This podcast episode delves into the inspiring story behind the Daffodil Project, a community-driven initiative that has resulted in the planting of over 12 million daffodil bulbs across New York City since its inception in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy.

Sally Flatman speaks with Constance Casey who was working for the New York Parks Department when the gift of one million daffodil bulbs , was given to the city by Hans van Waardenburg and the city of Rotterdam following on from the attack on the World Trade Centre.

That Autumn as the community took on the task of planting the bulbs, they were creating "a ribbon of yellow around the island of Manhattan" that would bloom the following Spring.

Adam Ganser, the Executive Director of New Yorkers for Parks, joins the conversation to discuss the ongoing efforts to maintain and expand this initiative, emphasising the importance of community involvement and equitable access to parks. The episode highlights not only the significance of the daffodil project as a living memorial but also the broader impact of green spaces on public health and community wellbeing.

Of course we also learn how to grow the plant ourselves though as Adam assures us: "its hard to screw it up"!

Our Plant Stories is back and once again we will be sharing stories about plants.

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Our Plant Stories is presented and produced by Sally Flatman

The music is Fade to Black by Howard Levy

Takeaways:

• The Daffodil Project began as a response to the tragedy of 9/11, aiming to bring beauty and hope to New York City.
• Every fall, thousands of volunteers participate in planting daffodil bulbs.
• The project has distributed around 12 to 13 million daffodil bulbs over 23 years, making it a significant and beloved initiative.
• Daffodils are hardy and easy to grow, making them accessible for both new and experienced gardeners alike.
• The initiative highlights the importance of parks and open spaces in urban areas, fostering a sense of community.
• New Yorkers for Parks advocates for equitable funding for parks, ensuring all neighbourhoods have access to green spaces.

Mentioned in this episode:

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Welcome back to Our Plant Stories series three. It's lovely to be back with you and if you're new here, hi.

It's great to have you listening and if you like what you hear, then there's another 40 odd stories back in series one and two. I love stories, finding them, listening to them and recording them. And I also love plants. So this is a podcast where those two joys combine.

We start with the story, but then I find someone who knows about that plant, shares the passion so we can have a conversation, learn more. And that leads us to the final section of the podcast, how to grow it. I find someone's passion for a plant can be infectious.

So leaving the podcast armed with the knowledge to have a go ourselves is important to me too. Today I'd like to transport you to a city.

This is part of the Daffodil program.

How do I get the bulbs from here to there?

How many did you get again?

550 for my friend and 200 for me.

I think something like that.

It's autumn and we're in New York and this lady is collecting 750 bulbs. That is 750 daffodil bulbs to plant in her neighborhood. And there's a queue of people here to collect bulbs and where are they planting them?

So I'm going to plant up in Inwood Hill park at the top of the island. Tree beds in the neighborhood from my building. Also we're going to be planting at.

Montefiore Square park in West Harlem.

Washington Square Village.

Yeah.

By NYU.

I got sunshine. How many?

And this happens every year?

I thought you were going to say like, like a pallet. Yeah, like 5,000.

There's a goal. What's your motivation?

But where did it all start?

I came across this plant story when I was reading a book written by Constance Casey, a retired newspaper editor, plant lover, former full time assistant gardener in the New York Parks Department. Her book Cultivating is an appreciation of some common plants. And the one on page 52, the daffodil really stopped me in my tracks.

Constance had been a part of the story of planting 1 million daffodils in New York. And it all goes back to 9/11 and the attack on the World Trade Center.

I woke up that morning and where I lived, which was in the far north of Manhattan island, and I didn't have TV on. And I walked over to First Avenue and looked south and I couldn't see the buildings, but I saw this billowing smoke.

First I thought it was a building fire and then people thought it was a stray, small airplane and it was very hard to take in. And then you learn that 2,977 people died.

Around the world. We were watching those images.

Lynden Miller, a woman who restores parks, a former artist who devotes her life to restoring parks, got a phone call from a Dutch bulb grower who had just seen on TV the burning, crumbling World Trade center powers. And he said, what can I do to help? And being Dutch, he said, I can send you some tulips.

And Lynden Miller, who is a very practical person, said, tulips will get eaten by rats. As we well know, those of us who garden in the New York City Park Department.

So daffodils appear, not natural, but naturalised all over the US And Lyndon said, send daffodils.

The other thing is that daffodils, the yellow daffodils, which is what we mainly got, a million of them in boxes, they multiply and they're still multiplying, which is quite wonderful. And what I love about Mr. Van Waardenburg's gesture was that it was so fast, spontaneous, not sentimental. I'm looking right now at my tv, Lyndon.

And he saw a horror. And his response was, some people might find this too light. But his response was, let me give you some beauty and colour in years to come.

And they had this immediate sympathy.

It's also flowers often are planted in that way as some sort of hope as well, aren't they?

Yes, because there was this moment when I was in sort of day 50 of planting daffodil bulbs in the several parks. I took care of that. I had so many daffodil bulbs, I had to find extra spaces.

And I was working in a bed, barely deserves the name, alongside a basketball court between Second Avenue traffic and a basketball court about this, about 6ft wide. And a woman stopped. This was about a month after the World Trade center horror. A woman stopped and said, what are you doing?

And because it looked, you know, it looked as if I was taking onions out of a sack, you know, to someone who doesn't garden and sticking them six inches in the ground. And I said, I'm planning daffodils. Wait five months and they'll be up. And she said, will we be here then?

It was a time of anxiety as she was demonstrating. But it also was a time when people spoke to each other and were a little more. I wouldn't call New Yorkers ever tender, but a little more. Less raspy.

And so this has continued.

The Parks commissioner at the time, a very nice man named Adrian Benepe, said what he pictured was, quote, "a ribbon of yellow around the island of Manhattan".

And the place where you can see this, which I would tell English visitors who rent a car, there's a very busy road called the west side highway that goes up the Hudson river side of Manhattan. And there you do see, popping up amidst the roadside weeds, many daffodils in April. And yellow, which most of the bulbs were the classic King Alfred.

Yellow is the colour that you see most easily from a distance. Did you know that? It's what pops out of the landscape. If they were white daffodils, they would just blend in.

There was also a community aspect to the bulb planting.

The bulbs were given out to libraries, schools, every park. And I was in one rather grand neighborhood in an area with cherry trees with fairly loose soil. And a group had been organized to come plant.

And it was mainly adults taking videos of their adorable children not digging deep enough holes. And I explained, I said, here's the bulb. It looks like an onion. You can see their little roots here. And it's very hard to make a mistake.

The roots go down and the little pointy part goes up. Well, because people were so busy videoing their adorable children, they didn't double check. And I really said, you know, the depth of my trowel.

And when it was all over, there were little bits of upside down bulbs sticking up and looking at me. I mean, what I did was go around and replant them. But I asked Lynden Miller what she did, and she said she ordered a truckload of compost over it.

And daffodils will actually come up if planted upside down. Most bulbs will go down, figure it out, and come around and go up. But it takes energy to figure that out.

Do you remember your reaction when they came up in April?

The following April, I think I made a special trip to the little strip next to the basketball court, where I also couldn't water there because all the kids playing basketball put their backpacks across the fence. And if I watered, the cursing was loud. I will go look the next spring at this little place.

It's interesting. I did an episode with Lally Snow, who'd written a book on war gardens. And it is interesting, isn't it, that plants can, you know, offer some solace?

You're right

In some ways, you know, when you look at the enormity of what had happened, where did daffodils fit into that picture? And yet that spontaneous act of empathy, kindness with something that they knew well and knew would give pleasure, was very special.

A gift.

Do you think people in New York are aware of this now, you know, these years after?

I honestly don't know. And so many people you see in the parks now are zipping along the bike path on their motorized bikes, terrifying pedestrians.

What I love to see is people going to a bench in a park and reading something or just sitting there. And I took care of a park on the east river, very small, but it had about six benches and a bed in the middle with some roses.

And in all the shady parts, hostas and daffodils. And people would come in late February or March and sit on the bench and turn their faces up to the sun.

The wonderful thing about this gift was that it didn't just end after one year. It has continued every year since that tragedy. Adam Ganser is the current Executive Director of New Yorkers for Parks.

He describes himself as someone who is interested in what parks and open spaces can do for those of us who live in the city. For 10 years, he was also part of the team on the New York High Line.

I brought him and Constance Casey together and began by asking Adam if he could describe New Yorkers for Parks.

For those of us who don't know the organization, absolutely. We are a not for profit, independent organisation in New York City focused on New York City. We've been around for over 100 years and we do research, advocacy and programming in our city's parks.

Our primary goal is to make sure that parks across the city have adequate funding. And that means that the agency Parks Department has adequate funding to operate and maintain our city's parks.

And as is often the case, that conversation really boils down to equity in New York City. Our park system is unfortunately quite inequitable and we're wanting to make a difference in turning that around for the future with a bigger vision for parks for all New Yorkers.

And, and that conversation has got a lot broader over the last 20 years to include discussions around climate change, economic development and public health.

Roughly how many parks are we talking about?

You know, there's 20,000 acres of natural areas that the Parks Department takes care of. So it's a huge, huge portfolio. Roughly 30,000 total acres of land in the city. 14% of the city is operated and maintained by the Parks Department.

Wow, that sounds like a huge amount of space when you put it that way.

Yeah, it's. It's a. It's an incredible task, and I always look at it as an incredible opportunity to really change the face of the city. If our parks are maintained, if we're aggressively and towards the future on what these spaces should be for New Yorkers. The city can be on the forefront on so many issues, and that's where we're really pushing.

Constance, I know you had some questions for Adam. Looking back to what you did and what's gone since.

Adam's part of the story is the continuing.

My part of the story was the first year with this incredibly generous spontaneous present and the Park Service leaping in to get the bulbs in the ground. But my question would be, why continue it and how do you continue it? Who's paying?

Well, from the moment of that first sort of extraordinary gift where we partnered with the Parks Department, our board member Lyndon Miller was really the face of that project, the Daffodil project, from that first year going forward, we have been raising money every year to buy daffodil bulbs ever since that first large donation.

So we really work with a lot of partner corporate partners and philanthropic folks to raise the money each year to give away daffodil bulbs every year in the fall. And it's, you know, it's a beloved program. Talk about it now as the largest volunteer program in the city's history.

So many people participate year after year, but it's grown every year as well. In all, I think we're up to around 12 or 13 million bulbs distributed over the 20 some years of the project. They're in every corner of the city.

And it really is, you know, as time goes on, the project becomes. It blossoms, and the. The narrative around it also becomes more.

And so while it still remains living memorial to 9/11 for us, it's also become one of the primary ways that we're interacting directly with the public across the city to understand what's important for them, what our work means to them, and where we should be tailoring our work. And this year, we've added a couple of things to the project.

We're partnering with local organisations in each part of the city where we do these large distributions to highlight specific advocacy projects that are sort of big visions for those areas of the city. And we're also giving away pollinators now.

So we're trying to make the project sort of more in tune with the discussion around climate and sustainability, while maintaining a lot of the joy that comes out of simply picking up and planting daffodil bulbs.

So how many people get involved every year?

It's an enormous amount.

And we don't, unfortunately, we don't see everybody who's involved, but we open up registration online in usually in August, and we get thousands of people that register for the bulbs. I'd say three to five thousand people register, and then at least that many come to pick up the bulbs.

And when they take them back to their neighborhoods, they're usually working with tens to hundreds of people to plant the bulbs. So the multiplier effect gets to be pretty insane.

We feel like there's probably 50,000 people a year that are participating in one way or another with this project.

You could never have thought, Constance, when you did that first planting of the bulbs, could you, that it would still be going strong, if not stronger, 23 years later.

Actually, some of this I see listening is the force of Lynder Miller, who is a woman who was an artist and became upset about one park across the street from her being poorly maintained. And when it could be beautiful, she started that. And then she began working other places.

And she had the personal relationship with Hans van Waardenburg and the other guys whom she used and had ordered thousands and thousands of bulbs from already. And Adam mentioned equity. And I had an interesting one, of the things I loved about being in a parks uniform out doing stuff was people responding, usually in a cheerful way, and what are you doing? And what's it about?

And I was working in an east side park, and a woman who probably worked in one of the hospitals nearby came walking by and said, what are you doing? I said, I'm planning daffodil bulbs. And she said, nobody does that in my neighbourhood. She said in very angry voice.

And I said, well, what park is in your neighbourhood? And she said, Marcus Garvey. And I said, I will bring some bulbs to your park.

Yeah, it's a really interesting.

She had a false impression because I bet you had bulbs up the wazoo in Marcus Garvey.

Well, what we've really been trying to do, particularly over the last couple of years, is when we have a lot of data around who is planting, because when folks register for this, they're entering their address, they're entering the place where they're going to plant parks, the bulbs.

And we realised that, you know, the six distributions that we're doing around the city might not be the most convenient place for the areas of the city that we want to make sure are getting access to these bulbs. So we've done much more outreach to those communities. And then we've added a distribution in Harlem, which is much more convenient, and in the Bronx, which is much more convenient for people who live in those areas to participate. But that really is the goal of the project.

It's not to make, you know, wealthy neighborhoods beautiful with daffodils, although I love that they do it. It's to give the opportunity to neighborhoods and communities across the city to do the same thing. And it's a real equalizer, getting people on their knees, putting their hands in the dirt, planting something, and then seeing it sprout and grow in the spring. Everybody finds joy in it.

I'm interested also that that vision going forward. You talked about, the pollinators. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Yeah, I think that there's, you know, when I look at describing earlier, the kind of this is corporate speak, but the distribution channels that we've set up through this over the many, many years, there are so many people that are doing this year after year.

And there's been a move generally in the horticulture world to be using native species and native plants, plants that serve a purpose beyond being decorative, and that is coincided with green roofs and beehives and you name it. And just looking at the thousands of people that are participating in this project, we thought we could be having an even bigger impact.

So this was the first year we piloted it, and it was really, really popular. People just loved it. So our goal is to really expand the distribution of pollinators across the city and. And make it, make it itself its own sort of event.

And we're starting to try to dig into data on what the impact would be for the city, what the environmental impact would be to have 50,000 people planting pollinators across the city. So we're interested in seeing what that looks like.

So your volunteers would carry a little bag of bees?

No, we'll leave the bees up to nature. The pollinating flowers are really just wildflowers. So we're giving away seeds.

Seed packets that we get from a pollinator seed provider in Staten Island. And this year, we were able to give little packets to everybody that came. So it was really interesting to see people's reaction to it.

This sounds so Cheerful and wonderful. And you're actually making my life in New York City more vivid, colorful, full of bees. But there must be things that discourage you.

It's a city with a lot of cement. It's a city where things don't get watered enough. Daffodils are such a sunny, hopeful, bright thing.

But I'm wondering about the other side of New Yorkers for parks, of what you have to struggle with.

You know, our, our primary goal right now is really focusing on the city's funding of parks.

And you know, what you see over the last 20, 25 years is administrations that have invested heavily in new parks and in new parks where there is private funding to maintain those parks. But there really hasn't been a move to increase funding for operations and maintenance for the many, many parks that I spoke about earlier.

And so if you aren't maintaining the city's parks, they very quickly fall into disrepair.

There's an aspect of public safety that goes along with that that is really important and ultimately quality of life for New Yorkers, no matter where you live.

So again, our focus is really on ensuring that the park's budget is increased each year, is prioritized each year, and is safe from one year to the next. And that's been a very long battle, but one that we'll never give up.

And it's easy to get deterred because there's always a moment where a mayor feels like the Parks Department should get cut because it's the easiest agency to cut.

But that in large part is why we exist, to push back, to rally New Yorkers across the city to push back and to make sure that every elected leader understands how important parks are to every single New Yorker.

Do you know of any other cities that have any kind of similar volunteering program to plant something like this? Because it feels quite unique.

It is unique. I think there's a volunteer around parks in New York City. There's a volunteer spirit that I think comes out of necessity and isn't paralleled in any other cities. And I think you're looking back at the 70s and 80s when the fiscal crisis was very real and the city was about to file for bankruptcy.

The Parks Department was in tatters, and parks across the city were reflecting the condition of the agency. And that included parks like Prospect park and Central park, where, you know, they were a disaster.

And it was at that moment that so many New Yorkers started galvanising in volunteer efforts.

And some of those volunteer efforts have developed into full on institutions like the Central park conservancy and some of them remain, you know, a group of neighbours that gets together to clean up their parks. But there's something like 500,000 volunteer events across the city in their city's parks.

You don't see people getting together to volunteer to take out trash or fix roads. And it's because parks are so beloved and so important in a city as dense as New York is that you see that type of volunteer activity.

And it's a bittersweet thing, fantastic to see people investing in their communities and in their parks. But the downside is they're doing it because they have to, because the city isn't investing the money it should in our city's public spaces.

And the city has come to rely on those volunteers, which I think is, again, that's the crux of the situation. You can get a lot from volunteers, but it's no substitute for public funding and professional people out in the field doing the work.

So obviously, we champion volunteerism, but we also want to make sure that the mayor and electeds understand that that's no replacement for funding from, at the city level.

Now, as I mentioned at the start of the episode, we always end by learning how to grow the plant in the story. And Constance, as a listener to the podcast, knows this.

Sally likes to think also about the actual physical plant. And it has just occurred to me, with all this distribution and handing out, that a daffodil bulb is a wonderfully unfussy thing.

Sometimes they get a little mildewy on them, but almost always it's light, it's condensed in a nice way. It's sort of pretty with these beautiful glossy chestnuts skins. And you can, and they're light, you can carry, I have had a hundred in a bag or in a backpack with ease. So I think.

And then, of course, the daffodils, like every plant, want to take over the world and they make the little bulblets and drop them all over the place and you get a spread.

I was going to ask you actually, in terms of we always do have a how to grow section. And I, I mean, are there any hints or tips that you've discovered along the way of planting a million and, or several more than a million?

Now, Adam, in your case, as you've been there, of these bulbs, anything you would, you would say is a, is a top tip for planting, you know.

The irony is that it's a, it's a hardy plant, like you can, it's hard to screw it up. That's what's so great about it. You really just have to get it in the ground in the fall before the ground freezes and then hope for the best.

And then they keep coming back. But going back to what Constance was saying, I think what's great about it is they're about this big.

They're about the size of a golf ball, say, which means when you get them, you kind of feel they're too big to not do right. You sort of feel like they're there. Oh, I got these. I can't avoid it.

I got to go plant these bulbs because otherwise they're going to be sitting here in my apartment or whatever. But I think that there's, there's something to that, that that makes people follow through. And so you just see them popping up.

Before I took this job, I couldn't have told you a thing about a daffodil. But now when I drive around in the spring, you know, if I'm walking or in a cab, they're everywhere. And you're like, oh, my God, this is amazing.

So many people doing this.

I would love to see photographs of these daffodils in New York.

So if any listeners are living in New York, do please email them to me sally@ourplantstories.com and I will share them on the website ourplantstories.com and also do get in touch if you, like Constance, have a Plant Story you would like to share? Our Plant Stories is an independent production presented and produced by me, Sally Flatman.