There's something oddly soothing about watching Lower Manhattan bob in the background, beyond the newly-planted apple trees.
It's a perspective unique to those who climb aboard Swale, a floating garden that's now docked off the pier at Brooklyn Bridge Park.
The idea: public park meets public art. It's free and open to anyone who wants to plant, pick, or (a novel concept for most city-folk) forage.
Mary Mattingly is the artist and founder of Swale. She says her work mostly deals with sculpture and the waterways, and she originally got a grant from an arts organization to buy the deck barge, 130 by 40 feet, and outfit it with 40 tons of gravel and lava rock and about 100 tons of soil.
"We’d like to think of this as a living sculpture, as something that’s always changing when people come on and pick things," said Mattingly.
The Swale team is mostly made up of artists, and many of them have knowledge of permaculture methods, farming and herbalism. That's why the plants are arranged more like a forest, in natural clusters rather than straight lines, with plenty of clover scattered between to condition the soil.
And all kinds of things are growing: blueberries, cherry trees, nodding onions, lettuce greens, kale, many varieties of mint. This is their second year on the barge, so the perennials are just starting to come back. And people are free to pick as much as they'd like.
Marisa Prefer is Swale's education program manager; she leads free workshops about the different uses for each plant. She says there's this dynamic that plays out, where some people feel reluctant to pick too much and others feel totally entitled to help themselves to fully-ripened veggies that have been growing for weeks.
"It’s this theory of the commons, where you hope that somebody will leave it for somebody else, and then somebody takes it, which obviously is going to happen," said Prefer.
So why grow plants on a barge? There's the experiential reason: bobbing along the water, trying to find your sea legs and your green thumb at the same time. And of course, the ideal full-sun conditions and temperature insulation from the water.
But there's also a legal reason. The New York City Parks Department currently has some pretty strict laws about what can and can't grow on public land, which means most public land isn't being used to grow edible plants.
"In New York City, we have 100 acres of community garden space versus 30,000 acres of park land," said Mattingly. "What a difference it would make to have some edible landscaping happen in park land!"
The end game, for Mattingly, is not necessarily more floating gardens. She wants people to feel more invested in food sourcing, and she wants the Parks Department to see that it's possible for a public space to be used in this way.
She's optimistic about the Parks Department coming around to her way of thinking. Swale is now officially collaborating with the department on a new project in Concrete Plant Park in the Bronx, transforming a section of the park into the first ever edible public foodway on Parks land.
