Gardening in the Park with Dan:
A Volunteer's Education

Daniel Ransom (fourth from left) and Saturday Session volunteers

by Carol Bergman

After months of procrastination — spring come and gone, the forsythia, daffodil, and cherry blossoms withered, the baby birds in the Ramble all fledged — I finally clicked on the words, "volunteer opportunities" and received an almost instantaneous personal reply from Daniel Ransom, Volunteer Field Coordinator for the Central Park Conservancy. "Hello Carol and good morning to you," he wrote with warmth and enthusiasm, the perfect antidote to a country at war, corporate malfeasance, and the stresses of contemporary urban life.  There was no escape now from my intention of "giving back" to the city where I had been born and raised, and where I now feel at home again after a long meandering hiatus.

I stepped into the Park on that first Saturday morning in August 2006 with a long sigh.  Here I was ready to work — in my hiking boots, shorts, sport top, and straw hat — just south of the Great Hill, an area I had jogged and walked around hundreds of times but barely noticed. "Look for the big green monster," Daniel had instructed, referring to the truck filled to overflowing with tools and gardening gloves, a tank of cool water, plastic cups. Daniel introduced himself to the new volunteers and the volunteers to each other. A clutch of blue-shirted "perennials" with the words "Central Park Volunteer" tattooed on their backs hung in the background and chatted to one another.  "What’s the task for today?" one of them shouted.

"Weeding.  Everything must go but the asters, a native plant," Daniel replied.  He separated one of them from an overgrown patch and identified it.  "It’s a hot day so take breaks when you need them and drink plenty of water."

Weeds.   I thought I knew what the word meant until Daniel showed us a wild rose bush with thorns like daggers, tick weed, poke weed, hog wort, ragweed and — every gardener's nemesis — burdock, an edible weed, according to the Japanese, with roots so tenacious, so deep, they run straight from New York to Tokyo.  We cut away and dug with shovels and pick axes.  My first partner was Janet, a film location scout.  Another neophyte, she had come out for the day to take her mind off the news and a failed love affair.  Sweating and dirty, we talked easily about books, music, films, children.  Bodies are not only meant to be of use, they are meant to be useful, the Buddhists say.  No wonder we felt so good, connected to the earth and to one another.  As I stepped sideways, forward, or scampered down the schist to add to the growing pile of mulch and twigs, I found myself alongside the perennials — Rita, her husband Abe, Marge, Dion, Fern, Clay, and Eleanor — who have been volunteering with the Conservancy for many years.  Even though I was not yet an "official" regular, they welcomed me heartily.

That was the beginning of my first year working in the Park on Saturday mornings. I have now been out in all seasons, though it is sometimes difficult these days to figure out what exactly those seasons are.  One balmy day in early January of this year, stripped down to tee shirts, we were raking and mulching near the newly-renovated Heckscher ballfields when Pale Male, the most famous of the resident hawks, flew by with sticks dangling from his talons. "He thinks it’s time to nest," said Francis, one of the Park’s zone gardeners working with us that day.  We discussed climate change for the rest of the morning.  "We’ll have to adapt," Francis said, "just like the plants and trees and animals are adapting."  That began a chain of commentary among the volunteers that continues unabated.

What would Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux have thought of our volunteerism?  I’d like to think they’d be grateful for it.  The Park is the City’s lungs, and it belongs to all of us.

For more information on volunteering in Central Park, please click here.

Carol Bergman’s essays and interviews have been published in The New York Times, The Times (of London), The Christian Science Monitor, The Daily News Magazine, The Amsterdam News, Newsday, Cosmopolitan, Woman’s World, Family Circle, Art Times, Cineaste, and Salon  “Objects of Desire,” appearing in Lilith and Whetstone Literary Review was nominated for a 1999 Pushcart Prize in nonfiction. “Another Day in Paradise; International Humanitarian Workers Tell Their Stories,” was published by Orbis Books (US/Canada) and Earthscan Books (UK/Commowealth) in October, 2003 and was nominated for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize. It has been translated into Korean and Chinese. She is one of the founding faculty of Gotham Writers’ Workshop and has been teaching in the NYU writing program since 1997.