Hi all!

Moving to New York City was not what I expected when I applied for an internship with the CLM program, but I have totally embraced my life as a new New Yorker. I packed everything in my tiny car and prepared to move into a cozy apartment in Brooklyn. Being a new New Yorker, I have also embraced a new diet of primarily pizza, bagels, and donuts…kidding…kind of. I have only spent about 2 weeks here, but I am really enjoying all of the great food and the never ending things to do. As for the internship, we received our plant list on the first day, and I have been steadily trying to learn the list of over 200 species. This has been overwhelming, but I appreciate the challenge. I find it really great that my job consists of learning and getting familiar with these plants before our field season gets into full swing.

Last week, we did our training in North Carolina with the other Seeds of Success east coast interns. I was saddened to learn we wouldn’t be going to the Chicago workshop, but North Carolina was beautiful, so I can’t complain. We spent three days learning about the history of SOS and the protocols. On our third day, we got to go out into the field, which was a great hands on learning experience. We spent the first half of our day identifying common plants in the area and looking for possible plants to take seed collections from. We focused on grasses, sedges, and rushes, three groups of plants I am not as familiar with.  The second half of our day was spent doing a seed collection as a collective group. We collected seed from the plant, Glyceria striata, and it was a pretty easy seed to collect. So easy, that we apparently collected about ~500,000 seeds, which is a bit over our 15,000-30,000 seed goal, haha. That being said, it was a great experience to finally apply what we had learned the past two days (and be in the field, of course).

My internship has just begun, and it has already been great. I’m looking forward to the rest of this six months full of plant identifyin’, seed collectin’, and NYC livin’.

Dogbane (Apocynum cannabinum) seed

Identifying Poaceae! This is Dichanthelium scoparium.

Signing off,

Barbara Garrow

Seeds of Success Intern

Greenbelt Native Plant Center in Staten Island, NYC.