The bedrock underlying Manhattan is tenacious enough that many streets north of Harlem and far into the Bronx end in stairways. The precipitous topography outlived efforts to dynamite it.
My block has a few flights of cement pedestrian steps where Pinehurst Street gets too steep to be a road. This stretch of stairs is dominated each April by a large 15 year old Wisteria vine. The Garden club put a sign up to describe it:
"This beautiful wisteria vine came from a 6" plant grown from seed by the late Sona Kunter. It survived the 2001-2002 reconstruction of the steps and garden because Sona stopped by every day to remind the workers to take care of it. Please don't pick the flowers -- they don't survive off the vine!"
Downtown has a rich assortment of venerable vines too, e.g. the vine photo at Matthew Schiavello blog.
Such vines.
(I wish the "reblog" buttons I see around were cross platform. I almost started a tumblr account for it, but then I realized how few people I know blog there much or at all. If we could really reblog anything at a touch of a button, the blogosphere would be more like Facebook, except a lot more worth reading.)
Posted by: Peter | May 06, 2012 at 07:53 PM