Off the west side of Manhattan, sitting in the Hudson River, is a new New York City public park called Little Island. The $260 million pet project of businessman Barry Diller features 2.4 acres of tree-lined pathways, an amphitheater, and a food court. The idea for Little Island began nearly a decade ago, though it just opened to the public at the end of May. You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s been around longer. The park juts out of the river on concrete tulip-esque columns, and jutting out of the park itself is an array of trees—and not skinny saplings secured with stakes into the ground. These trees look as if they’ve already lived here for some time, and that was by design.
Little Island’s 114 trees were sourced from three suppliers, all specialists in high-caliper trees (tree size is denoted by caliper, a measurement of the diameter of the tree trunk): Halka Nurseries, which has two 1,300-acre farms in southern New Jersey; Ruppert Nurseries, a 600-acre wholesale tree grower in northern Maryland; and Hammell Nurseries, which spans more than 1,000 acres in eastern Pennsylvania. There are 35 species of trees throughout the park, including red oaks, Japanese cedars, October Glory red maples, and zelkova “Green Vase” trees.
Because the trees had to be transported, and because they were already so mature with massive root systems, timing for their planting was crucial. Nielsen describes the multitude of considerations for every tree: “Was the tree dug at the right season? Did it get enough root mass? During the time it was put into its burlap bag and the time it got put on the truck, was it well watered? How much time was it out of the ground? How long will it spend on the truck? How long was it between the time the tree was delivered to the site and we got it in the ground? There are so many steps along the way that can lead to a problem.” She credits her landscape contractor, Brightview, with coordinating all of these points.
Once those roadblocks were passed, there was the actual challenge of building the park, and getting the trees into the ground was its own feat. When out of the ground, trees are losing water, which could hurt their chances of survival. Nielsen remembers a 12-inch-caliper maple or oak that weighed roughly 20,000 pounds when it arrived on the site. The next day when it was picked up by crane to be planted, it had lost 6,000 pounds of water weight.
“If that tree had not been planted immediately, its roots would dry out and it would suffer,” Nielsen explains. There’s still a chance something could happen to the trees in the park—an infestation, disease, a lightning strike—but luckily they are under a two-year warranty. “The trees are the single-largest investment of the entire landscape, and I think they’re also hugely visually important to the site, so their care and feeding, so to speak, is an extremely high priority,” Nielsen says.
There’s no doubt getting all those trees onto Little Island was a feat, but there’s also no doubt to Nielsen that it was worth it: “Landscape [is] what people experience and smell and walk through and touch and love [about] a place, especially a park.”