzan’ has always been a favorite of visitors, not to mention a media darling. It’s a shame, though, that the cultivar’s extravagant beauty sometimes overshadows the rest of the collection.

The Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden and Cherry Walk feature a wide variety of cherry cultivars with different forms and colors of flowers, all uniquely beautiful and all blossoming at different moments throughout April. For example, BBG has four Yoshino cherry trees (Prunus × yedoensis), the favorite cherry in Japan, where the delicate form of their single white flowers is highly valued. (Some Japanese cherry fans might even consider the bright, many-petaled ‘Kanzan’ flowers a bit gaudy.) Yoshino cherries also display a lovely progression in color. Their dark pink buds open to white flowers, which then turn pink again. Look for them soon. The beautiful pink weeping higan cherries (P. subhirtella ‘Pendula’) along the pond are in bloom right now, as are ‘Fudan-zakura’ and ‘Okame’ (P. sargentii ‘Fudan-zakura’ and P. ‘Okame’). CherryWatch has the latest updates, locations, and descriptions of most of the cherry trees at the Garden.

So if you’re waiting until the day to see the cherries, don’t. Instead try to see as much of the season as you can. When you do, also try to appreciate how the blossoms and the trees themselves appear in different contexts—nestled into the landscape of the Hill-and-Pond Garden, up close in the cherry cultivars area along Cherry Walk, as part of a panorama from the Overlook. Then by all means come back in later this month or in early May, when Cherry Esplanade will likely be in all its glory. But if you wait until then to see your first cherry blossom of the year, you’ll have missed most of the show.

On March 28 and April 2, Deutsche Bank volunteers assisted New York-based artist and renowned tree house architect Roderick Romero in the construction of BBG’s newest site-specific art installation, Sandy Remix. The 200-square-foot, nest-like platform made of trees is the first of Romero’s projects to be set in a public garden and features wood from Garden trees felled during Hurricanes Irene and Sandy that was milled on site. Two teams of volunteers from Deutsche Bank worked with Romero to help build the tree house, weaving woody material from the Garden’s previous onsite sculpture, Natural History by Patrick Dougherty, into its exterior and interior cladding.

These two days were filled with moments of creative collaboration and hard work, and BBG thanks Deutsche Bank for this effort as well as its lead sponsorship of Sandy Remix. Visitors of all ages will be able to experience Romero’s interactive, hyper-local work after the installation opens on April 6.

I had a rare and wonderful experience as I was walking through the Garden at dusk one night last week, just about 6 p.m. I was strolling through Cherry Esplanade when I thought I heard the “peent” call of an American woodcock coming from the Cranford Rose Garden. Suspecting this to be the product of an overactive imagination induced by my late-winter lust for spring, I nevertheless walked hopefully toward the sound to investigate. As I stood outside the white lattice fence surrounding the Rose Garden, I could clearly hear the loud, buzzy peents repeated at regular intervals of about three to five seconds. Just a minute or so later, I heard the bird burst into flight and immediately saw his unmistakable silhouette as he popped up over the white fence right above my head. Tubby round body, big head, no neck, and an outlandishly long bill…the woodcock sighting was confirmed! I stood in the gathering darkness, listening to the live soundtrack of this amazing bird as he conducted his flight display, finally landing back in the Rose Garden to begin his peent chorus all over again. The first bird sign of spring has arrived in Brooklyn!

The American woodcock is the leading contender for oddest bird in North America. Though it is considered a shorebird, its inelegant proportions are adapted to life in upland habitats well away from the coast. Its short legs keep it close to the ground, and a long bill with a flexible tip is the perfect tool for probing into the mud for its favorite food, earthworms. The woodcock’s large eyes, set far back on the head, allow this bird to watch over its shoulder for danger while feeding, and its mottled brown feathers make it nearly impossible to see among dead leaves on the ground. Given the bird’s habit of hiding under shrubs in a dense thicket and freezing in place when danger is near, it might well have remained an undiscovered species but for its elaborate courtship display.

Each year in the very early spring, male woodcocks perform a song-and-dance routine in an open field at dusk, aiming to attract a lonely female. Its loud peent call is accompanied by a bobbing dance on the ground. Next comes the sky-dance flight, tracing a distinct pattern high up into the air and spiraling slowly back to earth. The woodcock’s wing feathers produce a sharp chirping sound as they beat through the air, so even if the bird is out of view, his entire dance sequence can be followed by the sounds alone.

If you’re thinking this bird sounds too exotic to be found in a central Brooklyn neighborhood, you’re only partly right. I don’t expect any male woodcocks will turn the Rose Garden lawn into their favorite dancing ground for the next several months. However, the early-spring migration of woodcocks to nesting grounds in the surrounding region and farther north brings a high number of the birds through Brooklyn, and some may just settle down in the Garden for a few nights’ rest. After my encounter, I checked online with eBird, a citizen science project from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Audubon Society, and discovered many birders had reported seeing woodcock at locations all across the city last week, so the migration is on for 2013!

If you’re curious, check out the description of the woodcock courtship ritual here.

And Cornell gives a good photo and audio clip.

The celebrated landscape architect Darrel Morrison is best known for designing wide-open prairie-inspired gardens like his landscapes at Storm King Art Center and the Native Plant Garden at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum. Recently, though, the New York City resident has turned his attention to a more local, urban project, the Native Flora Garden expansion. On a recent visit, he took a break from planting pitch pines to talk about ecological art, the beauty of native plants, and why he’s glad that his work will never be done.

BBG: Have you always used native species in your work?

DM: Early in my career, in the 1960s, I worked with the typical plants that everyone was using at the time—hollies, crepe myrtles, English ivy, pachysandra. There were, and still are, generic landscapes filled with these plants all over, and they all look alike. When you’re there, you could be anywhere in the country. They’re the equivalent of those highway exits with fast food restaurants and chain stores. It reminds me of what Gertrude Stein once said about her childhood home of Oakland, California: “There’s no there there.”

At some point I realized there’s got to be more than this. I saw the light when I read American Plants for American Gardens, by Edith Roberts and Elsa Rehmann. They convinced me of the importance of looking at native plants as parts of communities. It’s such an eminently reasonable way of looking at landscape. Working with the plants that were here before we were is a way to create a real sense of place.

Did that inspire you more than the idea of educating people about native plants?

Many people will have you thinking that those are two different things, but I believe that people will first be attracted by what’s pretty—the attention grabbers like mountain laurel or lupine. Then once they’re drawn in, they start to notice patterns and differences. I see it when I’m teaching field courses with students. First they’ll notice the colorful flowers, then the surrounding grasses and ferns, then the greater environment and the complex ecology of the place. I love to get people “hooked” in this way.

So, is designing a native plant garden a lot like restoring a natural area?

It’s more like a capsulization. You can’t re-create nature in a space this small, but you can get the essence. So what we want is to provide a small sample of a pine barrens for people who have never been to one. To most visitors, it will look a lot like the plant groups here occurred naturally, but actually a lot of design was involved in the way the plants are placed.

Would you say that you compose the landscape in the same way a painter composes a painting?

Well, there is an art to it. Not only do you want to hew to the ecological integrity, you also want to create a space that is experientially rich; it should look beautiful, and there should also be sounds and smells. There should be other forms of life too— birds, butterflies, and other pollinators.

Do you consider a garden a work of art?

Yes, but unlike most artists, we garden designers have the luxury of working with the fourth dimension—time. So what we’re creating here will always be a work in progress. We set it in motion and let it take off, and people will see a different garden each time they come. Visit in the late spring and you’ll see a blanket of small, colorful flowers in bloom, but come again in October and you’ll see a different place, with tall grasses waving like ocean waves. And then the following year, there will be more differences still. It will never be “done,” and that’s one of the most exciting things about working with plants. That’s exactly how it should be.

Difficult as it is to imagine today, the New York metropolitan area was once home to a broad array of incredibly diverse plant communities. Much of Brooklyn was old-growth oak forest; the New Jersey Meadowlands were cedar swamps and sphagnum bogs; the eastern part of Long Island was a rolling, tallgrass prairie; and the wetlands now occupied by JFK International Airport were filled with beautiful orchids. These ecosystems have been nearly wiped out by urban development, but a stroll through BBG’s newly expanded Native Flora Garden provides a glimpse of the natural world that existed here hundreds of years ago.

“This is more than just a pretty place. The plant collection is truly local, so people can understand the beauty, the diversity of the native plant communities that once existed here and a few that still do exist very nearby,” says esteemed landscape architect Darrel Morrison, who headed up the Native Flora Garden expansion.

The newly planted area, which will open to the public in June, features a cultivated pine barrens and a meadow modeled after small, extant natural ones nearby. All together, 150 native species will be included, many of them rare or threatened and most propagated from seeds collected from the wild by BBG experts. Not only will the garden serve as an exhibit for the public, it will also be a place to grow specimens for research and conservation.

This expansion comes a century after BBG first established the Native Flora Section, as the garden was then called. The original design featured a woodland and separate wildflower beds, arranged in a systematic grid so that scientists could easily observe and access the plants for research. Those plots were redesigned in 1931 into an ecologically based arrangement that allowed visitors to observe native species growing in plant communities as they would in nature—a garden design concept revolutionary for its time.

Today the original two-acre space has matured into a small forest of century-old oak, maple, and tupelo trees, some of which are more than 100 feet high. Though it makes for an authentic re-creation of a natural forest, the mature tree canopy has shaded out plant communities that require a lot of sunlight. The new expansion provides a sunny space for these important species to thrive.

Morrison, best known for his expansive designs using native prairie grasses, described the project as a great opportunity to design a garden that allows visitors to take in a wide diversity of plant communities in a small space and to see re-creations of the successional transitions that occur in nature. “As you move from the existing, wooded area, you’ll pass through a grove of birches that will act as a woodland edge, and the light continuum and the moisture continuum will change and give way. You will really see and feel it open onto the sunloving garden area,” he says.

Along the winding footpath and boardwalk, on the east-facing slope, visitors walk through a replicated pine barrens, an unusual plant community that evolved in the acidic, sandy soil that covers parts of New Jersey and Long Island. Pitch pines and scrub oaks dot the upper reaches of the garden. Planted last fall and this spring, they will mature into a small forest.

Other plantings include blueberry, sheep laurel, and most notably, pixie-moss, a rare and threatened species of flowering evergreen groundcover for which BBG serves as an official custodian. Just beyond, a small stand of Atlantic white cedar and a freshwater bog represent a typical lowland pine barrens plant community. The water’s edge is home to sun-loving carnivorous pitcher plants and sundews, orchids, sphagnum moss, and yellow-flowered bog-asphodel, another rare and threatened species.

On the west side of the path, visitors will see a sloping meadow inspired by the Hempstead Plains, a tallgrass prairie that once covered a large part of Nassau County. Drifts of grasses and herbs including big bluestem, orange-flowered butterfly weed, blue wild lupine, and purple showy aster will create a wash of color that will change with the seasons. Near the top of the slope, a small cluster of greenish-gray rocks represents a serpentine outcrop like those found in parts of Staten Island. These unusual, mineral-rich rocks change the character of the surrounding soil, making it very high in magnesium and low in calcium. The plants that grow in it, like whorled milkweed and eastern shooting star, must be very resilient; a sample community has been planted here.

Like the rest of the Native Flora Garden, the expansion will be a place not only to enjoy but also to connect with and learn about local plants at a time when they are increasingly threatened in the wild. Visit soon to see it in its earliest stages, and then return to watch the specimens mature and adapt to their new home over time. This special place will be a refuge for the plants that grow here and for the people who visit them for many years to come.