It’s hard to miss how green New York City is these days.
Weeds are creeping through seemingly every crack in the pavement. Entire bushes are sprouting high out of treebeds. Wherever there’s enough dirt for a root to take hold, plants are reaching for the sun.
The city’s lush summer is apparent on Classon Avenue in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, where an 11-foot-tall sunflower has grown out of a sidewalk pit. Its height has captivated nearby residents, including Conal Darcy, who takes credit for planting the flower a year ago.
“It’s just kind of a wild seed that stayed over from last year and just kind of kept growing, and now it’s apparently gigantic,” said Darcy, who spoke from his vacation in Australia.
Gothamist transportation and infrastructure editor Clayton Guse went out to measure the enormous sunflower outside his building.
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Experts and city officials have also noticed the flora boom around town. They say the relentless growth has been helped by increased rainfall during the rainiest August in at least five years. The city’s warming climate is also accelerating the bloom.
Workers in the parks and sanitation departments have stepped up efforts to keep up with the greenery, including some toxic species that have flourished.
Parks officials said that the mix of warm weather, sun and frequent rain has created ideal conditions for plant growth. Mugwort and other invasive weeds have grown more rapidly this season alongside the trees. Parks officials also noted that young trees have shown especially rapid growth this season.
Plants are growing rapidly out of every crevice in the city, even ones near Mott Haven tire shops.
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In the Bronx’s Mott Haven neighborhood on Wednesday, resident Ramona Ferreyra welcomed the vegetation.
“It seems like nature’s trying to seep up from every possible space that’s available,” she said. “Which is beautiful, and we need it.”
But Ferreyra noted that NYCHA groundskeepers had to wield their weed whackers multiple times a week this summer to manage the wildly lush grass.
Sanitation department spokesperson Vincent Gragnani said the green explosion has the agency’s managers shopping around for new equipment. They’ve also redeployed street cleaning crews to weed-whacking duty. “We expect this trend to continue as the climate continues to change,” Gragnani wrote in a statement.
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Bram Gunther, a former forestry chief with the parks department, said the weather has been a perfect accelerant for growth.
“There is consensus that heat and moisture, particularly this season, which has been unusually wet and warm, fosters rapid growth,” he said. With New York City reclassified as having a humid subtropical climate since 2020, experts said aggressive growth will be the new normal.
Clara Pregitzer, the deputy director of conservation science at the Natural Areas Conservancy, said plants are being supercharged everywhere, including in her own backyard.
“I live in Queens and I have a princess tree that just emerged in my backyard and is over 10 feet tall, just this summer,” said Pregitzer. “It’s completely huge.”
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Former Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe, who now runs Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, said that uncontrolled plant life isn’t always a good thing. He shared photographs of toxic nightshades and pokeweed popping up in uptown tree pits, including two outside a daycare.
“It’s frightening. Just the voracious growth is frightening, and I’m seeing it in parks all across the city,” Benepe said. “If you don’t manage any piece of soil in New York City, nature takes over. They’ll grow out of a crack in the concrete,” he said.
“Nature abhors a vacuum.”