Nostalgia calling you to Arizona every few days, but time and money holding you in Brooklyn all the time? Consider the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where for the low low price of $75 per year, you can go to the desert pretty much any day. Nostalgia is a strange creature. So demanding! And yet so easily appeased. A few minutes breathing the dry deserty air of the BBG desert biodome will surely transport you to Arizona, your lost youth, and everything that was always gonna be. Sometimes you won’t smell enough desert just by walking around. Maybe it is your nose’s fault. Maybe the flow of air. Maybe I don’t know some critical plants aren’t bleeding much odor at that moment. Don’t worry! You can always smell the creosote bush located pretty much directly opposite the entrance door (on the far side of the little loop-trail). Then you’ll feel it! The sun. The infiniti of a childhood adventure. The airplane, the airport, the hot asphalt parking lot outside of Furrs Cafeteria, the clatter of plastic trays on the metal-bar platform along the front of the enclosed cafeteria food, the cheery food server happy for you to have a second helping of chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes, the cousins and grandparents, the joy of obvious unconditional camaraderie, the drive up the mountainsides, stopping at the blue-sky valleying vista with a restroom halfway to Prescott, and two whole weeks to go, tow whole weeks of mortal glee.

Now at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, their creosote bush comes with a tag that says these plants can live “Up to 1100 years!” And that’s why sometimes young idealists will howl and stomp the ground in trendy sneaks and pound the smooth white pavement with the padded butt of their fists. “The injustice! The cruelty!”

For they’ve done a little math: A shrub that can live up to 1100 years in its native climes, transported here, to a realm too cold and damp, preserved only by a glass dome and human attention — guided, no doubt, by experts in the filed of horticulture and garden displays. How long can the Brooklyn Botanic Garden hope to survive? Surely not 1100 years. Surely all our hopes, dreams, schemes and visions will soon crumble-tumble and peter-out as surely as Ozymandias’s statue. Can these gardens reasonably aspire to another 1000 years? And so is housing this creosote bush in this little biodome not akin to keeping a human specimen in a terrarium that’s bound to be crushed to smithereens within thirty or so years? And so in empathy, feeling themselves like caged animals scurrying hither and thither as their glass home crashes down — shards flying inward — upon them, do these young people take a little break from their leisure day to howl at the terrible injustice perpetrated right here in their city on ample hills.

But have they done enough math? Do young idealists ever do enough math? Consider that the Brooklyn Botanic Garden opened in 1911 — surely this creosote shrub is more than 110 years old. Perhaps it was already hundreds of years old when it arrived in Brooklyn — a magical land where thousands upon thousands of people are willing to pay thousands of dollars every month to live in. And now imagine that Brooklyn and its Botanic Garden lasts another three hundred years — perhaps that’s as likely as the average creosote shrub’s environment maintaining a creosote-friendly climate for the next three hundred years. So imagine a 200 year shrub living in Brooklyn a total of 400 years. 600 years out of 1100 is not so many. But how often to creosote bushes really live 1100 years? Couldn’t a plaque in a human terrarium read: “Surprising long-lived for mammals of these dimensions: up to 120 years!” Most of us would be lucky to live to 90. So if our terrarium was only going to last 6/11 of our alleged lifespan, that’s 6/11 * 120 = 64. Oh, that’s just retirement age, and actually it seems like creosotes can on average live like who even knows how long? But a long time, so maybe the kids are right to shed tears for the creosote shrub — but not just the one stuck here in the carefully cultivated desert biodome of Brooklyn, but for all the creosotes living now in this evolving world climate: they are ready to live forever in their deserts, but will their deserts be able to provide them with the right lighting, temperature, and moisture content for the next thousand plus years?

Essay author: Bartleby Willard
Essay editor: Amble Whistletown
Essay copyright: Andy Watson

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Brooklyn, County of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

“Ozymandias” by Percy Blysshe Shelley, slightly altered as a joke or something like a joke (Ozymandias, King of Kings -> Brooklyn, County of Kings)

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Brooklyn, County of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”