- Good morning. Over these last many decades, I've sort of come up with what I think are the four most important goals in designing with plants in the landscape, or in designing landscapes more generally. And these sort of have been increasingly my own guidelines for myself, and I think many of you can follow a similar route, starting wherever you are now. But anyway, the four goals that I see as being really important in the landscapes that we manipulate are, first, that they be ecologically sound, not surprisingly, and this implies many things. One being that we have plants matched with the right environment. We have a diversity of plants, both for the health of the environment and for attracting other forms of life. We wouldn't, with this as a goal, we would never introduce invasive plants into a landscape that will spread beyond the site and diminish the natural diversity. So first, ecological soundness, but, secondly, and this doesn't conflict in any way, is experiential richness. We need landscapes that are full of color, texture, movement, and movement I think is really important, which is one reason I really like grasses because they move and there's life as a result. And part of the experiential richness also relates to the fact that if our landscapes are ecologically sound, they will be filled with many forms of life. And I know the monarch butterfly is really high on everybody's lists but there are multitudes of other species that benefit from a diverse landscape. The third characteristic that I shoot for is the designs be of the place, that we know where we are when we are in a particular landscape. Gertrude Stein made the famous statement on one occasion about her town of Oakland, California, where she lived for a time where she said, "There is no there there." And that, increasingly I think, has been a problem throughout the country. Regional differences are erased as we plant a very limited array of often non-native species in the landscape. And so having recognition of where we are is really critical.  The fourth characteristic that I think is also important is that our landscapes be dynamic.  A lot of landscapes, historically, have devoted all kinds of resources to making them never change, mowing, clipping, clipping hedges, mowing lawns, with very little change over time. And the landscapes that you are interested in, that I'm interested in do evolve. They change. There's plant reproduction. There's migration of plants. And all of the things that are associated with that. So anyway, those are my four goals, and I hope some of the work I show you will be representative of that.  And, in that regard, what you see on the screen is a designed landscape.  And I'm really pleased to tell you that this little landscape is one that I was involved in in Brooklyn, New York. This is at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. 150 feet from Flatbush Avenue. And so it really gives me heart to know that this can occur in Brooklyn, unlike the tree that grows in Brooklyn, the Ailanthus that was so famous a few decades ago. But anyway, we can have rich diversity in the city and even in Brooklyn, New York.  But I didn't start doing this. This is time for true confessions. There was a point in my life when I was planting Vinca minor and English ivy by the dozens, by the hundreds, by the thousands, working in an office in Washington, DC. I was planting Chinese hollies and crepe myrtles and honey locusts, over and over.  And after a while it really occurred to me there's got to be more to it than this. And that's when I happened to run across a wonderful little book called American Plants for American Gardens. This was in the mid-1960s that I ran into the book. It had been written in 1929 by a botanist, ecologist, Edith Roberts, and a landscape designer, Elsa Rehmann. And they talked about plant communities, which was kind of a new concept to me. Anyway, this slide  reminds me so much of Edith Roberts and Elsa Rehmann's book, which introduced me to the idea of plants growing in groups and particular environments fairly predictively. Anyway, in their book, they describe the plant communities of Dutchess County, New York, and listed the prominent species in each of them, and then wrote beautiful descriptions of those native plant communities. And that was when I decided I really needed to get more education after doing all of those Vinca minor and Heterohelix plantings in the Washington, DC, area. And it was at that time that I decided to go back to school to get master's degree at the University of Wisconsin in landscape architecture. But the first course that I took was plant ecology. And in that course I was introduced to the first prairie restorations, really, in the country, in the world for that matter, Curtis Prairie and Green Prairie, which were quote "designed by scientists, "by ecologists and botanists." And that too really made an impression on me that we designers could learn a whole lot from scientists and ecologists in doing our work. And then after getting acquainted with restored prairies at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum, I started going to remnant natural prairies throughout the state and to other native communities and started teaching field courses in 1973, taking students into various plant communities. And it's just so, so important. Okay, I'm going to proceed, I think. Ah  [chuckles] .  [audience laughing]  There. And in my field exposure, in my looking at native plant communities, I was at the University of Georgia for about 20 years and went to a number of native plant communities there, oftentimes with my very talented assistant, co-teacher, Nancy Aten, right up here, at the University of Georgia. But anyway, here we're looking at Heggie's Rock, or a portion of Heggie's Rock, which is a 100-acre nature conservancy site near Augusta, Georgia. And the course, or the class that I took there was the garden design class, which at first glance may seem a little strange, but then you think about it and there is a whole lot of design in this particular composition here. For example, there's the representation of different microenvironments with the very shallow soil being inhabited by mosses and lichens, where there's a bit of soil buildup, there's broomsedge and little bluestem. Beyond that where the soil is deeper there are red cedars and various oaks. And then there's another factor here. There's the distribution of the Yucca filamentosa, which forms what I think of as the quintessential drift. Again, back to the title of the talk, Rivers and Drifts. That phenomenon occurs over and over in nature where there's an aggregation of species that is dense and then it trails off and then another species picks up in a beautiful relay system. And so that's important too. And this slide also reminds me of somebody else who has been instrumental in teaching me, and that's the environmental psychologists Steve and Rachel Kaplan at the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources. And they've identified four characteristics of naturally evolving landscapes that seem to appeal to people. And these are mystery, complexity, coherence, and legibility. And mystery, obviously, relates to the idea of not seeing everything at once, that there are partially concealed areas so that there are surprises and new things to discover around the bends, so to speak. Complexity relates to a diversity of colors and textures and forms, but it also relates to a diversity of species, as you see in this slide. But the third characteristic  Somebody who did study nature and studied the Midwestern landscape was Jens Jensen, Danish-born landscape architect who started the clearing that many of you are familiar with in Door County in 1935.  Anyway, this is some of his work from about 1915. This is Columbus Park in Chicago. And here you see, certainly, the mystery idea. The fact that you don't see everything at once. And you can actually make a space feel bigger by not letting you see it all at once. And you can do this in your own backyard. You can have peninsulas of vegetation that come into the open space and hide part of the landscape so that it sort of interestingly seems bigger. Anyway, Jensen was a master, certainly of spatial design, use of light and shadow, the sequence of enclosure and openness, and then he, increasingly through his career, used native plants of the Upper Midwest, when he was in the Upper Midwest, and then started using natural processes, letting plants reproduce and spread and migrate so that his own designs were enriched over time.  And here's another example of a naturally evolving landscape that I feel like I have learned from. This is a hillside in Iowa County with birch trees and then an oak forest beyond that. But there's a spatial form here, the river of native grasses moving  into the space beyond the birches. 

 And this particular scene sort of inspired a later design idea in about 1912, 1910 that you'll see-- Excuse me, I'm not that old. 2010.  [audience laughing]  I used to drop a year now and then and then I started dropping decades and now I'm dropping centuries. But anyway.  [audience laughing]  This idea of observing something in nature which is transferable into design is really useful, I think.  And again just a view of a natural composition. Native sunflowers with prairie cordgrass in Avoca Prairie, a native prairie west of Spring Green, Wisconsin.  And it's so inspiring to have these. I love the fog, of course. I'm frequently in a fog. But anyway, this is just a beautiful composition, and it gives you a reference point for design some time later.  And this, interestingly, is a little bit of prairie in northwest Georgia. And at first glance you might say, "Where's the design in that?" But then if you squint your eyes a little bit, you see a river of gold  color moving through it. The habitat is probably slightly different, the soil may be more shallow, and there's certain set of species that forms that beautiful moving pattern, and I would be very happy if I could claim that I had done this design, but I didn't. But I have learned from it.  And, again, just for some of the visual effect. Here we see the textural character of Curtis Prairie at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum, again with just a little bit of fog. And this led me into a project at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum, and I worked on the native plants garden there from about 1997 and then planting began in 2002 and subsequently has been managed and guided with lots of tender loving care by Susan Carpenter, whom you'll see and hear later in the day as well. Anyway, here you can sort of see the idea of the mass and the space. And to me, even when you're designing your backyard, that becomes critical, is to identify the mass versus the space. I mentioned Jensen managing light and shadow. Well, you can create, even in a quarter acre, you can have zones that are trees and shrubs providing the mass, and then you can have intermediate zones that might be ferns, wildflowers, grasses, and then you can have open space, which does translate to lawn in some cases. And that sort of is the theme here.  And in the end, the quote "natural community groupings" maybe stand out more because they contrast with that smooth center area. But anyway, in this case we tried to establish plant community groupings for 11 different southern Wisconsin plant communities, and this is a during picture of the limestone prairie where we brought in tons of gravel and created a more limestone prairie environment. And a couple years later on that slope, we had things like this, which is pretty exciting. Plants that grow in limestone in prairies. And I'm going to back up just a little bit and talk about the sequence ones that follow. Like I told you, I was doing all those terrible monotypic ground cover plantings in Washington, DC, in the 1960s, but I think you can progress from that, and I would suggest there are at least three levels of progression.  The first might be to substitute native species for often used exotic non-native species. And usually there's a native shrub or perennial or tree that will do very well in a design. And so, for example, in the shrub category we have New Jersey tea. We have dwarf bush honeysuckle. Both little, beautiful small shrubs that grow to two feet or so, and they could be used instead of some Japanese clipped holly or something of that sort. And it's true in each grouping of plants. So anyway, the first step is substitution of a native for frequently used exotic. Second step is to diversify, and instead of having a single species ground layer under the shade of a tree or on the north side of the house, instead of having Vinca minor or pachysandra or English ivy, one can have a mix of, let's say, 10 species, ferns, wild geranium, blue woods phlox, columbine, wild ginger, matched with the habitat that they're in. And it could be a beautiful tapestry with flowers and a changing scene throughout the year, whereas the evergreen ground covers never change.  So, hence, the dynamic nature. So we can go from substitution to diversification to really abstracting native plant communities in the right environment where we don't really copy nature but we select the key species and the key patterns that might occur in a natural version of that community. And that's sort of what you see in the slide in front of you. It's a dry prairie composition. It's not really a true restoration but it is based on a plant community and it has the key species and quite a lot of the visual character.  Here, again, is that same area from the visitor center looking out over Curtis Prairie. I might just mention parenthetically, when you look at this you see, in Curtis Prairie, the reddish-rust color in the foreground and then the green color beyond that. This photograph was taken in October after there was a spring burn in the front part of Curtis Prairie, and the summer after the burn there's this profuse flowering and growth and the fall color is so spectacular. Whereas, in the unburned portion, the green part beyond that, we don't have all of that. So, again, just working with natural processes to enrich the design over time. This is a wet area in the same place, the native plants garden at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum with a drift, rivers and drifts, a drift of swamp milkweed in our small fen, or as Molly Mary called it the fen-ette. And just another thing to remind us of the dynamics of planting, this is a planting at the visitor center of bur oaks, the major trees here are bur oaks. This is photographed probably in 2003. And seven years later it looked like this. Seven years. And people say, "Oh, we won't plant oaks "because we'll never live long enough to see them." Wait a minute, this was seven years' time, and they've grown a lot more since then. These photographs are from Susan Carpenter who has done a great job of documenting the change in this landscape over the now, what, 15 years it's been growing. So put in a little one-and-a-half-inch bur oak, and you'll be surprised what you'll get in your lifetime. And this too is a plant community distillation or abstraction. This is a wet prairie in an area where roof rainwater is directed to flow over it. We have sweet black-eyed Susan and Joe Pye weed, grass leaf goldenrod, mountain mint.  And here's another fairly moist area with blue joint grass being the tall, luminous one,  which reminds me of an article I read in 1967 in Landscape Architecture Magazine by the author and landscape architect A.E. Bye. And he talked about the visual effect you can get by placing translucent vegetation, like grasses or ferns, between the observing and the sunlight. And this, the blue joint here, is kind of a  representation of that. And, again, you can do this is your own backyard. Think of the view of the window at a certain time of day and then placing plants that would capture the light and glow. 

 And this is the rain garden at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum native plants garden. This was photographed only, I think, about a year after it was planted as plugs. Culver's root, cardinal flower, Liatris, Pistacia, Rudbeckia subtomentosa, mountain mint, Pycnanthemum, Virginianum. But anyway, there's a bit of patterning in that and amazing color and change throughout the season.  Now, back to the idea of looking at natural patterns as a basis for design. Here's a residential area that I designed in Westchester County, New York, a few years ago. And there's actually an uncharacteristic straight walkway through it, but it works with the architecture and the stone walls that we built. But the key thing here that I want to talk about, which, again, is translatable into an area that may be 20 by 10 feet, is to drift the species through the design. And I won't go into the species particularly, but I will a little bit. This is a columbine, for example. We're on the north side of a house, a three-story house. So, near the house we have very shade-tolerant things and then, as we move out, plants that will take more sun, as we move southward so to speak. Up here, for example, there's blue cohosh, there's Christmas fern, there's wild ginger that will take a lot of shade. Here's the columbine. There's Pennsylvania sedge moving through. There's woods phlox moving through.  But there's this sort of diagonal drifting. This was on a site that had been totally disturbed, so it was starting from scratch so to speak. But it's been really fun to observe this, and even in the three years it's been in existence there's a bit of movement and migration, which is pretty exciting as well.  And this is a little, little garden in New York City in the West Village at New York University. It's called the Native Woodland Garden. And here you can see, again, that the idea of the drifts dominated by different species moving diagonally through the space.  And here we see a bit of that a couple years after planting.  And it was done, actually, 400 years after Henry Hudson arrived in the New York area. And all of the plants that we used in this garden were known to have existed in New York 400 years previously. So that was kind of fun too, exposing at least 10,000 people a day who walked through here to the idea that there are native plant communities and that they were in New York and that you can bring them back.  People will say to me, "Well, native plants are just fine "but you really can't use them in the city "because it's so different." You can use them in the city, if you put them in the right amount of shade and the right amount of moisture. Here we see white wood aster with hay-scented fern in that little garden in the West Village. And many of you have read the books that say, "Watch out for hay-scented fern, it's very aggressive." But in the West Village, you kind of got to be aggressive.  [audience laughing]  Here we see the drifts. They're not extremely clear. I don't like sharp-edged drifts. I like loosely edged drifts. You can see Pennsylvania sedge, the wood aster. There's some Solidago caesia back there and various fern species, again based on that drifting pattern.  And, again, at least 10,000 people a day walk past this. Which is kind of exciting. And some of them stop and have lunch, which is not a bad thing either. And now Storm King, that was mentioned in the introduction. This is Storm King Art Center, a 500-acre sculpture park in Mountainville, New York, which is about an hour and 20 minutes north of Manhattan. And, in contrast with the eighth of an acre I was working with in the West Village, this is a 500-acre site. And, basically, we've planted large, big, sweeping masses of predominately native grass, of native species that are predominately grasses. Increasingly, we're adding more diversity in the new plantings. But anyway, again this points out something you can do in your own backyard. You have a bit of lawn to play croquet on or play Frisbee with the dog or whatever,  but then you can have other vegetation that is taller, creating overall patterns and continuity. This is a planting that was done in May of 2003. Photographed in September of 2003. And the mounds, which had been newly created, were planted with little bluestem, Canada wild rye, Indian grass, switchgrass, and partridge pea, an annual legume which provides kind of a good initial cover.  Here's that same site 13 months later, October, November of 2004.  You can see the beautiful grasses, and if I could shake the screen a bit, you could see them moving in the breeze.  [audience laughing]  Which I-- And here we see that again. So the whole landscape is now this combination of turf where large numbers of people, they had over 125,000 visitors this year, I believe, this last year. 

 And the big sweeps of tall grasses give sculptural form to the landscape at large. But, again, it can be compressed into a small space.  And there is management there. It's not a case of planting it and walking away. And, as many of you in this group would know, fire is maybe the best management for grasslands. The Native American population certainly understood that. And we have been doing it at Storm King for over 10 years now, and it's been extremely beneficial to the native grass plantings. Here's the fire of 2015, photographed by my good colleague and friend Diana Drake, with whom I co-taught at Columbia University. She also took that great photograph that opened with, with the butterfly weed and so forth in Brooklyn Botanic Garden. But anyway, they let me have some fun here and initiate the fire.  And it does get increasingly interesting. And before I show you the next slide, I'm going to mention, I hope very clearly, that at Storm King we have the luxury of having mowed turf around all of our tall grass areas. So we have a built-in fire break, which makes it really very doable. We don't burn when there's more than a 10-mile-per-hour wind. But still one can burn without it getting out of hand. And the next slide might make you think there's some danger there. Oops, that's not it. We're not there yet. There we are.  [audience laughing]  That is so exciting.  [audience laughing]  So much fun. And, again, it is totally safe in this context because we have that wide buffer of mowed lawn which will not burn. Don't try this at home. Yet anyway.  [audience laughing]  And five minutes later it looks like this. That's me with Mike Seaman, who's the landscape manager at Storm King. And it looks like this for a few days, but if there's a rain, then it's all green again. The dark soil warms up and the moisture produces a new cover very quickly. And here we see it. This is literally three weeks after the burn. And we have a lot of switchgrass in this area. It's a poorly drained area that actually used to have a lot of purple loosestrife in it, but there's no loosestrife anymore because of that switchgrass. Switchgrass is a wonderful biofuel and should be promoted much more than corn, but that's another story.  [audience laughing]  And this is the late summer effect with the luminosity of the little bluestem after the spring burn at Storm King Art Center.  And the juxtaposition of Mark di Suvero's sculpture with Indian grass and little bluestem and the switchgrass is pretty neat. Now, a poor photograph but a before picture of the old stone mill at the New York Botanical Garden. The old stone mill was a snuff factory of the P. Lorillard Company in the mid-19th century. And the building had been restored in 2008, nine. And in 2010, New York Botanical Garden asked me if I would do a design for this steep slope down to the Bronx River.  And of course I said yes.  And this was a chance to show, again, the idea of distilling native plant communities into an urban setting which would be attractive to people and still very functional.  And this is the plan that I developed for that. And I'll go back again to the idea that determining the mass space relationship is key, and I keep referring back to your own work and your own place. You need to create that framework before you start naming species to fill in the masses and the spaces. But here we see a design that has a couple of major drifts of gray birch, which is the birch that occurs in old fields at the edge of forests in that part of New York. And they drift diagonally across the site like this. And then there's a grassy river, little bluestem with now some Pennsylvania sedge and wildflowers in it. There was originally, I had to include this stairway here, which, fortunately, we were able to eliminate. So we don't have that. But we have the drifts of birch and then complementary drifts of a dwarf Amelanchier, gray dogwoods, witch hazels, sweet shrubs as we get closer to the river, I mean spicebush, Ilex reticulata, and buttonbush along the river. But the whole scheme here sort of revolves around these directional drifts of vegetation and rivers of space.  And the inspiration for that in a way was this scene in Iowa County, Wisconsin, that had that same spatial relationship.  And here we see that planting. We planted in May, well from May to August of 2010. This was photographed in October of 2010. These are the gray birches drifting across the site. This is the little bluestem and other species drifting through. This is a fern drift, cinnamon fern and interrupted fern and others coming through here. And this, again, is at the end of the first planting season. I still remember when I took this project on, it was a pretty fast track in that I started designing in February and we planted in the summer and this is photographed in October. But Todd Forrest at New York Botanical Garden said, "Just remember, it has to be beautiful on October 6th," which was the opening date. That's about when this was taken.  [audience laughing]  That's a big order.  But here we see it in the second growing season. The birches are growing. The little bluestem is growing. There is a hedge of Myrica pensylvanica along the left side. There's a beautiful bridge over the Bronx River, but the view is created by that space that flows down to it. 

 Here we are again, spring of 2012.  You can see the rivers and drifts. There's too sharp an edge there at the top of the rock rubble, but that's disappearing over time now too.  You probably recognize spiderwort here, after blooming. Really quirky seed heads. Then the grass that dominates this particular zone is purple love grass, Eragrostis spectabilis, which is very much a Wisconsin native as well.  Again that scene.  And little bluestem that is really blue. There's a bit of butterfly weed visible in here. That was kind of fun. We planted plugs and started plants here rather than seeding. And we planted the butterfly weed. One morning there were a few flowers on it, and an hour and a half later there were butterflies coming in. The word got out really quickly.  [audience laughing]  And here's the cinnamon fern drift, which is, over time, getting more diverse. And here's spiderwort in flower.  This is probably 2013, 14 in the cinnamon fern area. I also interspersed about a hundred Turk's cap lilies not knowing that Turk's cap lilies were a favorite food of muskrats.  [audience laughter]  They would come up from the river and lunch on the bulbs of the lilies. But there have been about 20 that have appeared in spite of the muskrats.  And now we're getting into a period, this is like four years in, where certain species are migrating a bit. The blue lobelia that you see here came from the group over there, and that's just fine with me. I like the fact that it will be evolving. In certain areas, in the open spaces, I'm encouraging them to manage to not have tree invasion, but under the birches it's just fine if there's tree invasion in our mass of birches. If, a hundred years from now, those are red and white oaks coming up, over-topping the birches, that's just fine with me too. The idea that it is a dynamic changing landscape.  Lobelia again.  And now to the project that I showed you as the very first slide. This has been a great project in that it sort of has pushed me a little farther in getting natural diversity reintroduced into an urban area. And this is the native flora garden extension at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which I encourage you to all visit when you're in New York. And here we had the good fortune of working with a wonderful botanist, Uli Lorimer, who's on the staff of Brooklyn Botanic Garden. And he and I would go to the pine barrens of New Jersey and Long Island to study the vegetation but also to collect seed for plants to be propagated. So the garden in this case is a representation of several different plant communities of the region. Anyway, we tried to represent five different plants communities of the region. The grasslands that occurred on Long Island. At one point, pre-settlement, there were 40,000 acres of native grassland on Long Island with a lot of the same species that occur in the Midwestern prairies. Of those 40,000 acres, there are now 38 acres. Not 38,000 but 38 acres remaining. So one goal of this project was to incorporate the species from the Long Island grasslands in a much more confined area. But to give them a home again and to make them available for people to see at home, so to speak. So we had the Long Island grasslands, we had the pine barrens of New Jersey and Long Island. We had an oak savanna section and a pine barrens pond and bog complex as well. Anyway, this shows some of the process drawings working up to it, re-grading the site. This is a site that had been lawn with a few scattered trees in it in 2010. The photograph you saw at the beginning was that same site in 2013.  And this is just some of my squiggles early on. Here we're starting to think of plant communities within the site. And here we see the representation of different zones. And there are no clear lines between those plant community groupings. Vegetation is a continuum, as John Curtis will point out in the vegetation of Wisconsin. But anyway, we have, from the upper right-hand corner, we have sort of a rocky zone, a serpentine barrens, and we go into a very xeric or dry prairie, then we go into a dry mesic prairie, then we go into a more mesic prairie. Again, all based on species that occurred naturally on Long Island. And all of the seed for all of the plants that were propagated here were collected locally, Long Island, Staten Island, and the New Jersey pine barrens. And then they were grown by wonderful native plant nursery run by the city of New York. Surprise, surprise. The City Parks Department of New York has the Greenbelt Nursery, and they propagated 15,000 species for, 15,000 plants of 150 species for use in this project. So that was a real luxury to have a truly native garden. 

 And here we see a little bit more detail with plant patterns, trees and shrubs shown in ink, then the color zones. And this gets to be a lot of fen where you're drifting at a big scale and as I've suggested multiple times, you can do these wonderful little drifts in small spaces, but then you can also expand the concept to big areas. And I won't go into names here because we don't have time, but you can pretty much see the carry-over of species. And this is a herbaceous planting plan. The plants were not placed in those little oval forms, but that was sort of the nucleus, and then I personally placed those 15,000 plants on the site, which is a luxury to be able to do and very hard on your back. Actually I learned fairly quickly rather than to bend over and place the plant, I would point to the place where the plant would be placed by somebody else.  [audience laughter]  And this is the first year after planting in the pine barren section of that garden. Again, it's not something that would be appropriate in a lot of places because we purposely created a sand barrens. But if you live in a sandy area, some of this visual quality might be desirable. The characteristic tree species in the pine barrens is the pitch pine. And this leads very quickly to some ideas. If you want to abstract from a native community, first you've got to get to know that native community. And, in Wisconsin, you have a great resource in the form of John Curtis' book, which I just happened to bring along, The Vegetation of Wisconsin, which has wonderful plant community listings, with the dominate species, the prevalent species, and so forth. And, anyway, you have a ready reference if you want to do that. But in doing an abstraction or a stylization of a native community, I like to think of using, first, the dominant species, those which typically are the biggest plants in the community. In this case it would be the pitch pines. But then also using the abundant species. Those that occur frequently. And then a third category that I would call the visual essence species. And in the case of the pine barrens, the prickly pear cactus would be an example of that. Anyway, this is, again, photographs taken by Diana Drake, my colleague at Columbia.  And a bit of backlighting with luminosity. I love the fact that a Brooklyn schoolchild can walk through here and see prickly pear cactus and bird's foot violet and all these things close up...  and begin to appreciate the pine barrens as a whole ecosystem. And here's the wetland of the pine barrens next to the pond. And here's a bridge over calm waters. This is a boardwalk around the pond. And I like the sleekness of the boardwalk relative to the complexity of the surrounding vegetation. I think it's a complementary relationship.  Here we are. There's a council ring here. Sort of a nod to Jens Jensen, who, many of you know, often placed council rings in his landscapes, including those at the clearing. And it's a great gathering place in the Long Island grassland representation.  And we have many of the species that you know here, Bracken fern, little bluestem, butterfly weed, and butterfly weed with monarch butterfly.  And back to the beginning.  In the one minute I have remaining, I'm going to show you that we're still at it. I've had the great good fortune in the last five months of working with Nancy Aten, in the audience again, on a project for the Western New York Land Conservancy, which is a representation of eastern grasslands and savannas, which we presented at a public meeting last Thursday night, and it got enthusiastic reception. But I'm just going to show it ever so briefly. This is that project, and we're still at it. And I really owe a lot to my colleague Nancy for her work on this. It was so much fun to work at that scale. But I, while saying that, I want you to not be intimidated and to feel you can do a lot of this type of thing in a small space, just adapting to the conditions. And I believe that's the end. Thank you very much.  [audience applauding]