At This Staten Island Garden, the Plants Are All Queer
The Alice Austen House in Staten Island celebrates the life of the trailblazing photographer Alice Austen, who lived there in the mid-19th and early-20th centuries.
The stately house by the bay, now a National Historic Landmark, has stunning views of Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, and features a selection of some 7,000 photographs taken by Ms.
Austen of New York City in the Victorian era. Amid its rolling, verdant grounds and vine-covered porch, there’s also a new initiative in the works: the Queer Ecologies Garden Project.
It’s something of a misnomer, since many plants and flowers, to use human terms, are transgender or bisexual, in that they can change sex or have both reproductive organs and can self-pollinate, said Marisa Prefer, a Brooklyn-based horticulturist who identifies as nonbinary, requested the honorific Mx.
