An Interview With Rebecca McMackin
Putting gardens where they’re needed
Rebecca McMackin is a horticulturist who currently works as the Arboretum Curator at the historic Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, N.Y. She previously served as Director of Horticulture at Brooklyn Bridge Park, a groundbreaking East River greenspace where urban ecology thrives. With a passion for biodiversity and environmental equity, she shares her knowledge through lectures, writing, consultation and design work. She can be found online at rebeccamcmackin.com. Scott Beuerlein caught up with her in summer 2024. (This article also appears in Horticulture's September/October 2024 issue.)
Scott Beuerlein: Where did you grow up and how did you come to realize your passion for gardening?
Rebecca McMackin: I grew up on a small farm in Connecticut, and I grew up gardening. It was just part of life, like cooking and going to school. I had my first garden when I was six. My mom tells me that she actually went into labor with me in a garden, but she only told me that a year ago, and I’m not sure she’s telling the truth. It might just be a good story!
I never thought of gardening as a vocation, so for a while I lived a pretty wild life. I worked in art and fashion and lived in New York City. I went to school for political science, but somehow I wound up in graduate school in British Columbia studying freshwater ecology. It was there that I really discovered ecology and the dynamics of ecosystems. When I finished that degree, I moved back to Connecticut. I needed a break from academia.
I started gardening again, and I just fell in love. It was all of the things that I love about ecology, but I didn’t have to publish anything or do statistics! I moved to New York City and became a gardener for the Parks Department.
SB: You then went through a series of projects and wound up at the Brooklyn Bridge Park (BBP), which is where I first heard about you. That’s such a massive and cool project. How did it come about?
RM: It was such an honor to be involved in a project of that scale that affects the lives of so many people. At the time I was the Head Gardener of Washington Square Park in Manhattan, and BBP put the call out for a horticulturist. I had a degree in ecology, plus a degree in landscape design from Columbia, and I had just overseen the landscape portion of the renovation of Washington Square Park. I had this really unique skill set combining ecology, horticulture and construction. I ended up becoming the Director of Horticulture.
SB: Tell us about the design and vision for the park.
RM: Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA) is the firm that designed the park, beginning in 1999. At the time it was their flagship park. It was the biggest project they had done and from the very beginning it was an attempt to encourage the ecology of the region.
Like a lot of modern public landscape architects, MVVA worked with the community at the beginning phases and throughout the design process. Some amazing people, like Cindy Goulder and others from Brooklyn, were very active in those processes and made sure that the ecological elements of the park were front and center and that native plants were used.
MVVA had done projects like this in the past, so they took that ball and ran with it. They ended up making salt marshes. There are three separate salt marshes in the park—revolutionary to have in an urban park, at that time especially. They also put in grasslands, forests and freshwater wetlands. They included experimental design elements that dovetailed with ecology, like beautiful bioswales that catch rainwater and recirculate it for irrigation. To the average park goer, it just looks like a beautiful garden, but there’s always this underlying ecological functionality.
SB: It must have been a treat to work there every day.
RM: It was incredible to watch something of that scale get built and to see them actually create land. As a country person, I kind of took land for granted. I would never think, “Let’s put a hill there!” That’s a specific vision that landscape architects have. I don’t. I decorate. I will decorate that hill with flowers, but I’m not going to put a mountain someplace. So to see that happen and to learn how landscapes can be built—not just designed, but constructed out of Styrofoam and gravel and pipes and wires—was fascinating! And now it reads as land, but there’s a very complex infrastructure beneath all of that land.
SB: I love it how you used the word “decorate.” How did you decorate that land when it was ready?
RM: The original design was always intended to change. MVVA had developed this approach called “managed succession,” a similar idea to a Miyawaki Forest (a small, multilayered planting of woody plants designed to recreate the old growth of a specific eco-region).
Hundreds of tiny, tiny trees were planted, along with sun-loving perennials all around them. Then, as those trees grew, it was the horticulture team’s job to edit: edit that tree canopy, figure out the winners and losers, replant the understory.
In that process we replanted much of the understory of that park. There are huge sections of spring wildflowers, ephemerals and understory trees like dogwoods and redbuds that we were able to incorporate into the design, and that was one of the greatest pleasures of the job. From the landscape architect’s perspective, they’re designing land that doesn’t even exist yet. They’re imagining what they’re going to build, and that’s a hard job! They’re imagining the hydrology and how the wind is going to be, and they’re designing for that. Those of us managing succession have the luxury of designing for known landscapes.
I got to do some design and it was so much fun, but whenever possible we also tried to give the gardeners who managed a specific area a big role in designing it, as well. I think the best gardens are a combination of art and the close relationship with the land that only gardeners have. Some of the most beautiful parts of BBP are designed by the gardeners who work there.
SB: Fantastic! Then in 2023 you left BBP to take a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard to study ecological design, the history of plant movement and science communication.
RM: It was one of the best years of my life. It took a lot to get me out of BBP, but I was there right when it opened and I left just as they finished the last section. So I oversaw the complete construction of the park, and I made sure that the team I was leaving behind was fantastic. They’ve done wonderful things since. Rashid Paulson, the new Director of Horticulture, is just amazing.
The fellowship at Harvard was the most luxurious year. I’m a nerd who got to hang out and take whatever class I wanted to at Harvard or MIT! I’d be asked to lecture to a landscape-architecture class and I would just walk in and get to talk about labor organization or climate change or storm damage.
As gardeners, we’re often nose to the grindstone. Our hands are in the dirt. So this was this wonderful opportunity to spend some time thinking about the work I did and the work I want to do, and put it into the context of history, politics and labor relations, and then have conversations with other deeply curious people about that work. It was time spent figuring out how I can become most helpful in this world, but also the potential pitfalls for this movement and how can I avoid them. How can I use whatever platform I have to make this movement as robust and diverse and beneficial as I possibly can? It was an opportunity to think about gardening and to interrogate my own work, and then plan for the future.
SB: At Brooklyn you started at the ground level of a new landscape, but now you’re working for Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, a very historic landmark with many venerable trees. Can you contrast that for us?
RM: To help care for a historic landscape is another honor. This is actual hallowed ground and I take it quite seriously even though it’s a part-time position. It is the exact opposite of BBP; instead of working on something that we built entirely new, this is something so incredibly old, so incalculably precious. More than anything I’m trying to not mess it up!
But I’m passionate about urban ecology. That’s one of the main drivers of my work. BBP is 85 acres and more than 5 million people use it in the course of a summer. Woodlawn Cemetery is 400 acres and it is in the middle of the Bronx, a community most impacted by environmental racism and air-quality issues, and most in need of green space for the people there to really thrive. An opportunity to work on a site like that and bolster the ecology of the region, the access of green space for people, was just too good to pass up. That’s the ecological perspective.
And the big part of that, of course, is caring for these trees. We all know the ecological benefit of big trees entirely dwarfs that of young trees. Some of these trees are over 300 years old! They are absolute monsters—I feel like when I visit them, I should leave an offering. They are so beautiful. I feel like asking, “What do you need? How can I take care of you?” A lot of that work is soil work, really: decompaction, pulling the turf away from the trees, exposing root flares, vertical mulching. That’s the big part of the job, caring for these veteran trees.
But then another part of the job is design and that is awesome—I was a teenage Goth, and the idea of designing a 150-year-old cemetery is just “it!” There is the best collection of Japanese maples I’ve ever seen in my life. They’re all over 150 years old. In the fall, it’s absolutely glorious. There are flocks of tens of thousands of grackles that move through the landscape. It’s beautiful, and it’s amazing to be in the position to say “I want to put a grove of fir trees here.”
And on top of that, there’s restoration. In the 1920s, Woodlawn Cemetery was the place to be buried for high society from all over the New York region. People were just dying to get in there. (Laughs). They would hire a who’s who of landscape architecture for their burial plots. You might find in one row landscapes by the Olmsted brothers, Ellen Biddle Shipman and Beatrix Farrand. It’s like a museum of early American landscape architecture. It’s absolutely fantastic, but a lot of the original trees and plantings from those lots are missing. It’s my job to go in and restore them. It’s very delicate work, respectful work, and there’s a lot of research involved. I’m very new there, but I’m excited about starting this work and then sharing it with the broader community. I think there is historical significance at Woodlawn Cemetery that’s going to be incredible. I’m starting to research some stories, which I can’t share yet, but they’re pretty amazing.
SB: Let’s talk about your outreach. You write. You create blogs and videos, and you did an amazing Ted Talk. Where does the energy and the drive and passion come from to do all these things after your workday and after parenting and everything else?
RM: I don’t want to oversell anything, but I really believe that gardens have a role to play to make the world better for people.
We’ve always recognized the level to which gardens are sanctuaries from the chaos of the world. People have used gardens this way from time immemorial. But this new wave of horticulture—which considers ecology, considers biodiversity, considers environmental health for people—is so critical. It’s not just about making gardens but also about beautifying people’s environments, in cities especially. Experiencing an environment that is cared for, that is lush and verdant, that has birdsong and butterflies, is absolutely essential for mental and physical health. There’s so much research now showing how critical nature exposure is.
Related: "Why Gardens and Gardening Matter"
I think that for so long the types of gardens that have gotten the most visibility, the ones that are most lauded, have been the places of the wealthy. They’re behind a gate, a place that you go to. They’re not really part of anybody’s environment. And this new wave is more about making the lived experiences and the environments of everyday people lush and beautiful. It’s putting wonderful trees and shrubs back where people are taking their kids to school or going to work, as opposed to offering them an open day at an estate in New England. It’s a very different sort of movement.
That’s the social part of it. For an ecological perspective, Doug Tallamy and Desiree Narango have done incredible work looking at the ecological impact that would occur if homeowners transform even just parts of their yards for biodiversity. It’s massive, absolutely massive. Desiree showed that yards in America equal the space of three Texases. It’s huge, and that’s not counting college campuses or public land. So there is real potential from an ecological perspective.
I believe in the importance of this work. It’s not just fun for me. Although it is fun. I like to put on a show with my lectures and write my gossip-filled newsletter of tips and research. I like to design. That stuff is all very fun and lovely, but behind it all is a sense of purpose that I think a lot of people in this movement share.
SB: Like many zoos, at the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden we’re always touting conservation around the world. “Donate to save rhinos in Indonesia.” That kind of stuff. And that’s important, but we’re also finding that it’s just as important to encourage people toward doing conservation in their own back yard by planting for pollinators.
RM: That’s so cool! That’s the same thing. It just shows that horticulture is shifting, zoos are shifting, forestry is shifting. I do think that we’re all waking up and everyone is responding. And there are so many ways to respond to this moment of, sometimes, sheer terror at the state of the world. Everybody is doing it differently, but we’re all trying our best. Whether or not we make it, who knows? But at least we’re trying.
SB: In everything that you’ve done and all the experiences you’ve had, is there one story that the has really affected you, one that sort of sums up why you do what you do?
RM: I do tell a story in my Ted Talk about the butterflies showing up on an Anaphalis. Since that got out there, people have been sending me photos of Anaphalis with American ladies on it. So that experience is happening for people all over right now, that they went out and planted Anaphalis and butterflies immediately found it. It’s pretty incredible that you can spread that experience—watching the life cycle of a butterfly and how integrated it is not only with the host plants and their environment, but also with your personal actions. It’s the revelation that you can be helpful.
I think a lot of us walk around with the sense that “humans are terrible. We’re part of the problem.” And there are a lot of sectors of humanity that are terrible, but we can also be helpful. We can still support other organisms in our lives, and in fact we should and must in order for us to continue.
Sharing that experience with other people, hearing that other people have had their own transformations of recognizing the importance of their own role in their land or their regional ecology, that’s what it’s all about. That’s what makes it all worthwhile.
Images courtesy of Rebecca McMackin. Portrait photograph by Caitlin Atkinson.
