Quick Takes With: Junior Schouten

We are such unabashed fans of Brooklyn Grange and what they do: promoting, designing, building, and maintaining sustainable urban green spaces. If you want to visit their projects, you’ll likely have to look up, though—their forte is creating thriving rooftop gardens. Founded in 2010, the firm has since grown in both influence (they’re responsible for the farms atop Javits Center, Rosemary’s restaurant, and Vice Media headquarters) and size (it now owns and operates two rooftop farms, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and in Sunset Park). But their focus remains simple: encouraging a more intimate connection between city folk and the natural world.

Today, just in time for growing season, we’re excited to share a Quick Takes with Junior Schouten, Brooklyn Grange’s head of horticulture and maintenance, which originally appeared over on Gardensista. If you’re a gardening neophyte, Junior has advice for you: “Make friends with owners of perennials gardens—as they grow, they will need to be divided and can be shared.”

Read on for more of his tips, including a recommendation for a beginner-friendly plant that “grows quick, blooms beautifully, and is an edible pollinator magnet.”

Above: Junior on a visit to Berlin. Photograph courtesy of Junior Schouten.

Your first garden memory:

Mom asking a neighbor in the Caribbean for some cuttings of their front yard hibiscus hedge.

Garden-related book you return to time and again:

Taylor’s Guide to Perennials by Houghton Mifflin. The whole Taylor’s Guide series is a great reference source for succinct information on gardening.

Instagram account that inspires you:

@nativeplanttrust shares region-specific plant information and ties beauty with sustainable gardening.

Describe in three words your garden aesthetic.

Seasonal pollinator magnets.

Above: In addition to a vegetable patch, the rooftop garden atop Vice Media in Williamsburg, designed and built by Brooklyn Grange, is filled with pollinator-friendly perennials. Photograph by Marie Viljoen, from Vice Media’s Rooftop: A Brooklyn Meadow Garden with Panoramic Views.

Plant that makes you swoon:

Dinner plate dahlias are arrestingly beautiful—literally as big as your head and oh so easy to grow.

Plant that makes you want to run the other way:

English ivy—I’m literally a sneezing, sniffly mess when maintaining this plant. Brooklyn Grange clients get a little switcheroo with less dusty natives like Boston ivy or Virginia creeper.

Favorite go-to plant:

Salvias! Garden sage grows quick, blooms beautifully, and is an edible pollinator magnet—Brooklyn Grange and our landscaping clients get all their boxes checked with this one.

Above: Rows and rows of crops above Rosemary’s. Photograph courtesy of Rosemary’s, from Restaurant Visit: A Secret Roof Garden at Rosemary’s in Greenwich Village.

Hardest gardening lesson you’ve learned:

All tomato plans are for naught when chipmunks abound. Expect every tomato to have a single bite mark in it. Rude.

Unpopular gardening opinion:

Roses are overrated. Happy to say it one more time for the folks in the back.

Above: Above the Javits Center, a food forest thrives in three feet of soil, courtesy of Brooklyn Grange. Photograph by Valery Rizzo for Gardenista, from Garden Visit: Farming on the Roof in Hell’s Kitchen.

Old wives’ tale gardening trick that actually works:

Cucumber and June beetles nose-dive when threatened. Hold a container of soap water directly under them, feign an attack, and then watch them swim!

Favorite gardening hack:

Mulch, mulch, mulch! I have Brooklyn Grange’s maintenance team mulch our clients’ spaces quite heavily (4″!) once for a season of weed-free gardening.

Favorite way to bring the outdoors in.

If short on flowers, bulk up a bouquet with cut greens from a mix of shrubs. When done right, the accompanying textures can rival the best of most any flower. Learn how at one of our public workshops.

Above: On the menu at Brooklyn Grange’s “Compost Dinners” at its 65,000-square-foot rooftop farm at the Brooklyn Navy Yards: unsellable, misshapen produce and waste-conscious dining. And what doesn’t get eaten gets composted, of course. Photograph courtesy of Brooklyn Grange Rooftop Farm and Anastasia Cole Plakias, from Compost Dinner: A Zero-Waste Menu at Brooklyn Grange Farm.

Every garden needs a…

…compost bin. Let’s normalize keeping garden refuse on site.

Favorite hardscaping material:

I swoon for a meandering path of reclaimed bricks.

Tool you can’t live without:

Having to choose between a pruner and trowel, I imagine, is what it would be like having to chose between two children—just not possible.

Go-to gardening outfit:

A long pant and a long-sleeve fishing shirt—no bugs, no grass scratches, no sun damage, just vibes.

Not-to-be-missed public garden/park/botanical garden:

As a native of the Bronx, I can proudly say the New York Botanical Garden’s Native Plant Garden in autumn. Norway may have kosileg, but for New York autumn feels alone, this garden is an exemplary reason for why I live in the Northeast.

Above: Photograph courtesy of Junior Schouten.

The REAL reason you garden:

I despise cubicles.