Some people, as they walk up the path at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden to worship the velvety blooms spilling over the walls of the rose garden, turn their heads toward the sandy hummock to their left and wonder what those scrawny pines and tiny plants are all about "Some of our visitors don't understand it," says Uli Lorimer, the curator of the Native Flora Garden extension, which opened in June 2013. "They say, 'Oh, there's nothing here. Everything's little.'" Sometimes, he tries to explain that this is a different kind of garden, where 150 native species, almost all collected within 200 miles of New York City, have been assembled to re-create the essence of the region's primeval plant communities. Those scrubby-looking grasses on the hill are the same species that once thrived on 40,000 acres of the Hempstead Plains, now buried under houses on Long Island. The pond with the green scum-there's a debate going on here about how to fix it-is home to bog plants paved over for Kennedy Airport. The skinny little pine trees sticking out of the sandy soil are a nod to the pygmy pines of the New Jersey Pine Barrens. So are the patches of bearberry, blueberry, and prickly pear cactus, planted in little drifts down the slope.
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