In this Staten Island garden, the plants are all odd
The Alice Austen house on Staten Island celebrates the life of pioneering photographer Alice Austen, who lived there in the mid-1800s and early 1900s. Now a National Historic Landmark, the stately home on the bay has sweeping views of Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan and features a selection of some 7,000 photographs taken by Mrs. Austen of New York City in the Victorian era.
Amidst the sloping, green grounds and vine-covered porch, a new initiative is also in the making: the Queer Ecologies Garden project. It’s a bit of a misnomer, since many plants and flowers, to use human terms, are transgender or bisexual, in that they can change sex or have both reproductive organs and pollinate themselves, said Marisa Prefer, a Brooklyn-based established horticulturist who identifies as non-binary requested the honorary title Mx. for this story, and who consulted in the construction of the garden.
With this new venture, Mx. Prefer and Victoria Munro, the executive director of the Alice Austen House, want to celebrate this widespread gender fluidity of the natural world while focusing on plants that are particularly loud and proud in their functions, or that are culturally associated with the LGBTQ community in some important way.
“It challenges the idea that being queer is a choice,” said the project’s Ms. Munro. “If nature does it, it’s natural.”
An example for the garden is the jack-in-the-pulpit, a plant with green and maroon striped flowers and red berries. It changes sex from year to year, based on environmental conditions. “One year it may produce fruit, and another year it may produce a flower, and another year it may produce pollen, depending on the environment,” Mx. Rather. “Many plants have all the parts to do what they need to survive.”
In another corner are tree trunks on which shiitake mushrooms grow, which are considered non-binary, Mx. Prefer said, who added that fungi are known to reproduce in different ways. Some are asexual and reproduce by spreading their spores far and wide. Others may mate with themselves.
“Mushrooms are super strange in so many ways,” Ms. Munro said. “They are very controversial. I love that they are here.”
Plants such as wisteria and lavender, which have certain cultural significance in the LGBTQ community, appearing symbolically in literature and activism, are part of the garden. “They’re all purple, which is this historically odd color,” Mx. Rather.
There will also be spices. “One that I find particularly interesting is the black cohosh, which is a feminizing herb,” and is said to help balance hormones, Mx. Rather.
Ms. Munro had long been interested in making the garden a welcoming space for LGBTQ New Yorkers. After reading about the complex and diverse sexuality of plants, she sought help for the plan with the New York Restoration Project, a non-profit organization that helps activate green spaces. Jason Sheets, who oversees many of the organization’s gardening projects, said the group took an immediate interest.
“Usually we are asked to do a lot of installations where people are excited about growing food, which is obviously so important,” said Mr. Sheets. “We were really excited when this application came in. This is a small space, but it has a really big purpose.”
Focusing on LGBTQ programming is a relatively new mission for the Alice Austen House, one of New York City’s oldest homes, originally built in 1690 as a one-room Dutch farmhouse in the Rosebank section of Staten Island. Because of its location near the Narrows, the waterway between Brooklyn and Staten Island and a maritime gateway to the city, sailors and harbor masters referred to it as the first house on the left. “It was the first thing they saw when they came here,” Ms Munro said.
The house was purchased in 1844 by John Haggerty Austen, Alice Austen’s grandfather, who developed it into the Victorian Gothic cottage it is today. It opened as a museum in 1985, focusing on decorative arts and historic architecture, but originally there wasn’t much information about the lesbian photographer after whom the house was named, Ms Munro said.
“The house used to be full of all this Victorian furniture that didn’t even belong to Alice,” she explained. “The first time I visited the museum, I left and didn’t know Alice was a photographer, and I didn’t know she was queer,” she continued. “And I’m a queer artist, so that would have made a lot of sense.”
In 1917, Mrs. Austen, who had refused marriage, invited her old partner, Gertrude Tate, to move in with her. Together they created a welcoming space for women. Mrs. Austen’s photographs show groups of women laughing, cross-dressing and embracing in her gardens.
“Alice also founded the Staten Island Bicycle Club, an activity Victorian women could do without being supervised,” Ms. Munro said.
When Ms Munro became executive director in 2017, she “queered the museum,” as she put it. “I wanted it to be a really safe place to talk about queer history and celebrate queer identity today.”
Having a place like this is especially important in Staten Island, Ms. Munro said. “This borough tends to be more conservative and therefore not as open to differing ideas about sexuality or gender,” she said. (States Island still bans LGBTQ groups of marching in the St. Patrick’s Day parade.)
However, the museum is facing questions and criticism from all sides, said Ms. Munro, who hears from Staten Islanders unhappy with LGBTQ programming, as well as progressive donors who assume this kind of work may not be happening in New York. York City’s most conservative neighborhood. (The Alice Austen House did receive funding from City Councilman Kamillah M. Hanks, who represents the North Shore of Staten Island, for its strange garden.)
Multiple LGBTQ-affiliated student groups from the neighborhood have been recruited to clean flower beds, plant mushrooms, and create explanatory signage for the species on display. Elementary school groups plan to visit the garden from Brooklyn and Queens, and as an experiment in cross-pollination, the museum is in early talks with Pioneers worka cultural center in Red Hook, Brooklyn, to come up with LGBTQ programs that would benefit both spaces.
Ms. Munro sees the museum as a safe place for all young people, including those still struggling with their identity or just curious to learn more. “We’re not a Pride center, so we can send home a permission form to come and do a workshop with us, and that kid won’t go out,” she said.
Lexy Trujillo-Hall, 19, who identifies as queer or agender (neither male, female, nor both) and lives in Staten Island’s South Beach neighborhood, has taken up yard work.
“One of the main arguments against queer people in general is that it’s not natural or not normal,” she said. “But this is like nature supports you, nature understands you, and it’s not a bad thing to want to be who you are.”