Vanished Gardens: Finding Nature in Philadelphia

9. Water Lilies

45 & 9. Water Lilies i met two men fishing in the shallow watery ghost of the waterworks garden this morning.They were dressed in green fishermen ’s clothes and had their licenses pinned to their shirts in plastic envelopes. It was sunny, and the wind was mild and from the north. They flicked their lines into the place where the water is midnight blue on a drawing I have of a plan for the Benjamin Franklin Parkway designed by Jacques Greber in 1919. The Parkway was an ordered shining vision of paradise from the glittering blue pool in Logan Circle to the serpentine paths in the original waterworks garden. The art museum is the focal point of the Parkway. Three different types of trees march in green splendor toward the winged building on the hill. Tiny carts and carriages circle around the curved paths that lead to the building.On the steps Greber has drawn the silhouettes of slim shadowy figures. The dark blue water cascades over the dam in white froth. Mixed plantingslike anEnglishshrubbery surround the museum and spread into the large garden that winds close to where the fishermen stand on the grassy edge of the lawn, tossing their lines into the still water of the inlet that flows almost up to the steps of the art museum. The drawing shows no tangly thicket or yellow water lilies at the narrow end of the inlet. Someone is cultivating this garden with great care. “Used to be you could fish right over there on that land,”the more talkative fisherman said. He nodded toward the thicket in front of us,beyond the inlet where the ferryboats used to pull up to the dock below the waterworks, women in silk dresses leaning out over the railing above the swirling waters. 46 springettsbury The fishermen told me they catch crappies and smallmouth bass, yellow perch, and sometimes catfish and carp. I asked them if there were still shad in the river,and the taller man told me he saw two upriver. He was reeling his line in, flicking it out to the water. “They come up that ladder over there,” and we all looked across the river to the other bank below the highway. “It’s not really a ladder, more like a channel that the fish swim through. I bet if you went over there right now there’d be a few in the rocks at the bottom.” You can’t see up the river in the drawing, but I know there was a towpath and a canal on that side of the river. A few days ago, he told me, “the shad were this big, everybody was catching them.” And he held his hands about a foot and a half apart. “About a week ago the fish like this,” and the fisherman held his hands about six inches apart, “those little silver ones were coming through.” “Herring?” “Yeah, that’s them. You see them better when the tide’s out, it’s in now,” he said. I looked down at the swirling green water, foam in puffs on the surface, a mixture of salt and fresh water all the way up to the dam. I read not long ago that Alosa sapidissima, or the “poor man’s salmon,” returns to the river of its birth to spawn. The prime breeding ground of shad is the Delaware River estuary. The Lenape used nets made of brush to catch the shad that swam up the Schuylkill, spawning in the little rills where the tributaries met the river. The Schuylkill was the best place to fish for shad in the 1700s until the dams were built upriver and at Fairmount in 1820. I’ve been to the end of the town at the northwest corner along water lilies 47 the river where shad once swam in countless numbers to spawn at Flatbrush Rock. I saw sloped-roof houses covered with wisteria, a row of trailers, and long lawns to the river. Little streams flowed into the river.Graham pulled a cane of bamboo from a stand near a stream, separated the parts, put his hand in his mouth. “You’d get swamped if you went out in a canoe,”a blond man said. He was sitting on a dock. “We just came in from water skiing.” Not far from here downriver the shad still spawn at Flatbush Rock...