The Fen

I have been walking in the woods as long as I can remember. As a child, I especially loved swamps, the places that teem with life and death. I saw beauty in the decay and in the prehistoric plants that grew from the muck. I admire plants’ unwavering desire to survive and thrive, their ‘fuck-it-game-on’ attitude. Grasses squeezing through cracks on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway never cease to amaze me. 

Plants give me hope and seeds hold that hope until the time is right. I watched them grow into my mom’s backyard garden; into rooftop watermelon plots in Los Angeles started from seed saved by a roadside vendor; into epic school gardens at the Brooklyn New School, where I was an educator; into Edgemere Farm, a transformational urban farm I co-founded in Far Rockaway; and, finally, here, into The Fen, where I have come home to the swamp.  

When I arrived in the northwest corner of Connecticut in 2009, the time was right for me to grow a longtime dream; to celebrate plants and their seeds. My family and I began to tend a property situated on the unceded land of the Schaghticoke, who lived in this region for generations before colonization. The land had been put through the wringer by European settlers. They clear-cut timber—first for lumber, a second time for charcoal—then grazed sheep and cattle. At every stage, they relentlessly plowed. Indigenous knowledge had been lost or simply disregarded and, combined with bad advice from the Department of Agriculture, this had resulted in a kind of bankruptcy of the land. The natural biodiversity was buried under years of neglect or banished entirely.

As I peeled back the layers of overgrowth  (a who’s who of introduced species, such as Privet, Multiflora Rose, Japanese Barberry) what emerged was a world of wonders that had lain dormant: skunk cabbage, columbine, bloodroot, trillium, trout lily, Dutchman’s breeches, spicebush, grass of Parnassus. In the process of removing the non-native species, however, I was left with plenty of bare ground. Local nurseries did not carry many of the plants I was seeing reemerge, nor did they offer other native species that had vanished from the land. Delving deeper into the world of native plants, I saw there was a need for seed; specifically, the seed of plants that belong here in my neck of the woods. 

As an extension of my own restoration project, it made sense to become a seed resource, a local place for the community to learn about saving the seed of plants that naturally occur right under our feet. At The Fen, we encourage you to plant those seeds, or seedlings from those seeds, and turn your patch of home into a thriving habitat for our native flora and fauna. They are so desperately in need of land that resembles the one with which they evolved.