Rashid Poulson is the Director of Horticulture at Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation. His career began as a Million Trees Training Program alumni in NYC, where he studied and practiced arboriculture, urban landscape design, and ecological restoration. His current role as Director focuses on the management, training, and development of the Horticulture Staff; and education about the park’s horticulture through tours, presentations, and community engagement. Still, he guides and participates in work such as the management of the Pier 5 Berm, allowing him to maintain a connection with the staff, community, and the landscape he has been connected to for over a decade.
WLA recently interviewed Rashid (via email) about Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation about landscape, maintenance, and what landscape architects can learn from horticulturalists.
WLA: What is your role at Brooklyn Bridge Park, and how has it evolved over your time there?
Rashid: My time as the Director of Horticulture at Brooklyn Bridge Park (BBP) began in October of 2022. As overseer of the department, I focus on supporting the many ideas of the skilled and knowledgeable team we have here, which is comprised of a Deputy Director, over a dozen Gardeners, a Groundskeeper, an Arborist, a Horticulturist, 2 supervisors, and by the time of this release, 3 interns, bringing this team to a total of 25. My current role ranges from determining the best approaches to using our generous budget, to fostering a continued relationship with Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates Inc (MVVA), the park’s design firm. My favorite parts of my work here are directly supporting the maintenance of the Pier 5 & Pier 3 sound berms and sharing the stories of the park’s horticulture operations through tours and other speaking engagements similar to this one. Going back, my journey at BBP began as a Seasonal Gardener in 2012. For 2 years, I would maintain the park’s 3 intensive green roofs on Pier 1, Pier 5, and Pier 6. My work on the green roofs mostly revolved around keeping them thoroughly weeded and editing a shrub palette of Forsythia sp, Rhus aromatica, Comptonia peregrina, and Cotinus coggygria, to name a few. In 2014, I became a full-time gardener and was additionally assigned to the Pier 1 Fresh Water Wetlands as a part of my zone. Time spent in the wetlands focused on managing out invasive species like phragmites and keeping intentional plants in check, such as Typha spp., and Scirpus validus. My time within the wetlands was some of my fondest. Remembering moments like a baby mallard accidentally imprinting on me or my first RedTail Hawk sighting, with sharp eyes staring down at me from merely 10 feet above, perched on a sumac. Alongside tending to my gardening responsibilities, I would be promoted to Horticulture Supervisor in 2015 and began shifting gears to plan and support the daily operations of the horticulture staff. Being a supervisor at that time meant helping to maximize the efficiency of the team by building out protocols and scheduling group projects (or blitzes, as we like to call them) to tackle large challenges together. In 2018 I would be promoted again to Deputy Director of Horticulture. My approach to management was still growing at that time and would evolve further to create a new focus towards “ethical management”. For me, this means to change the paradigm on how labor forces are treated and respected as human beings. I am always thinking of equitable ways to support individual growth, team growth, and skill building while still meeting our goals as a department. One of the most important themes in this department is for it to develop somewhat democratically over time by receiving and finding the best ways to implement feedback from this team. We’ve always wanted this team to feel like a community that is on the same mission.
WLA: How would you describe the landscape of Brooklyn Bridge Park?
Rashid: The immediate description that comes to mind when thinking of our Park’s landscape is innovative, diverse, and constantly evolving to maximize its ecological functionality. The Horticulture department at BBP has a deep connection with Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates Inc (MVVA). This allows us to learn together about plant habits and successes here towards improving plant species longevity with the landscape, expanding upon an already diverse palette, and rethinking maintenance of what is now the vision for the modern park landscape in the nation. MVVA’s heavy utilization of resilient native plant choices is what set the tone for how the park would be managed ecologically; and considering that BBP was built in phases, I have witnessed firsthand how both BBP’s and MVVA’s plant selections strategies have adapted from shared learnings within the park.
WLA: What is the maintenance approach at Brooklyn Bridge Park?
Rashid: Maintenance is always changing here; we hold space for our high performing plants while adding in new species that usually serve several purposes. Our approach is described as adaptive management. This is how we navigate successional changes in the park’s original plant palette of full sun, quick growing trees, and shrubs like Sumac, Lindera, Honey locust, Salix and Sassafras; and incorporate new species into the understory plantings like Carex, Diarvella, Fothergilla and Tiarella; helping gardens function as ecological habitats. We seek species that can thrive in the deeper shade of the parks consistently expanding canopy, plants whose root systems will hold the ground on the complicated slopes of engineered sandy soils, plants that can handle the disturbance and environmental conditions of the city, and most importantly, provide an ecological resource for present park wildlife and species we would hope to encourage visitation from over time. Our stewardship of the parks’ landscapes goes outside the idea of maintenance and keeping gardens tidy or beautiful. Gardens here are meant to feel a little wild and replicate the nature world but within the urban environment. Time is not solely spent laboring in the gardens, we emphasize research as a part of the work, creating a deeper understanding of the floral and faunal relationships at hand, and implementing maintenance approaches that create minimal disturbance to the gardens, thus increasing their viability as habitat for species like migrating and overwinter birds.
WLA: Do you see the difference between maintenance and care for the landscape?
Rashid: These two words can go hand in hand but can also be divided based on the type of tasks or overarching goals. For me, garden maintenance implies the thought of keeping a garden static or preserving the vision of its as-built design in perpetuity. An example of this can be keeping intentional plants at bay by limiting their proliferation to hold the original design aesthetics they offer. Care can be both the broad vision of a landscape’s current performance and its long-term projections; it can also be a one-on-one relationship with individual plant specimens. Let’s consider how a shrub is pruned at the park, say Lindera benzoin, maintenance can center around pruning this shrub back to keep it off paths which maintains safety for the public, but care involves an understanding of that plant’s natural habit, comparing that information with how it is performing in a landscape in relation to the other plants around it, and making tactile decisions that will preserve that plants functionality while complimenting how it reads aesthetically; and drafting a plan that will help retain, and at times, increase its viability to play an important role as part of the larger habitat.
WLA: Have you used animals to maintain Brooklyn Bridge Park?
Rashid: Back in 2016, we had goats at the park as a trial to manage (eat) some of the invasive plant populations that were overwhelming the Pier 3 Berm. The goats were 4 siblings, named Minnie, Eyebrows, Horatio, and Hector, who came from Larry Cihanek of Green Goats. Originally, when our berm was erected, it was seeded with a blend of fescues and warm-season grasses, but like any landscape, unintentional and aggressive plant species made their way in. The pressure from these weeds like bindweed, burdock, thistle, and vetch were abundant, preventing many of the intentional grasses from establishing themselves. And considering that our horticulture operations manage the park organically, approaches like the use of herbicides are completely off the table. Pier 3 Berm (one of three) is about 45’ tall and over 900’ feet long, equating to about 2 acres of landscape to manage. And with limitations on staffing at that time, we tried an array of methods to manage the berms, from team blitzes to cut and hand pull weeds, trialing a robotic mower used frequently on DOT highways, but the goats would prove to be an effective way to manage these conditions because they target broadleaf plants like burdocks and thistles, while ignoring the intentional grass palette. Also, since they are goats, they were more than capable of traversing the challenging slopes, which can wear on your body when actively gardening on the berm. Unfortunately, the goats were only a trial because we could not provide a permanent shelter or space to rove the entire berm while effectively keeping interactions with the goats and the curious public limited. Maybe one day we will see goats back at Brooklyn Bridge Park; they were certainly an effective and sustainable way to approach this particular park challenge. Since then, we have moved on to another approach to managing undesirable plants on the berm: solarization. For the last 5 years, in late spring, we have scalped large sections of the berm, hand-pulled taproots of problematic plants, and sealed off scalped areas with a plastic fill, like the ones used in agriculture. This film cooks the invasive seed bank over the summer, and in early fall, we remove the plastic fill, and install a sod mix of fescues that have totally reclaimed most of the berms areas where weed pressures are the highest.
WLA: Brooklyn Bridge Park is located in New York, which has a changeable climate; how does the climate impact your maintenance regime?
Rashid: Everyone, whether working within the landscape or not, experiences the challenges of climate change. For us, the most impactful condition to managing the land through is when we are faced with severe heat and droughts, as well as the heavy volume of rainfall. Last year we experienced an almost 60% increase in annual rainfall. And specifically in September of 2023, we had nearly triple the amount of rainfall we’ve seen in previous seasons. These damps conditions can lead to potential issues for our densely planted trees and shrubs through the park because they allow for the cultivation of a fungal environment that can infect certain species of trees and shrubs that are be vulnerable to pathogens like Powdery Mildew, Fusarium Wilt and others. Again, since the horticulture operations at BBP rely strictly on organic methods and/or mechanical processes to resolve plant health care issues, this influences us to utilize pruning practices that allow for more natural airflow between neighboring woody plants to reduce such risks. The goals of these pruning operations can be twofold because a heavy volume of pruning can also increase the available light to the ground plane, which is now lined with part to full shade plants due to our successional management plans. So, all pruning is completed with mindful perspectives and goals that consider the impact on all garden elements from top to bottom. Thinking about the heat and droughts of summer and the fact that much of the park’s landscapes are built on old industrial shipping piers with a limited loading capacity, meaning soil profiles of certain garden beds can be fairly shallow. In some ways, our outboard piers can be viewed as intensive green roof systems. Thankfully, the park is lined with a vast irrigation system. Of course, all park lawns have the standard of overhead rotary sprinklers; but additionally, most garden beds throughout the park have a drip irrigation system, These sets of parallel lines of irrigation are buried a few inches below ground and are spaced every 12 to 18 inches apart. With this, we are able to support the plantings should we run into a long dry spell. All that said these systems aren’t meant to last forever and are a supplemental means to maintaining soil moisture. We try our best to ween our plants off supplemental irrigation once plants are established and lead them towards independence over many years. Careful use of the irrigation systems will not only have a longer-term benefit to the plants as the adapt to the realities of climate change, it will also bring us closer to a more sustainable world class park.
WLA: What are the key ideas that landscape architects can learn from horticulturalists?
Rashid: I have been fortunate to work with dozens of gardeners over the last 12 years at BBP. Gardeners here are the drivers of the changes we see in the landscape. What I think landscape architects can learn from our experiences here at BBP is that when we design or rethink the direction of a landscape, we should always go beyond the concept of right plant, right place. Our approaches to species selection should of course, utilize resilient plant species that can thrive in their intended environment, but before that, there should be an analysis of the existing and or struggling local wildlife populations and aim for a planting palette that is situated around providing long term food resources and shelter that can be offered by native plants and more importantly specialized host plant. It is my hope that the future of landscape design will transform to the right purpose, right plant, right place, and move away from choices that are strictly influenced by the human experience and relationship with green spaces. Let’s reverse engineer the processes so that landscape design, which is traditionally shaped by what is appealing to visitors, owners, or designers, starts by looking back to those historical stories to understand the damage of human practices or the establishment of cityscapes; and seek to revitalize our systems for the benefit of all walks of life, while still providing an enriching experience for people.
Thank you to Rashid for taking the time to answer our questions, it is enlightening to learn about horticulture at Brooklyn Bridge Park. We hope you enjoyed reading this profile. Editor – Damian Holmes
Image Credits: Rashid Profile Image (Courtesy of Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation); All other image credits as captioned.
