What's growing along the wall of Croton Aqueduct gate house on Amsterdam Avenue at 119th Street
There are a couple of disused water control gatehouses for the Croton Aqueduct on Amsterdam Avenue, relics of the 19th system that first brought clean, fresh water to New York City. The gatehouse at 119th St. is still abandoned (the one at 113th St. has been incorporated enterprisingly into a nursing home and rehab facility). It sits on a pretty barren stretch of Amsterdam even though this goes through the heart of the Columbia campus.
The gatehouse presents a stone wall to the sidewalk with various places that plants can take hold in addition to the crack at the base. The wall faces west so is shaded in the morning but gets sun from midday on until the campus buildings west of Amsterdam shade it late in the day.
There is an interesting collection of plants scrapping away here. I thought it would be interesting to compare and contrast the assemblage with what is growing in the neglected tree planters on Broadway just half a mile away (see my previous post).
I have identified here:
Tree of heaven
Siberian elm
Prickly lettuce
Prickly sowthistle
Eastern black nightshade
Green bristle grass
Upright woodsorrel
Fireweed
Purple loosestrife
Common copper leaf
Unidentified dicots
For the plants in the dicots family, there are lots of individuals of this but iNaturalist always fails to identify exactly what it is. It's just listed as Dicots here.
The woodsorrel here is growing from a crevice in the wall and has the appealing look of hanging garden or a vertical rockery.
I was struck by how little overlap there is between what is growing here and what is growing in the wild tree planters over on Broadway. Nightshade, wood sorrel and Siberian Elm are the common ones. Siberian Elm in fact seems quite adept at growing in these small scale wild environments. This is the only place I've noticed the common copper leaf.
The introduced plants here are the tree of heaven, the prickly lettuce, the prickly sow thistle, green bristle grass (related to foxtail) and purple loosestrife.
The native ones are the nightshade, wood sorrel, fireweed and common copper leaf.
Richard Mabey informs that loosestrife got its name since when used on horses it can calm them down, so loose their strife!
You have to admire the tree of heaven - its everywhere, so called because of the rapidity with which its branches reach to heaven, its pretty much the official weed tree of New York City.
The purple loosestrife seems out of place. It was introduced from Europe and is meant to prefer stream sides and apparently is all over the banks of the Hudson further north. This does not seem a well watered site however. It's very pretty.
On September 27th I was walking home one evening after parking the car past the Gatehouse and noticed that this entire assemblage had been weeded out from both the wall and the crack where the wall and sidewalk meet, and done very well so absolutely no plants remain at all. I'm glad I was able to record what had been able to grow in the moments between human intervention.
