Roots of Memory

This story is a part of “Memory Loss,” a series co-published with Urban Omnibus.

Just inside the north entrance of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park is a small grove of trees resembling a kind of experimental Eden. Lightly signposted, the grove is planted with creamy-white magnolias, “Venus” dogwoods, paperbark maples, red buckeyes, witch hazel, and a Himalayan Pine. Among them is a young bur oak, which will probably outlive them all.

Between the trees, the ground cover grows wild. It was planted to attract pollinators to the park, but is still a work in progress, according to the park’s chief landscape architect, Christian Zimmerman, who designed the grove in collaboration with longtime Brooklyn resident and park donor Karen Burkhardt. Work began on the grove in the spring of 2013, not long after Hurricane Sandy had knocked down hundreds of trees in the park. Moved by the death of a towering oak near her favorite entrance, Burkhardt made a donation to the Prospect Park Alliance, the park’s stewards, to replace it. With Zimmerman, she settled on the bur oak, a hardy, slow-growing tree with deep roots.

The planting marked the beginning of an intensely personal undertaking for Burkhardt: a living memorial to honor her partner’s long struggle with Parkinson’s. Informally known as Marilyn’s Grove, the plot has no clear borders or permanent signage, though the trees’ GPS coordinates are precisely logged by