We are celebrating 15 years — and counting — of stories that are deeply researched and deeply felt, that build a historical record of what the city has been.
We are celebrating 15 years — and counting — of stories that are deeply researched and deeply felt, that build a historical record of what the city has been.
Some people are very good with plants, attuned to their minute responses to the environment. For those of us who are not, greenery, when we notice it, seems to appear out of nowhere. The extraordinary efforts made by plants and people to survive and thrive is reduced to a pleasant surprise. The Greenbelt Native Plant Center is also easy to miss. Tucked into the edge of Staten Island’s Freshkills Park, it plays an outsize role in the collection, care, and propagation of the city’s “native” plants. Switchgrasses, ferns, and oak trees have developed in and adjusted to our climate, soil, and environmental conditions. These and thousands of other locally evolved and naturally occurring species define the fundamental qualities of our landscapes, and are also the best guides to their preservation as climate changes the equation. Year-round, the Plant Center’s small team of administrative workers, botanists, and seed collectors, seasonal staff, and volunteers collects, protects, propagates, and replants these local species on eroding shorelines and urban forests in New York City’s parkland. Documenting the Center’s reach from collection site to restoration plantings, Morgan Mueller likens the movement of seeds to harder infrastructures that manage flows of trash or traffic with important consequences for the city’s survival. GNPC is not a pretty plant nursery but a robust network that all the same requires our consistent cultivation and care.
Staten Island has the highest percentage of parkland in New York City. Fifty-nine percent of New York’s “greenest borough” is made up of forests, wetlands, and grasslands that form a critical ecological buffer, absorbing storm surges, filtering water, and providing vital habitats for wildlife. Yet 24 years after the closure of Fresh Kills Landfill — once the largest in the world — Staten Island remains closely associated with this enduring symbol of disposability and environmental degradation. Now a public park, Freshkills has become a highly visible symbol of environmental transformation and the complex forces shaping contemporary urban ecology.
Out from the park’s northwest edge, a less prominent force has been quietly shaping the city’s landscapes for decades. The Greenbelt Native Plant Center (GNPC) is New York City’s only municipal native plant nursery and seed bank. More than just a greenhouse operation, it functions as an ecological infrastructure hub. The center cultivates native plant species adapted to New York’s unique urban and coastal environments, which help rebuild wetlands, reforest parklands, and stabilize shorelines in restoration projects across the five boroughs. Through its seed collection, propagation, and large-scale replanting efforts, GNPC plays a critical but overlooked role in strengthening the city’s natural spaces against the pressures of climate change, habitat loss, and urbanization.
GNPC is not a singular site, but a network that moves plant material through parks, wetlands, and reforested spaces across the city. Just as subway tunnels dictate the movement of people and fiber optic cables control the flow of digital information, GNPC’s work determines how native plants move through New York City’s landscapes. Unlike our transportation or waste systems, this flow of plants is rarely recognized as essential infrastructure. The City’s native plant restoration efforts depend on a vast flow of plant material largely unseen by the public, from wild collection sites to the structured spaces of nurseries, greenhouses, and final restoration zones.
In the early 1980s, seeking to address the rapid loss of Staten Island’s natural areas, Parks Department naturalists Richard Lynch and Nancy Slowik proposed creating a dedicated native plant conservation nursery. Their initial efforts focused on rescuing native flora from the unregulated marshes that were being relentlessly developed into commercial properties (from tidal wetlands to Hilton Garden Inn). They propagated the salvaged plants in a makeshift nursery within the Staten Island Greenbelt at High Rock Park. As demand for native species grew across the city, so too did the need for a more permanent and expansive facility.
That opportunity came in 1992. The New York City Department of Sanitation provided funding to purchase a portion of the Mohlenhoff family farm, which had operated on the site since 1911. The farm, originally 32 acres, was known for its innovative practices, including a mechanical watering system and steam-heated greenhouses. As part of a consent agreement related to Fresh Kills, the State Department of Environmental Conservation acquired 16 acres of that site to prevent new residential development near the active landfill — and in doing so, secured a permanent home for the city’s growing native plant program.
The Greenbelt Native Plant Center formally launched at the site in September 1992 under the direction of Howard Haffner. A few years later, Ed Toth joined as director and helped focus and expand the nursery’s efforts. While local ecotype restoration has remained central to GNPC’s mission, over time the nursery has taken on new projects and partnerships in seed banking, native plant production, and ecological restoration. GNPC has provided hundreds of native species to restoration projects across New York City, supporting wetland remediation, forest understory recovery, and coastal stabilization.
A Panicum virgatum (switchgrass) seed collected from a marsh in Great Swamp, New Jersey, may seem insignificant on its own, but — as it is cleaned, stored, propagated, and replanted — becomes part of a broader ecological strategy. Multiplied through GNPC’s nursery system, this single switchgrass seed may help stabilize a coastal edge, reduce erosion, and provide habitat for wildlife. Its presence in a single park is part of a city-wide, even regional, ecological infrastructure that may shape how New York will adapt to climate change, pollution, and habitat loss.
This scalar shift — from an individual seed to a functioning urban ecosystem — is a process essential to the city’s resilience. If the waste system aggregates individual garbage bags into towering landfills that degrade the landscape, the native plant system transforms small, local inputs into living infrastructure that restores it. Unlike conventional urban infrastructure, which is often rigid and engineered, this green infrastructure is adaptive and self-sustaining. More than planting individual trees or grasses, GNPC works to build an ecological framework that ensures New York’s landscapes remain viable and functional for generations to come.
The first step in the native plant cycle is identifying and collecting seeds from wild populations. Ecologists, botanists, and seed collectors who work for GNPC or in partnership with city and state agencies spend months tracking plant populations, documenting growth cycles, and, finally, collecting seeds by hand when the time is right.
Seed collectors return to Idlewild Park in Queens multiple times a year to monitor salt-tolerant grasses like Spartina patens (saltmeadow cordgrass) and Panicum virgatum (switchgrass), which play a crucial role in stabilizing marshland soil. Unlike large-scale agricultural seed collection, this work is highly site-specific, requiring knowledge of microclimates, soil conditions, and plant-pollinator relationships. To preserve genetic diversity, collector teams follow strict protocols: seeds must be harvested from multiple plants across a given population and no more than 20 percent of the seeds can be taken in a single season. Collectors use randomized sampling techniques — intentionally varying which plants they collect from — to avoid favoring specific traits or over-representing any single genetic lineage.
Collected seeds are cataloged and transported back to GNPC’s processing facility, where a team of full-time staff, part-time workers, and seasonal interns process them. They label each batch with detailed metadata — species name, collection location, habitat type, and environmental conditions — to ensure that seeds are matched to the right restoration projects.
Employees and volunteers separate seeds from chaff using mesh screens and specialized machines. They then sort the cleaned seeds based on viability. Some are stored for later use, while others are immediately propagated in GNPC’s greenhouses and nursery beds.
Once collected, seeds enter the nursery phase, which unfolds within the controlled environment in GNPC. Here, dormant seeds begin their transformation into transplant-ready specimens. Germination rates vary widely: some species sprout quickly, while others, like oak trees and milkweed, require cold stratification — a process that simulates winter conditions to trigger growth. The urban nursery environment presents unique challenges: limited space requires frequent rotation of seedlings, and open-air growing houses often attract hungry urban wildlife like foxes, groundhogs, and geese eager to snack on the young plants.
Once seedlings are mature enough for transplanting, they are shipped to restoration sites across the city. The logistics of this process are complex; projects must be carefully timed to align with the growing season. Some plants, such as warm-season grasses and coastal vegetation, are best planted in late spring to early summer, while trees and shrubs are often planted in the cooler months of early spring or late fall to reduce transplant shock.
Extreme weather events, supply chain disruptions, or site access issues can complicate planting schedules. Restoration teams (which often include city workers and nonprofit conservation groups like the Prospect Park Alliance and the Central Park Conservancy) and volunteers handle the final phase of getting plants into the ground. Once planted, they are largely left to establish themselves. Because they are regionally adapted, native species generally require little intervention beyond initial care. However, not every plant will survive; some die-off is expected, and success rates can vary depending on conditions like soil quality, competition, and weather events.
For all the careful planning that goes into seed collection, propagation, and planting, restoration efforts still face logistical and structural challenges beyond GNPC’s control. While native plants are generally more low maintenance than ornamental or non-native species, they still require ongoing oversight throughout their early life cycle. Tasks such as monitoring survival rates, managing invasive competition, supplemental watering during establishment, and ensuring proper seasonal planting remain critical to long-term success.
At Sunset Cove Park in Broad Channel, Queens, GNPC played a key role by supplying salt marsh plants for a major $14 million restoration effort that transformed a derelict marina into a thriving 12.6-acre nature area. The project aimed to restore four-and-a-half acres of salt marsh and seven acres of upland habitat to improve water quality in Jamaica Bay and buffer the coastline against storms. But delays in municipal funding initially stalled the project, creating a mismatch between when the plants were needed and when they could be grown or delivered. A restoration plan that calls for 50,000 Spartina alterniflora (smooth cordgrass) plugs might find that only 30,000 are available at the critical planting window, forcing teams to scale back planting areas, delay installation, or seek alternative sources. Such disruptions ripple outward, impacting not just a single site but the city’s broader network of ecological restoration efforts.
GNPC’s role as a public nursery also comes with restrictions: it cannot sell plants directly to the public. Surplus stock must find a home within city projects or risk going unused. However, in cases where contract plants go unclaimed or reach the end of their viability window, GNPC makes them available for free to community groups, volunteer projects, and public space plantings, so they don’t go to waste. The ability to match supply with demand is further complicated by the long lead time required to grow native plants. While sod and ornamental trees are readily available from commercial nurseries, many restoration species take multiple growing seasons to reach planting maturity.
To grasp the scale of the city’s ecological restoration work is to look beyond visible greenery and toward the infrastructure, seed banks, and deep ecological knowledge that support it. With a slow, deliberate commitment to change how the city relates to its natural systems, GNPC’s plant distribution network has quietly reshaped parts of New York’s ecological landscape, contributing to restoration efforts across all five boroughs. Salt marsh grasses now stabilize shorelines in areas like Sunset Cove; oak and hickory saplings have taken root in reforested sections of Marine Park in Brooklyn; wildflowers bloom across former industrial zones like Bush Terminal Piers Park. Many of these plants began as seeds in GNPC’s greenhouses, their presence a testament to years of cultivation and inter-agency coordination.
Once framed primarily as a biodiversity initiative preventing the loss of rare and threatened species such as green-flowered milkweed, native plants have become central to the City’s long-term environmental planning: a strategy for adapting urban landscapes to the rising sea levels, increased storm surges, and extreme heat brought by intensifying climate change.
After Hurricane Sandy devastated New York’s coastal edges in 2012 — eroding dunes, inundating wetlands, and wiping out entire sections of native vegetation — GNPC played an essential part in the city’s recovery efforts. They supplied coastal-adapted species to projects aimed at stabilizing shorelines and restoring salt marshes, like smooth cordgrass and switchgrass, which actively reduce erosion, absorb wave energy, and improve water quality. These GNPC-grown native grasses were used to rebuild the marshland buffer lost to storm damage at Sunset Cove Park. The increasing frequency of summer droughts has made the establishment of drought-tolerant tree and grass species a high priority for urban forestry initiatives. GNPC now provides native tree species, such as Quercus rubra (northern red oak) and Carya ovata (shagbark hickory), to sites such as Forest Park in Queens, with the expectation that they will withstand higher temperatures and erratic rainfall patterns in the coming decades.
As the climate changes, some native species may struggle to survive in highly urbanized environments where extreme heat, altered soil chemistry, and pollution create conditions very different from historical ecosystems. Although native plants are the foundation of New York City’s ecological restoration strategy, some ecologists argue that non-native species have a role to play in climate resilience. GNPC remains dedicated to conserving native species, ensuring that the city’s ecosystems retain their historical integrity and biodiversity. However, it is evolving to balance this commitment with forward-thinking investments in climate adaptation, securing the ecological future of New York City’s green spaces.
GNPC has initiated exploration into “assisted migration strategies,” which offer a potential middle ground between strict native-plant policies and climate-adaptive landscaping. Partnering with Dr. Myla Aronson of the Aronson Lab for Urban Ecological Studies at Rutgers University, GNPC is testing whether southern ecotypes of species native to New York City — such as Liquidambar styraciflua (sweetgum) and Taxodium distichum (bald cypress) — can thrive as New York’s climate changes. These controlled trials aim to determine if shifting plant populations northward can preserve genetic diversity while improving long-term resilience to warming temperatures.
For decades, the idea of a global seed vault has been seen as the ultimate safeguard against ecological collapse. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, an underground repository preserving the world’s most critical crop and plant species, was conceived as a last resort against biodiversity loss due to war or natural disasters. In the early 2000s, GNPC briefly collaborated with the Millennium Seed Bank Project in England, contributing seed collections from 100 native plant species growing within a 75-mile radius of New York City. At the time, the vision was expansive: New York would establish its own long-term seed storage facility, securing a genetic insurance policy against future ecological degradation.
But over time, priorities shifted. Seed banking remains a part of GNPC’s work, but the focus has moved away from static storage toward a dynamic, process-based model. Seeds, like the ecosystems they belong to, are not inert artifacts to be locked away. They must be continually regenerated, grown, and reintroduced into the landscape. Long-term storage is costly and requires constant monitoring. Without active propagation, seeds lose viability. GNPC’s model is built on continuous renewal, ensuring that native plant populations are not just preserved but actively sustained through replanting and restoration.
This shift reflects a larger evolution in conservation thinking: restoration is not about recreating the past, but about building resilience for the future. GNPC’s role is not to stockpile plant genetics for an unknown future crisis but to participate in an ongoing system of ecological maintenance that requires investment not just in seeds, but in the infrastructure, labor, and expertise that keep them in circulation.
The future of the Greenbelt Native Plant Center, like the landscapes it supports, depends on its ability to remain adaptive. Just as the Fresh Kills Landfill is being reimagined as parkland, GNPC’s work represents a remaking of urban nature as central to the city’s future. Public attention often focuses on large-scale infrastructure projects such as coastal resiliency barriers, stormwater management systems, and engineered wetlands. But the work of maintaining and restoring living systems is equally vital. It requires long-term investment and public support.
All photos copyright Morgan Mueller
The views expressed here are those of the authors only and do not reflect the position of The Architectural League of New York.
