By Tyler Maroney
On the eastern edge of Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park stands an English elm—sturdy, furrowed, rough-barked—that reaches some eighty feet into the sky. Barring a single rival, it is the largest tree in a greenscape that commemorates Nathanael Greene, a Rhode Island Quaker who took on the British alongside Gen. George Washington in the Revolutionary War.
These 30 acres on a hill won their status as a park in 1847 after a two-year advocacy campaign in the pages of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle by its editor, one Walt Whitman. “The mechanics and artificers of our city,” he wrote, deserved a place to gather and play.
I fell under the spell of this elm one morning two Octobers ago during a walk through the park, which is close to where I live and not far from where Whitman lived when Leaves of Grass came out.
There is nothing truly remarkable about this tree, other than its size and shady allure as a place to gather, to read, talk, picnic or play. The diameter of its trunk spans perhaps 10 feet at the base, so you would need multiple humans linking hands to embrace its fullness. Its thick lower branches provide enough shade for two picnic tables 20 feet apart, and stretch and taper outwards like gnarled airplane wings.
The English elm is a rarity in the American northeast. You will not encounter its species hiking the Catskills or strolling the shores of Long Island. Some of its relatives, which were brought from Western Europe by colonists, have gained a measure of notoriety. One, on the northwest corner of Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village is sometimes described as the oldest tree in Manhattan, at 341 years old.
I have lived in Brownstone Brooklyn for nearly four decades and have read, napped, biked, played, walked, run, sat, picnicked, and parented in Fort Greene Park hundreds of times. But before that walk, I would not have been able to identify this elm using even its most fundamental marker: deep green, almond-shaped, palm-sized leaves with soft, serrated edges.
Thirty years earlier, my high school friend Jessica and l would often walk from Brooklyn Heights through Downtown Brooklyn—past the sneaker shops and jewelry stores, past Junior’s on Flatbush Avenue, up Dekalb Avenue, past what became Spike’s Joint, the filmmaker’s apparel shop where I bought Malcolm X caps and 40 Acres and a Mule T-shirts, along the southern ashlar retaining wall of Fort Greene Park—until we reached Clinton Avenue on the border of Clinton Hill, where Jessica’s parents were among the first wave of gentrifiers.
If, during those walks, which we filled with gossip and giggles, we veered into the park, I do not remember. In fact, I have no memory of being inside the leafy expanse until I was an adult. I was too distracted by the myopia of urban adolescence.
During that October stroll, I borrowed a tactic from the public interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson: get proximate. In encouraging people from different backgrounds to understand how black Americans have been trapped for centuries in systems of disenfranchisement, he teaches us not to turn away from uncomfortable situations and strangers with skin and accents and customs other than our own, but to approach them. (Stevenson has said he would not have committed his life to criminal justice reform if he had not accepted a summer internship in law school during which he met with death-row inmates.)
There is nothing uncomfortable about approaching an English elm, of course; my goal that morning was to experience something new and local and green, to engage in some amateur environmentalism, to get proximate with the trees that live in Fort Greene Park—and not just English elms, but European beeches, white pines, tulip and ginkgo trees, horsechestnuts, sugar maples, red oaks, and the forty-four other species.
(Among my favorites are a handful of Austrian pines scattered throughout the park. Tall and spindly, their lower branches have been pruned over the years due to poor health, and they now resemble palms, their slim trunks capped with an umbrella of stiff needles that grow from buds in pairs: Dr. Seuss trees.)
Getting proximate with nature, embracing environmentalism, working to counter the causes and effects of the climate crisis: These are not distinct from fighting racial inequality. As our planet heats, people of color will be disproportionately affected.
I have not been able to determine when the English elm was planted. There is scant historical information about planting programs before the 1930s, when Robert Moses created a centralized documentation system as the commissioner of The New York City Parks Department.
However, city records show that of the 760 trees in Fort Greene Park, there are 37 elms. The signpost in front of the one that caught my attention says that many of the park’s trees were planted in the late 1860s to conform to the redesign by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the landscape architects who also designed Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and Manhattan’s Central Park. I like to believe my elm was a sapling during the Civil War.
“The city is man’s grip on nature,” said Le Corbusier, the Swiss-French modern architect. “It is a human operation directed against nature.” I sought to loosen that grip.
I wandered aimlessly as best I could, circling the elm a few times, peering up through the soft rustle of leaves, and listening to the starlings, sparrows, and American robins pecking and chirping nearby.
Today, when I tell my daughters bedtime stories, many include the improvised adventures of three wayfinding mice who live under a tree in Fort Greene Park. An English elm has entered our family mythology.
— Tyler Maroney is a journalist turned shamus. His book, The Modern Detective, will be published in September. He lives in Brooklyn, where there are too few trees.