New York’s first food forest looks more like your typical vegetable garden than anything else, with a kind of controlled chaos. Circular beds nearly overflowing with vegetation are dotted around the entrance, some with vines that snake up trellises and others with blankets of clover and larger leafy bushes. The smaller beds give way to larger expanses of green towards the back with gravel paths meandering in between and a set of picnic tables in the center. It’s only the gentle sway of the tide moving out and the briny smell of the air that gives it away, because Swale is on a barge in the middle of the East River.
The people behind Swale call it a floating food forest, and the title is an accurate one. All of the plants aboard Swale are either edible or medicinal in nature. The idea is to create an eventually self-sustaining garden, where all of the plants work together to thrive and all are edible. This is the beauty of this concept, one that Swale is currently trying to prove the validity of in urban spaces, food forests can provide a great deal of food for a community with relatively little effort. In a way Swale is a sustainability minded community garden that is open to all.
Mary Mattingly is the artist behind the exhibition. She wanted to create a platform that allowed people to better think about and understand food. And in fact creating Swale on a barge and into an art exhibition is the only way it could happen. Because part of the exhibit’s purpose is for people to gather their own food, on land that would be illegal. Whether it’s food or just a pretty flower picking something from public land is considered destruction of property.
“We can do this more publically on a barge, you can’t on land,” she went onto say that being on water, “makes you more aware of your surroundings.” The water adds an almost surreal element; it changes Swale from being merely a garden into something that does make you think about the environment around you. The constant ebb and flow of the water makes you have to think about each step as you walk around the barge and pick some herbs or a few vegetables.
Swale is proof of concept in two ways, one this it is possible to have a food forest in New York City, and two that it can be done in new and different ways. The barge is hopefully a temporary home for the food forest as the people behind it petition the city to give them public park space to create a permanent home. Swale will be at Brooklyn Bridge Park until Oct 15th, after that the future of the project remains unclear Mattingly hopes that they will be able to stay longer.
The practices behind Swale originates in something known as permaculture. On paper permaculture sounds almost coldly scientific, various plants are grouped in such a way that they all work together. It is a science, to be able to determine what plants would work best in an environment, but it’s also an art. The results are not a clean cut and polished garden, but something that has more in common with the jungle.
Uyen Huynh, 24, from Harlem NY, is studying sustainability in the urban environment at City College. She said that she had found out about Swale through a post a classmate had made on Facebook. Huynh said, “When I first got here I didn’t think New York was very sustainable, you have to dig but it’s there.” She discovered her interest in permaculture design after moving to New York.
Huynh said, “Permaculture is about more than just growing food it’s about building relationships.” In her opinion it draws connections between people and the ecosystems around them. This idea of fostering the relationship between people and the food they eat is a large part of the foundation of Swale.
Amanda McDonald Crowley is one of the contributors to Swale, she’s worked with Mattingly in the past and has been part of the project from the beginning. She said, “Food is also about generosity… and art into that mix you can start to ask the important questions.”
To McDonald Crowley those questions revolve around how we as a culture look at food. Part of Swale’s objective is to have us look differently, both at where it comes from and how it gets to us.
Part of the purpose of art is to make us think about the world around us differently, it’s how Swale works and why it attracts people as they pass by. As Mattingly put it each visitor brings a new element to the piece contributing something to the project, helping to grow and shape the message that Swale shares as it ripples outward. Swale is currently docked at Pier 6 of Brooklyn Bridge Park overlooking the downtown Manhattan skyline.