The mugwort sounds like a villain from a Harry Potter novel, or the name of some plug-ugly in a bad 1930's prison movie. It's not a pretty plant, nor, by plant standards, is it very nice. To reproduce, it's quite capable of giving less aggressive flora an elbow in the eye and a shove toward extinction. The mugwort's a survivor.
The persimmon, on the other hand, is every botanist's dream -- a civilized and lovely tree that propagates at a leisurely pace, doesn't push out other species and produces a fine-scented blossom. Resplendent with its orange fruit and black bark, the persimmon has become quite rare.
Now the test: Which one is the real New Yorker? Is it: A) the take-no-prisoners mugwort, which evolved in Europe but has thrived in various forms in America, and particularly in New York City, where it loves poor soil full of limestone-laden concrete debris; or B) the retiring and reticent persimmon, which has been around since colonial days, but has seeds so delicate that they must spend a season in the soil before undertaking the rigors of germination?
It's a dichotomy and a tension as old as the city itself: on one side, a raw ambition to conquer new worlds; on the other, a hallowed lineage and all the right connections. This time around, the arena is a small patch of ground in Marine Park, Brooklyn, where late last month, workers from the New York City Parks Department were digging out a field of mugwort and other so-called invasives, to plant a garden full of old natives, including persimmon, that once thrived on the land that became New York City, but that mostly now do not.
Parks officials say the return-of-the-natives program, called Project X, is, of course, not intended as any kind of commentary on the city's cultural heritage, or on immigration, or on the tendency of old blood to thin out over time. Sometimes a plant is just a plant.
In many other places around the nation where so-called ecological restoration efforts are under way -- like the Midwest, where environmental groups and government agencies are re-establishing patches of native prairie grasses -- dipping into the old gene pool is also fairly simple, just a matter of replanting or encouraging a return to some more natural state.
But New York City has no natural state. Built over, upon and through, New York is a hybridized, cultivated hothouse of a city where the past has mostly been treated as a doormat -- something to be stepped on to make way for the future -- and where the triumphantly scrapping newcomer has been enshrined and celebrated as nowhere else. Doing ecological restoration in New York requires not just a return to some vestigial state, but a huge leap back to a time and place that many people say has been irretrievably lost under the tumult of history.
''Some people might accuse us of playing God,'' said the city's parks commissioner, Henry J. Stern, who created Project X in 1997 and named it for an obscure Matthew Broderick movie in which laboratory chimpanzees escape back into the wild. But Mr. Stern says that's fine by him -- the city plays God all the time when it comes to nature.
Since at least the days when Frederick Law Olmsted threw out most of what grew wild in Central Park and replaced it with his vision of what a cultivated urban oasis should be, the definition of ''natural'' in New York City has been a purely social construct, Mr. Stern said -- an invention of the people who lived here.
''The New York City parks system is not a Darwinian jungle in which species fight to the death,'' he said. ''We intervene all the time to do the things that we consider socially useful and appropriate.''
The goal of Project X, Parks Department officials say, is conservation and biodiversity, for human residents to appreciate, and to provide a broader habitat for the birds and animals that depend on the city's plants for food. Reaching back into the pre-European-settlement past, park officials say, is simply the best stock to draw from, because once upon a time, however remote it might now seem, these species did flourish here, and they might yet again.
