George Reis is not typically a hard man to get a hold of. Except in spring.

As I wind my way through his labyrinthine basement headquarters, in a brick building on Lafayette Street in Greenwich Village, I hear nothing but the buzzing of overhead lights. It is April, and he is nowhere to be found.

Reis is the Head Gardener at New York University. Spring is a busy time for gardeners and tax accountants, and I initially thought this was why I hadn’t found him. As it turned out, Reis was home with an injury when I came knocking, but if he was absent, his work was everywhere. Like some kind of horticultural Waldo, he leaves bits of greenery behind, in planters and plots, along the borders of buildings. Individually, these patches of green can seem small and insignificant, but add them together and you get some 17,000 square feet of green space. Beside Coles Sports Center, NYU's 30-year-old athletic facility, Reis has planted an expanse of tulips that's probably more than 100 feet long, and is shaded by a long line of cherry trees. I stood beside it on a recent brilliant spring day and watched as every third pedestrian pulled out a digital camera and hunched over the fence to snap a photo. “Once you step back from the planting bed and look [your work] it gives you that instantaneous gratification,” said Chris Roberts, a gardener who works with Reis. “It’s right there, you can see it, and it’s beautiful.”

In a sense, infusing plant life into one of the world’s most intense urban environments seems like a Sisyphean task, since one’s work is destined to be overshadowed by the concrete jungle that surrounds it. But new New York City is hardly a wasteland where plants are concerned. It has a fairly vibrant urban gardening scene, with thousands of community gardens throughout the 5 boroughs, the largest farmers market program in the country, and an active (if stealthy) guerilla gardening movement, whose adherents pelt vacant lots with seed bombs and plant flowers in tree wells in the dead of night.

Cecil Scheib, Reis’ boss and NYU’s head environmental official, told me that the lack of green space in New York makes what exists all the more valuable. “That’s what I like about New York in general; what is done with space is very carefully considered,” he said. “New York still has and environment. It’s been heavily changed, but I don’t see why we shouldn’t continue to honor and work with it.”

In that spirit, Reis uses mostly native plants, or species that were indigenous to the New York region even before Europeans arrived in the 1600’s. These well-adapted plants require less maintenance, but they also hint at something that most New Yorkers fail to realize: long before it became a global city, New York was a very diverse place. Researchers with The Manahatta Project, an effort of the Wildlife Conservation Society to map the pre-colonial environment of Manhattan, have found that biodiversity on the island “rivaled that of Yellowstone,” and featured 56 types of ecological communities.

These days, though, reintroducing some of that diversity can be a challenge. “Planting is tough sometimes in terms of the shading, Scheib told me. “It seems like everything is shaded, because of all the tall buildings.”

Photo by Chris Niedl.